Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Large-Scale Mac Deployment?

Posted by kdawson on from the rolling-'em-out dept.

UncleRage writes "I've been asked to research and ultimately recommend a deployment procedure for Macs across a rather large network. I'm not a stranger to OS X; however, the last time I worked on deployment NetRestore was still king of the mountain. Considering the current options, what methodologies do admins adhere to? Given the current selection of tools available, what would you recommend when planning, prototyping, and rolling out a robust, modular deployment scenario? For the record, I'm not asking for a spoon-fed solution; I'm more interested in a discussion concerning the current tools and what may (or may not) have worked for you. There are a lot of options available for modular system deployment... what are your opinions?"

11 of 460 comments (clear)

  1. Large scale Apple managed LAN? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is there even such a thing in this world? Folks like to disparage Windows, but it really is the only OS built for very large enterprises. Linux solutions don't really compare to Windows solutions - there, I said it...

    1. Re:Large scale Apple managed LAN? by norkakn · · Score: 5, Insightful

      radmind ftw

    2. Re:Large scale Apple managed LAN? by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 5, Interesting

      I preemptively beg mods not to bury this comment. We all know that Linux is great on hackers' workstations and on servers and in computing clusters, but not so great as a desktop system for average users.

      Well large managed networks is two miles away in the distance on the scale of things Linux is awesome at. Active Directory, Exchange, Terminal Services... Windows really does have a very impressive offering in this area, while Linux stays behind the scenes and rarely faces the user.

    3. Re:Large scale Apple managed LAN? by thatkid_2002 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Wrong! Novell Zenworks is on Linux too - so why can't you have a heterogeneous large scale Linux and Windows rollout? There is Zenworks for Mac but none of our customers (though there is quite a few Macs) use it. If you are going to roll out Novell stuff you may as well do Novell Groupwise while you are at it.

      Novell solutions pwn Microsoft, sorry to say.

    4. Re:Large scale Apple managed LAN? by DoofusOfDeath · · Score: 5, Funny

      Is there even such a thing in this world? Folks like to disparage Windows, but it really is the only OS built for very large enterprises.

      Agreed. It's the only OS for seriously large botnets.

    5. Re:Large scale Apple managed LAN? by firstnevyn · · Score: 5, Informative

      With puppet of course.

    6. Re:Large scale Apple managed LAN? by Magic5Ball · · Score: 5, Funny

      Among my experiences (mostly historic):
      -Some shims/extensions installed to compensate for hardware issues were unconditionally loaded, even on hardware that didn't need/couldn't boot with them. That made reusing disk images on slightly different hardware revisions... fun.
      -Wake on LAN should do... stuff. Consistently.
      -I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody. I've autodiscovered a shared printer which I'll share with everybody...
      -What's that? The mounted ASIP resource disappeared for a few seconds and now everyone's trying to reconnect? At once? And their workstations are beachballed until the share comes back, even though they have no open resources on it?
      -Restoring resource forks from backup always works!
      -What do you mean by "the QuickTime update broke the AppleScript methods for a completely unrelated subsystem"?
      -I've autodiscovered the same printer share which I'll share with everybody...
      -ls -lr on a folder with a few hundred files in subfolders ... get coffee as much of the btree is traversed
      -I've connected to this resource before, so I'll make a new alias for it with a subtilely different name
      -What do you mean you've deleted stuff to the network trash and now it's locked?
      -I've autodiscovered the same printer share which I'll share with everybody...

      --
      There are 1.1... kinds of people.
  2. DeployStudio or LanREV by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I have had great success out of both DeployStudio (http://deploystudio.com/) and LanREV (http://www.lanrev.com) in K-12 schools with 200+ machines.

  3. Suggested reading: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Check out the following:

    http://www.macenterprise.org/
    http://www.deploystudio.com/Home.html
    http://rsug.itd.umich.edu/software/radmind/

  4. Re:Have you looked at the features.. by GigsVT · · Score: 5, Insightful

    We have an OS X server.

    It really does suck.

    It's kind of like a crippled BSD server with weird management utilities and a lot of buggy modified utilities.

    You might as well just use a normal Linux server, since all the same daemons are available, and much easier to manage.

    --
    I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
  5. Re:Have you looked at the features.. by raddan · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The only problem with Mac OS X Server (and this is speaking from 10.3-10.4 experience; maybe 10.6 server is better) is that if Apple's grand vision for your network doesn't fit your own vision, then Mac OS X Server is next to useless. The problem is that Apple has preconfigured a number of built-in services, and changing them causes major headaches.

    For instance, in 10.4, any change to the GUI would overwrite your /etc/smb.conf. What's worse is that Apple often runs old versions of this software. If, say, you want to go out and run the latest Samba, nothing is stopping you, but expect parts of Apple's system to break. Sure, I admit, lots of people go this route and have many workarounds for Apple's stuff, but for us, we figured: if we're going to do all this work to circumvent Apple's packaged stuff, why not just run Linux? So that's what we run on our backend now. We even run Netatalk, which has to be the simplest daemon I've ever configured-- it basically worked with PAM+winbind right out of the box, and so we're able to authenticate our AFP clients against AD, too.

    If you're a very small shop, and you want a simple drop-in fileserver, Mac OS X will probably work for you. If you want a simple Open Directory, and don't have an existing directory system, Mac OS X will probably work for you. But get any more complex than that and you might as well use something else.