Archive for category: Deployment

With the release of Mountain Lion I needed a way of creating an updated Recovery HD partition when imaging our machines. In the past I used a combination of solutions by Clay Caviness and Joel Bruner. After discovering that all I needed was the dmtest tool from the Lion Recovery […]

Charles Edge has been doing a series of post on OS X Mountain Lion Server and one of today’s topics was of interest for those of us that do image deployments.  The NetBoot service has been around for quite a while and hadn’t changed a whole lot in appearance.  As […]

As discovered by @tvsutton and reported on ##osx-server IRC, the Mac App Store version of Garageband’s assets (which are downloaded on first-launch, all 1.57GBs…) can be fetched in advance: http://downloads.apple.com/static/gb/gb11bc/GarageBandBasicContent.pkg This makes it easier to deploy, since it is a standard package for content found outside of the .app bundle […]

Greg Neagle has a great post outlining the benefits of installing OS X instead of applying an image.  This method is great because you can use one installer in various scenarios and prevents you from doing the same work over and over again. Greg released an tool called createOSXinstallPKG on […]

The release of Mac OS X Lion dramatically changed how Apple distributed its desktop operating system. By moving from physical distribution to electronic distribution, Apple was able to offer Lion at a much lower price than many earlier releases, and also offer a better installation experience for most of its […]

In order for an app to run on an iOS device, it needs to be code signed. This proves to iOS that the app has been approved to run on iOS devices. This is true of any apps in the App store, ad-hoc, or enterprise apps. The App store apps […]

Starting with OS X 10.7 (Lion), there has been a shift from managing via Workgroup Manager and Managed Profiles (“MCX”) to managing via Profile Manager and Configuration Profiles (.mobileconfig). Configuration Profiles can be managed in a variety of ways, but OS X Server 10.7 provides a simple and efficient tool […]

If you’ve done any deployment work with OS X Lion, InstallESD.dmg is probably not a new concept for you. But just in case you haven’t, or just in case you need a quick refresher, with the release of OS X Lion, Apple completely changed its distribution method for Mac OS […]

With Apple releasing updates to OS X every year, the Mac SysAdmin has yet another thing to worry about. As if increasingly frequent security updates and managing iOS devices were not enough to keep us busy, we must now add yearly releases to our work load. This presents quite the […]