Archive for category: InstaDMG

InstaUp2Date + AutoDMG

If you use InstaDMG/InstaUp2Date and are worried that your workflow is going to break sooner than later, swapping AutoDMG in for InstaDMG may be your best bet. This article shows you how to make it work.

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AutoDMG, a modern replacement for InstaDMG

AutoDMG, a modern replacement for InstaDMG

At MacSysAdmin 2013, Per Olofsson started work on InstallESDtoDMG, a replacement for InstaDMG.  The first prototype was on a piece of paper: InstallESDtoDMG prototype 0.1 pic.twitter.com/E0fiPHkOMq — Per Olofsson (@MagerValp) September 19, 2013 Per was having trouble with InstaDMG and the then-current Developer Preview of Mavericks, and decided to write […]

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Deployment: A Pedagogical Manifest(o)

Deployment: A Pedagogical Manifest(o)

Last Fall, a discussion arose on the MacEnterprise list about deployment terminology, with the term “thin imaging” coming in as the winner for variety of (conflicting) definitions. (You can read the thread from the beginning or jump on when the discussion turns to terminology.) I was starting to prepare my […]

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Preparing the Office 2011 SP3 Installer for InstaDMG

Preparing the Office 2011 SP3 Installer for InstaDMG

Office 2011 is a common application to get baked into an InstaDMG image (or any other pre-compiled, modular style image).  There are a few quirks to installing Office 2011 in this way as it was made to be installed on a live system.  Noel Alonso put a script together that […]

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Skinning a Cat: Lots of Ways to Deploy Lion

Skinning a Cat: Lots of Ways to Deploy Lion

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 […]

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Automating Enrollment of Lion into Profile Manager on OS X Server

Automating Enrollment of Lion into Profile Manager on OS X Server

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 […]

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Understanding InstallESD.dmg, Recovery HD, and Lion Internet Recovery

Understanding InstallESD.dmg, Recovery HD, and Lion Internet Recovery

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 […]

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Surviving Yearly OS X Releases

Surviving Yearly OS X Releases

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 […]

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I am a humble personal assistant, with reminders about InstaDMG

Hey folks,

It's been a while since we InstaDMG-ers were at the forefront of people's minds, and it may seem like the whole IT landscape has changed.  I wanted to briefly drop you a line with a few tidbits and subtle reminders.  For one thing, did you know InstaDMG (and InstaUp2Date) is not just Lion-ready, but can now build images for (and on) Lion Server?  New catalogs, downloads and revised docs are imminent, keep checking the instadmg.googlecode.com site and follow the @OSX_adm twitterbot (trendy!)

Also, please understand that while InstaDMG was a early star in the modular image creation revolution, which helped turn the spotlight on packages and powerful image-building, it's merely a tool that fits a need.  Just because Greg Neagle developed and released a Lion upgrade package (which complements his work on Munki) doesn't mean it could be utilized with InstaDMG.  Likewise, many have hoped InstaDMG could address certain needs involving the recovery partition Lion introduces, but please remember, that's just an additional, somewhat static partition.

So when looking over tools in your chest, old (like NetRestore, hallowed be its name) and new-ish (like DeployStudio, which can extract and lay down recovery partitions with aplomb), please remember that InstaDMG is still an effective hammer. Your problem may just not be a nail, and that's A-OK. Thanks for listening!

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Competition Time! – seeking a name for "kicker-replacement" (We have a Winner!)

You might have read some of our previous articles talking about using kicker to perform actions on network status changes.

This was always an unsupported solution, and with Leopard it turns out that Apple no longer needed kicker, and so they got rid of it.

Chris Adams and I started kicking around some ideas in Python, and the result is an incredibly flexible framework for triggering events on any change to the SystemConfiguration API, NSWorkspace notifications, and filesystem changes via FSEvents.

You can find this along with some other useful Python Mac sysadmin utilities at the Google Code site pymacadmin.

Anyway, there's a problem.

We need a name.

 

[Edit: 2008/07/23 – We have a winner! Kok-Yong Tan came up with "cranker" and the primary daemon will be called "crankd" ]

 

Read on for details….

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