Archive for November, 2008

NetRestore Retired

After 6 years of development, Mike Bombich is retiring NetRestore, one of the most used and useful tools for OS X mass deployment. Mike cites an aging code base and other tools in the market as reasons for his descision. Read all the details here

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Open Directory Across Four Locations?

I have to set up the IT infrastructure for a company that has 4 different offices.  Two of the sites have Apple based clients and the other two have windows based clients.  All of the servers are Xserves.  I hope to set up a single Open Directory structure that can handle Mail, a Corporate Intranet Site, a Corporate Website, Home Folders (for both the OSX and Windows laptops/desktops), Job Folders, and Backup for all of these.  There will be roughly 75 users at the HQ, and less than 20 users at each of the 3 satellite offices.

Our current equipment includes 2 or more Xserves at every location
(plus Xserve RAIDs at the main office), 55 iMacs / Mac Pros, 13 MacBook
Pros / Airs, 30 Windows Desktops, and 7 Windows Laptops.  Our network
infrastructure is gigabit at all of the locations.

Currently
each office has it’s own Open Directory master and separate fileservers
for Job Folders and Home Folders.  The Corporate office hosts the mail,
websites, and backup for all offices.

Any help or advice for creating this infrastructure in a secure and reliable way would be greatly appreciated!

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