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  • October 27, 2010 at 9:34 pm #379713
    tristan_mason
    Participant

    Hi All
    I’ve been baking with instadmg and am just wondering…
    – Once i’ve baked a fully updated 10.6.4 OS dmg how can I then use that as the base OS disc for my future workflows instead of having to go through the update process each and every time I run a catalogue? Am I missing something very simple here?
    Regards
    Tristan

    October 27, 2010 at 9:51 pm #379714
    Allister Banks
    Participant

    Hey Tristan,

    Welcome! As the tool currently works, you do need to run through updates since whichever version was on the retail disc. There is hackery and converting the read-only ASR image to read/write for minor modifications, but I can get a fully updated vanilla build with iLife in less than 25 minutes, so I am content doing it over each time. I would guess you understand the use of the Cache created for that BaseOS install, and encourage you to grab an updated 10.6.3 retail DVD if you can. Let us know how else we can be of assistance,

    Allister

    October 27, 2010 at 10:22 pm #379715
    tristan_mason
    Participant

    Hi There
    Thanks for the prompt reply. Only having a 10.6 disc I can see I need to update! It’ll save me about 20 mins in the scheme of things. I’m building pretty complicated (perhaps too ambitious for this tool) images for the uni here and am just trying to cut the time down if poss. I’ve been doing the monolithic method but have been turned on to the modular approach earlier this year and am convinced it is the way forward. It’s just a matter of getting everything working and reverse engineering the installers which so far with the help of the forum posts is going well. The greatest problem I face is profile customisation. We have a default profile and a log in hook and the profile is quite custom from the apple default. Having had a look it seems as though I will have to do most things with Plist customisation which I have had a small shot at. There seems to be no other way I can find and as we have a large user base so doing it per user is out of the question. At present I am focussing on getting all the software in the image. Once completed i’ll be looking closely at the customisation of the profile. I’ll probably get back to you then for further advice.

    Do you have any further tricks for getting CS5 into an instadmg workflow? I can only find one which uses Composer and is not very explicit.

    Regards
    Tristan

    October 27, 2010 at 11:25 pm #379716
    Allister Banks
    Participant

    Hey Tristan,

    There’s a great book about profile customizations, Enterprise Mac Managed Preferences by Greg Neagle and Ed Marczak, released by Apress. It has the recipes you need to do literally whatever can be customized. If management via centralized directory services and the equivalent of GPO are not an option, the Mac even has an Apple-endorsed method of nesting the management settings locally, and I built a package to seed the moving parts all in one step while setting the local admin user.
    Another pretty cool presentation on the packaging subject was given by Mr McCracken at MacSysadmin Europe, which was recorded here: http://documentation.macsysadmin.se/2010/2010doc.html That should be ample starting points to looking at the different ways of getting the software into the build.

    Adobe software in general is a heavy trial-and-error re-packaging process, but Composer is really cheap – some prefer other tools more, but the presets for capturing CS3 saved me hours recently. Adobe’s ‘enterprise deployment toolkit’ app may just prove to ease the load after you already get the image deployed on the workstations, which you can distribute via client management suites like Casper, Puppet and LanRev, or free software-distribution specific tools like Munki and DeployStudio(which is absolutely awesome for restoring images over the network with or without netboot, and just flipped the switch on a self-serve mode non-admins can use if you enable it).

    Also, please keep in mind you can get a login to dead2sin’s wiki at osxdeployment.com and give him feedback on the things that weren’t as easy to understand as you would have hoped.

    Looking forward to hearing from you soon,

    Allister

    October 28, 2010 at 12:21 am #379717
    tristan_mason
    Participant

    Hi Allister

    Thanks for the great pointers! I’ve just purchased Composer and am going to have a crack at reverse engineering the CS5 installer as per the instructions on the forum (i’ll muddle through the bit where it says to “compare the two then drag the differing files into the main composer window). I’ll let you know how I get on.

    I tried my best to use the deployment tool for CS5 but gave up. Just couldn’t get it to play nice with instadmg in any meaningful way much to my chagrin. I thought I was onto a winner there but alas nada! Are the Adobe packages in CS5 non Apple standard?

    I’ll have to get the book on customisation as i can see that without a non GUI way of customising the Ui for profiles i’m a bit sunk and that is a major point for me. Giving our users a curated/tailored default profile every time they login.

    I do have a snow server hear which I am not really using except for running Deploy Studio to deploy my Mac only images and the Mac volumes for the dual boot images. I’m kinda sold on DS all EXCEPT for the partitioning which really doesn’t cut it for our setup, again much to my chagrin. I’ve just rolled back to t he previous DS version as I hated the percentage slider method for drive partitioning. I have many machines with differing drive sizes and for dual boot/bootcamp it just made things messy. end DS rant.

    You mention the preset for capturing CS3? Where would I find it and is it for Composer? Sorry if it’s an easy one like have a look in “x” menu. Am just knee deep in it at present. (just worked this out in Composer. THANKS for turning me onto this. I can now see some BIG time savings and less heartache!) genius…

    I looked at casper suite but we can’t afford it this year so it’s all by hand as it where but hey, that’s how we learn right? Anyway I have ARD which I can use for any post deployment shenanigans that may transpire. I’m looking to get Casper Imaging Suite which may make things a little easier but i’m really hoping it will deal to the drive partitioning problem we ran into last year before semester one on the dual boot machines. Dunno. Bit of a wait and see with that one. It says on the Casper box it’ll do partitioning as per our requirements but…

    I went to the AUC conference in Sydney this year which is where I did a workshop on instadmg and looked at Munki too. Since then i’ve been playing with insta but now actually building my first set of images so it’s nuts and bolts time. I’ve totally forgotten what we did with Munki so i’ll have to drag out the hand out and have a look. I do remember thinking it could be usefull at the time but i’ve no idea what for now. 😕

    I’ve had the odd look at osxdeployment but yes, I should join and participate. That’s where I got the good oil for Office 2011 and instadmg.

    As before, thanks for all the help.

    Regards

    Tristan

    October 28, 2010 at 12:51 am #379718
    tristan_mason
    Participant

    I just had a good look at the presets for capturing in Composer and i’m rather excited! It can capture User Environment Settings. I had no idea these were even there…

    BLOODY MARVELOUS

    Now I can see how I can capture all the odds and sods I need not just software to round out the image. 😀

    Thanks again for the pointers. This makes the instadmg route worthwhile and i retract the above statement suggesting that my requirements are too ambitious for instadmg.

    Cheers

    Tristan

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