ARD Database Package

[vogtstev]

Hi everyone! InstaDMG is working awesome. Thank you again!

I hope this is the right spot to post this.
I am interested in making a package or script that reports to remote desktop the ip address, etc the first time a newly deployed machine logs in.
It doesn’t necessarily have to access the ARD database. It just needs to make a list of machines somewhere so I can compare it to my ARD lists to keep them updated.
Let me know if this makes sense or if you have any better ideas.

Thanks for any input!!
Steve

[Patrick Fergus]

You could have the script mount a file sharing volume where it has write-only (drop box) capabilities and output the IP address to a file named for the MAC address of the machine. Not too pretty, but you’d get unique individual files for each built machine.

– Patrick

[eholtam]

Going off Patrick’s suggestion you could have the remote machines add a line to the end of the one document on the server in the format that ARD uses to Import into a Scanner.

From the Apple ARD Admin guide found at ( http://images.apple.com/remotedesktop/pdf/AdministratorsGuide20061116.pdf ):

You can import a list of computers into Apple Remote Desktop by importing a file
listing the computers’ IP addresses. The list can be in any file format (text, spreadsheet,
word processor) and must contain either IP addresses or fully qualified domain names
(such as foo.example.com).

So each computer could add its FQDN to the end of the file so you could later import that file as needed.

On a simpler note couldn’t you just create a bunch of saved scanners in ARD for the network ranges you’re interested in?

-Eric

[Rusty Myers]

I’ve seen somewhere, someone, who had used curl and cron (or launchd) to curl a form on their website that would fill out the form with specific data from that computer. Might be simpler than mounting/unmounting and appending a file. According to the man page, use -F for a form and fill out data using the “name of feild”=@/local/file/on/computer. See example from man page:

curl -F password=@/etc/passwd http://www.mypasswords.com

Good luck and post any good results! Oh, I suppose the bad results too.

Rusty

[thegooch49]

The way I dealt with this, is to have the new host email me some info about the system. It emails a mailing list group, so that the other admins know that a new machine was added to the network. The emails are a reminder to me to add them to the ARD configuration next time I’m on. The email has the hostname, and the first few relevant lines from system_profiler. It also sets the computer hostname (which comes from our DHCP server).

I have this script run as a post flight on another package that I run after the system is image. I just piggybacked this script as a postflight, since I have to run the package anyway (it sets some configurations for cfengine). Maybe this will help.

#Set the computername
systemsetup -setcomputername $(/bin/hostname)

#Phone home
SUBJECT=”New Host Added: ”
TO=”[email protected]”

/usr/bin/mail -s “$SUBJECT $(/bin/hostname)” “$TO” <

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