Caching a Finished Image?

[bosemachine]

I did a couple searches prior to posting but came up with irrelevant or no results.

I was just wondering whether it was possible to use a finished instadmg ASR image as the cached image. The reason I ask is primarily because of CS5, Final Cut, Logic, and a plethora of Apple Updates – about 70GBs total: they take an ungodly amount of time to install being able to include those in a generic image would cut down my image creation time from 12 hours to something much more reasonable during the work day.

I realize this would almost be a step backwards in the instadmg methodology but necessity drives progress and while I enjoy starting the script and doing other stuff while it bakes, I find myself running close to deadlines as the semester start approaches.

Thanks!

Edit: found this from 2008 https://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=45&showtopic=22036&highlight=cache but perhaps there’s been some new development on this front?

[larkost]

Nope, no new development yet. I am getting closer to being able to start the switchover, but right now the emphasis in my time is in reworking InstaUp2Date to get it ready to take the new development, and a lot on getting testing code in place so I am not so worried about things breaking, and can have more confidence that everything is working as expected.

[zvordauk]

Hi bosemachine,

I have been looking for a solution to this as well. What I do as a workaround is find out what is going wrong, strip down the build to the bare image and the couple of pkgs I think are causing the problem and rebuild.
Doesn’t work all the time but I find it great for solving small problems without loosing a day.

I feel your pain – one of my builds has a 45gb repackaged music app 🙁

P.S. @ larkost: Keep up the great work!!!

[bosemachine]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: larkost[/u][p]Nope, no new development yet. I am getting closer to being able to start the switchover, but right now the emphasis in my time is in reworking InstaUp2Date to get it ready to take the new development, and a lot on getting testing code in place so I am not so worried about things breaking, and can have more confidence that everything is working as expected.[/p][/QUOTE]

Well I didn’t mean to sound ungrateful or anything because I am absolutely dependent on InstaDMG for about 60-80% of my monthly paychecks 😉 But I’ll resist posting fluffy praise and just say that it whatever new development would only improve an already stellar imaging system.

Zvorduak,

Thank you for that suggestion! I’ve resorted to the same method of removing the huge packages and just messing with the smaller packages in a troubleshooting image. It works for the most part but I’ve got one problem right now where I need to ‘repair permissions’ after restoration in order to see all the fonts in any word processing application. This means to me that A) I screwed up permissions somewhere in one or more packages related to either ROOT/Library or the font folder and B) it’s something that leaves a receipt behind that Disk Utility can read off of. However, I can’t seem to pinpoint anything specific to fonts in the repair disk permission log. Oy! I do enjoy a good mystery tho 😉

[bosemachine]

So I ended up adding this these lines to do the permission repair prior to the image file getting created in clean_up_image() :

# Repair disk permissions
log “Repairing mounted image permissions” information
/usr/sbin/diskutil repairpermissions “$TARGET_IMAGE_MOUNT” | (while read INPUT; do log “$INPUT ” detail; done)

so far so good! Looks like I no longer have to repair disk permissions after restoring…yay bandaid fixes 😉

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