Do ARD Create client installer packages work with InstaDMG?

[Per Olofsson]

I’ve created a custom client installer package to create a user and configure ARD, but it doesn’t appear to work. The InstaDMG log shows the package being installed, but after booting up the imaged system, there’s no ARD user. Remote Management is enabled in Sharing, but there’s no user with management privilieges. The package works fine if it’s installed manually on the client.

Am I missing something?

ARD 3.3.1, Mac OS X 10.5.8.

[larkost]

Did you use the createUser package as a template, or did you build your own from scratch. If it is the later, then you are probably creating the user against ‘/’ rather than $3 (the target). If you are using the latest version of InstaDMG and 1.5 then this is solved for you, if you are on 10.6, then unfortunately I don’t have that solution working for 10.6 yet, so you have to do things the right way.

Edit: Ok… you said 10.5.8, but is that your host or target os? And what version of InstaDMG are you running?

[Per Olofsson]

I’m building on 10.5.8, for 10.5.8, with the latest svn of InstaDMG. I’m using the ARD pkg as-is (File->Create client installer->click click click->save .pkg to CustomPKG). I’m going to build my own package today based on createUser, with kickstart as a postflight action, but I figured I’d check here first to see if I’m doing something wrong.

[Patrick Fergus]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: Per+Olofsson[/u][p][i]I’ve created a custom client installer package to create a user and configure ARD, but it doesn’t appear to work. The InstaDMG log shows the package being installed, but after booting up the imaged system, there’s no ARD user. Remote Management is enabled in Sharing, but there’s no user with management privilieges. The package works fine if it’s installed manually on the client.

Am I missing something?
ARD 3.3.1, Mac OS X 10.5.8.[/i]
[/p][/QUOTE]I’ve hit exactly the same thing, except that instead of using the ARD Admin-generated pkgs I instead extract the configuration commands from the postflight scripts (we don’t create users specifically for ARD access, so we don’t need the ARD admin-generated pkg’s ability to create users). I’ve discovered:

– Items that are computer-based (DirectoryService-based logins, allowing requesting permission for access, etc) work fine

– Items that are user-based (giving user “xyz” access to privileges “abc” and possibly user creation (again, we don’t use this part of the ARD installer)) fail. They probably are escaping the chroot jail

This is using payload-free pkgs that worked fine in earlier revisions of Leopard and also worked fine with 10.5.8 before I upgraded to InstaDMG 1.5rc1 (however, 10.5.8 combo doesn’t install correctly without the chroot jail). Unfortunately, kickstart doesn’t quite seem to be compatible with the combination of chroot jail and non-startup-disk installation. I can see two options:

– If you only need limited functionality (e.g. assigning rights to a user you’ve already set up through other means in InstaDMG), you could figure out what keys are being set where and tweak them with defaults/PlistBuddy. This would only be serviceable if you have a very small number of settings you wish to set

– If you need more functionality, take the ARD Admin-generated pkg and install it on first boot of a freshly imaged machine.

– Patrick

[Per Olofsson]

You can also add com.apple.pkg.RemoteDesktopClient to the list of packages that should not be installed under chroot (CHROOT_EXCLUDED_CODES, line 80 in instadmg.bash). Please test it and let me know if it works for you.

[Author]

Posts