InstaDMG wrecked my server, real life horror story

[trondah]

I experienced the worst nightmare last weekend. I was doing an InstaDMG run of a Snow Leopard seed on one of my servers, and the result was it started to install stuff on /. Needless to say, InstaDMG quickly failed and I was left with a broken server. It’s also one of the more critical servers we have, I was doing the building there because it has a large attached storage. I normally don’t risk doing anything special on servers but figured InstaDMG is pretty safe. I was doing this from home as well, so had to go in on a weekend to try out my disaster recovery routines 🙂 Fortunately I have good backup routines and was able to restore the server completely from an image.

I’m not sure what went wrong, but I do recall there being some problems unmounting and ejecting disks on that specific server earlier, could have had something to do with it. I’m definately not saying this is a bug with InstaDMG, but rather a warning that servers are best left alone, strange things might happen 🙂

[larkost]

Right now I know that the current SNV version does not work on the 10.6 Developer Seeds due to a few changes that Apple has made. I have not really been working on the 1.x builds for it, but am building the 2.x betas on 10.6 now. Unfortunately due to NDA this is all I can really say about 10.6.

As to things writing to the HD, that is something I have been working to prevent very hard. Right now the version of InstaDMG 1.x that is in SVN has some new code in it to prevent installers from writing to the main drives, and have been playing with the sandbox/seatbelt system to try and close out any other possibilities of writing anywhere but the main disk, but have been having problems with changes in a certain OS…

But in general I really, really, REALLY think that your first mistake was running InstaDMG on a production server. I always run on workstations that I can afford to have go down. The first reason is if something goes wrong I can just pull the plug, and the second reason is that InstaDMG is a real resource hog. I see slowdowns on my machine during a build (especially when it is hunting for bad symlinks).

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