Looking for tips and advice on properly imaging Macs

[bw38]

I’ve been reading for the past few months about InstaDMG. I think the idea behind it is absolutely great. It’s very much like the way Windows allows one to sysprep PCs. I recently started working in IT at a university and without getting into too much detail let me just say that Macs get limited support (there’s no imaging of Macs, there’s no way to manage them the way PCs are, etc).

I plan on changing that. My first goal is to create a proper image using InstaDMG and I’ve been looking at threads, posts, articles and even videos that I’ve found on this site. A lot of informative stuff. I am unfortunately unable to test anything out until I get a Mac to work with (which should hopefully be soon enough). But I have a few questions which maybe you folks can help me with.

1. I keep hearing that I should use the latest OS X disc to create my image. One video (Karl Kheun from Uni of Utah on iTunes U) mentioned that I should be using a “retail” or “reference” disc. What exactly is the “reference” disc? Would I be able to use those gray OS X 2-disc set (the recovery disks) that come with new iMacs in the keyboard box? I understand those discs are particular to that Mac model it came with, but I don’t know if they can be used for the InstaDMG process of creating an image.

2. There are a few programs for Macs that we offer staff: Office 2008 (can’t wait until the new version comes out), SPSS 18 (or PASW 18). And a few departments have licenses for Final Cut Pro and Adobe CS4/5. I might want to throw in a few other free applications like (FireFox, etc). How complicated is the process of creating packages that contain these applications in the image (especially those already licensed)? I’ve heard of a few programs that I should use: Package Maker (where can I download this?), Packages (made by same guy who makes Iceberg), Composer (http://www.jamfsoftware.com/products/composer), any others that you may recommend? What’s your experience with this? Can you provide links (I can’t seem to find Package Maker online, it refers to some really old software which I don’t think is compatible with OS 10.6).

3. I’ve yet to deal with Apple directly, but I know companies like Dell or HP will send computers pre-imaged (assuming you supply them the image you want them to use). Does Apple do this? Do I simply need to contact their corporate office to get this worked out? If not, how do you guys handle the setup of new Macs? At what point do they get imaged with the customized image you’ve created?

4. To deploy images, what software is recommended? I’ve heard a lot about Apple’s System Image Utility and DeployStudio. Any others?

5. Lastly, I don’t know much about scripting on either PC or Macs, will this severely limit my ability to create images for Macs using InstaDMG?

Any advice or trips are greatly appreciated.

[larkost]

1) While those discs might be useable, those are exactly the discs that I was warning people off in the video (and other places). Go buy a copy of the retail disc (ie: the discs you buy in a store with no computer attached). The “reference” discs are ones that Apple will sometimes give out through special channels, like the old developer program.

2) Splitting this one up:

– PackageMaker comes with Apple’s Developer Tools (XCode), and can be download free (with registration) from Apple. I am split on whether to recommend using PackageMager or [url=http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Iceberg.html]Iceberg[/url]/[url=http://s.sudre.free.fr/Software/Packages/about.html]Packages[/url] instead. I like the latter tools better, but PacakgeMaker is the one from Apple…

– The complexity of bundling applications varies a lot by the application. Final Cut Pro and things from Adobe take some real care and feeding (despite a lot of feedback form the community).

– FireFox is absolutely trivial, you don’t have to do anything special with it, only provide InstaUp2Date with the url it need to target your package. Since it is just a “naked .app” in a dmg InstaDMG already knows what to do with it.

3) Apple does offer a pre-imaging solution if you put in a big enough order. Your University should have a Sales Engineer assigned to it, and between that person and the assigned sales person they should be able to walk you through those options. When I have talked through the option in the past they always have asked us to provide installers with the packages and settings that we want. This dovetails nicely into a more generic image creation with InstaDMG.

4) There are a lot of options, but those are probably the two best out there a the moment.

5) Without any scripting at all you can build basic images. If you need more complex things in your images, then the need for scripting increases. Regardless, being familiar with a least a few scripting languages is really helpful in IT.

[dead2sin]

1. Reference disk is an updated Retail disc. For instance, there is a Retail 10.6.0 OS X Install DVD as well as 10.6.3. Both are retail discs (They should work on every mac hardware version that came out at the time 10.6.3 was released). This is what reference build refers to. Say down the road they release a 10.6.6 reference build, all current machines would be supported by it, but if a new hardware revision comes out the day after 10.6.6 is released, it is not supported by that reference build (It might have a special version of 10.6.6, as is the case with Mac Minis and 10.6.4).

2. It is pretty trivial for a lot of the free software. Firefox for instance, you can just download the latest version in .dmg format and put it in an InstaUp2Date catalog and InstaDMG will know that it needs to copy the .app to Applications. In general, if the software is a .app sitting on a .dmg, InstaDMG will copy it to /Applications/ on the image you are building. I personally use Composer and I will always pump it as the best packaging software out there at the moment (I REALLY like it!), but Package Maker works and Iceberg or Packages are also good for building packages.

3. I believe Apple will build an image for you and pre-image machines for you, but I have no experience with it and I can’t recall what their name for it is.

4. DeployStudio is the best way to deploy mac images at the moment (in my opinion). It can do many many different things (Bind to AD, OD, install packages at image time, install packages on first boot, etc) and it is extremely flexible.

5. You don’t need to know any real scripting to build images with InstaDMG. Learning how to script will make your images a lot better in my opinion (Via the use of payloadless packages for settings), but it is not necessary. I’m sure you’ve already read over it, but the sticky at the top of this forum has good links for videos and guides as far as building images goes. You shouldn’t have to tweak the InstaDMG scripts used because they are already setup for 99.9% of people that would want to build images. I personally get lost looking through instaUp2Date.py and instadmg.bash, but I’ve picked up quite a bit of bash scripting in my own journey to building Mac Images.

Hope that helps. If you have any other questions, feel free to ask. Also, hop on the OS X Server IRC channel (##osx-server on irc.freenode.net) if you need urgent help with anything (almost always someone on there).

Nate

*edit* Dang it Karl, you beat me 🙂

[bw38]

Those were quick and very informative posts. I’ll continue to use numbers in my posts just for the sake of making it easier to answer my questions.

1. I didn’t know Mac Minis had a special version of 10.6.4. This brings up another question. Let’s say I can’t get my hands on the latest reference disk. I only have a retail copy of 10.6.0. Would the Combo Update of 10.6.4 include the special support for the latest Mac Minis (or whatever Mac model it is that may get special support from 10.6.X)?

I did test run the InstaDMG on my home computer a few weeks ago just to see how the process of creating the image is and it looks like it downloaded the latest update from Apple’s website. Does InstaDMG automatically download the latest Combo Update? Or do I have to point it to the download link from Apple’s website by editing some file?

2. It looks like I have to pay for PackageMaker from Apple ( [url]http://developer.apple.com/programs/which-program/[/url] ). We’ll see how far I can get with the other alternatives for now.

Continuing on the same subject: As I said earlier, I want some basic software on my InstaDMG image that the entire university can use:
Office 2008, FireFox, PASW 18 and whatever else is free or we have a site license for. That seems simple enough to include in an InstaDMG image.

But then there are special circumstances where some departments will purchase licenses for Final Cut Pro and/or Adobe CS5 for an entire lab. Not only are these installs rather huge but they can be rather sensitive to build from the threads I’m reading. Could I deploy individual software packages using DeployStudio to specific computers? Or is there another tool I could use? How have you folks handled this situation in your organization? Is it just easier to create that second image that you use for specific departments/labs?

3. I’ve already asked my supervisor to get me in touch with our Apple rep. We’ll see how this goes. I’m glad to hear that they do at least offer some pre-imaging solution.

4. Good things to keep in mind about DeployStudio. Thanks for that info.

5. I’m mostly familiar with Windows and can do some batch scripting and know how to use the Command Prompt. But on OS X, it’s a different animal altogether. It’s good to know that no scripting background is necessary for InstaDMG, but it never hurts to learn the basics. Is there any particular scripting language that may help improve my use of InstaDMG? Any books or online guides you could recommend?

6. On a different note: I may need an immediate solution for imaging soon and may not get a chance to test InstaDMG right away. I know how to image the old fashion way using programs like Disk Utility and Carbon Copy Cloner. If I were to create a gold image from a current iMac (mid 2010) and put it on an earlier iMac (intel-based), would there be any issues? Unfortunately, this particular department side stepped IT on this large purchase of Macs, but I am looking to help them out for the sake of efficiency (currently some of our techs were taking hours and days just to install Final Cut Pro on a handful of computers one by one; that is not very efficient or logical to me) and so that they can start to trust IT in supporting their Macs.

[dead2sin]

1. Generally speaking, the latest point release will add support for all models that came out before it was released. This is not true in the case of the Mac Mini (I believe it came out just before 10.6.4?) and as a result it has a special 10.6.4 version. For the Mac Mini, I imported the os isntall disc that came with it using importDisk.py and then made a special catalog with the special 10.6.4 combo update for the mac mini. This type of image was only used on Mac Mini and should NOT be used on any other model.

2. You don’t need a pay account, you can sign up for a free developer account and get xcode and PackageMaker without having to pay.

As far as Software goes, I would highly suggest baking in to the image all software that is standard across all departments. Typically this includes Office, Firefox, etc. When it comes to managing licenses per department, I’d highly suggest looking at munki. You can make custom manifests that install X software for a department, but not for others. It also manages Apple Software Updates and gives you the ability to install updates for pretty much any software on the image (Office, Firefox, Adobe Products, etc). I started using munki and I am quite pleased with it. It does patch management quite well and it is extremely flexible. I can’t post the link to munki because the forum keeps telling me it is spam. It is on google code. The website is code dot google dot com slash p slash munki

5. I’d suggest bash scripting if you are just starting out, although Python is very powerful if you are familiar with programming concepts.

6. Don’t do it!!! If need be, make a final cut pro image JUST for that department (I prefer to avoid this, but if it is for a bunch of computers, I don’t see why not). You also need to check licensing for FCP and make sure it is ok to put it on an image. Licensing can be sometimes be tricky with Apple’s Pro products. I’ve done Final Cut Pro on an image using InstaDMG and it worked out well (52 machines in a lab).

If you have issues with InstaDMG, we are more then happy to help you get it going. It is wonderful once completely set up and requires very little work besides updates here and there. It is the inverse of a Golden Master image the way I look at it. Golden Master might be faster to get together initially, but every time there is an update, it can be a bear to boot it up, make the changes, reboot to another partition, clean it up, capture it, etc. I think InstaDMG is the best way to go in 90% of all cases.

Nate

[larkost]

Picking and choosing:

1) The Mac minis and the iMacs were both released on the same day that 10.6.4 came out. They were released as 10.6.3 machines, but the 10.6.4 updates for each of them (note: separate updates) came out either that same day or within a day or two. So the “rule” that each “dot update” covers all of the previously released hardware is still (mostly*) intact.

5) I have become a huge fan of Python… I rarely write scripts in other languages now when I can help it (not always possible). But the downside is that you still have to learn a good chunk of bash because that is what you use on the command line.

I will say that knowing multiple languages is a must for serious IT work. In the last month I have had to work in projects in: C, Obj-C, Python (most of them), bash, and Perl… with a little JavaScript thrown at me when a college needed some help. Once you get into the rhythm and ideas of programming/scripting moving languages becomes easier.

6) Any work you put into a “Golden Master” image is pretty much lost for the next one. If you have to do it, you have to do it. But you have not gained anything for the next round.

* From memory the only case I know where something was not supported was with a single group of iMacs that used a new family of graphics cards that were not otherwise supported by 10.4.x. My guess is that they used a new graphics system that came out with 10.5. Since 10.5 came out a bit late they probably had to back-port the drivers for 10.4.x and thus were never compatible with generic 10.4.x images (since they were not going to do all that work for other computers).

[nobrainer]

I’m just going to comment on #4…

Jamf Software’s Casper Suite was highly recommended to us, and we were told “a lot of companies have used other applications and then gone to Jamf’s, but they didn’t know of any that had Jamf and went to another application”

It’s a full end to end suite of applications from deployment, management, packaging, scripting, software updates, etc. It will track your any Apple inventory (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad, etc), give you detailed data on each device, exportable inventory lists, etc.

They have excellent support, often getting back to you within minutes of asking a question to their direct support, as well as an awesome community of users (between AFP548 and Jamf’s mailing list, I have been able to get any question I can dream of answered quickly).

They integrate well with Adobe products and support Faronic’s DeepFreeze and PowerSave products natively.

They also offer services, where they will do your scripting, or packages, or images or whatever you want.

Bottom line, you get what you pay for, and I’ve yet to see a reason to move away from Casper/Jamf.

[Author]

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