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Alright it’s out now…
So I have been testing the new SIU for making InstaDMG style images and it’s working quite well. You need to setup a NetRestore workflow and then extract the system.dmg file from inside the netboot.nbi. It’s fairly easy to add a shell script automator action at the end to extract the image from the .nbi if that’s your desired process.
Anybody else building a Snow Leopard image using SIU NetRestore?
I think the most exciting part is that I can open an enterprise support case now if some updater doesn’t work properly. The only issues that I have run into are some error messages show in a drop down sheet that don’t effect the image and only have an OK option on them.
Blake
(BUMP)
interested to know how people are using SIU. just going to start playing with it myself. Interested to see what it actually does wrt InstaDMG process.
are there any good net resources available to read about using SIU?
(BUMP)
Also interested in hearing how other people are using this. I am currently at a turning point on changing how we do lab deployments and am hoping that this can be a good solution.
Jamie
(BUMP)
Also interested in hearing how other people are using this. I am currently at a turning point on changing how we do lab deployments and am hoping that this can be a good solution.
Jamie
Just an update on our usage here. We are building all of our 10.6.x images using SUI. It has some quirks like erring out because it can’t unmount a dmg once and a while. This is similar to our experiences with InstaDMG and you might need to reboot the system if you have problems building the image.
The SIU tool always creates a netboot set along with the NetRestore image. Other than that it works solidly with the apple created .pkg’s and our one custom package that creates user accounts and such. I have heard of people having problems with their custom Office pkg’s.
That said If I was in an education setting vs our software development setting I would be at least testing deploy studio. For us we need to stick with the vendor’s native tools as much as possible. Third party tools never work good enough durring an OS’s pre-release stage for us.
I’m having issues with using Net-install images under 10.6. All my 10.5 images work just fine. The issue is with the packages I add. My Net-install image only installs 10.6 none of the other packages I added. I thought it might be fact that it was a 10.5 Server, so I setup a Netboot server under 10.6 and remade the Net-install package. Same results. When I do a custom install and select options, I can see all the packages there, but after the install one of them get installed.
Anyone else having this issue?
“When I do a custom install and select options, I can see all the packages there, but after the install one of them get installed.”
Make sure you are running 10.6.2 Server on your image building system. The version of SIU that comes with the 10.6.2 Server update has tons of fixes in it. Also turn the logging up to verbose in the SIU preferences. Run your image build again and select show log from the view menu. Combing through this log output will give you detail on which part of the process is failing.