Some Packages overlooked by instaDMG

[Stephen Buckley]

I’m slowly migrating my imaging system to use InstaDMG, curently using 1.4b1 with some success, however I’m encountering certain packages, typically the ones I really would like to use which instaDMG just skips.

Two good examples are the CreateUser and ClearReg packages available from AFP548’s download section:

Taken from the InstaDMG log…
[code]
installer: Error the package path specified was invalid: ‘./CustomPKG/12/._createUser.pkg
createUser.pkg’.
installer: Error the package path specified was invalid: ‘./CustomPKG/13/._clearReg.pkg
clearReg.pkg’.
[/code]

Both are packages with empty payloads running scripsts but I don’t see why that would mean they have an invalid path?!?

Suggestions and explanations most welcome.

Thanks,
Stephen

[foilpan]

weird. is it getting confused there? the “._createUser.pkg” bit implies a resource file/folder that probably doesn’t exist.

try deleting that ._createUser.pkg and running the install again.

[Stephen Buckley]

I had wondered about that ._xxxxx.pkg files, and looked for them already, the bizarre thing is that they don’t seem to be there.

[code]

xxxxxxx-Stephen:12 sbuckley$ ls -AF
.DS_Store createUser.pkg/

[/code]

I am running the build off an XSAN 1.4 volume mounted onto a server running 10.5.3, I suppose it could be something to do with running off the SAN file system, although the build incorporates other much more complicated packages with no issues.

I will try and run the build on a local volume to see if I get different results.

Thanks for the suggestion.
Stephen

UPDATE:

Interestingly i just tried to run my build on my build server’s local hard disk, sadly the spare 30GB I had was insufficient for ASR to scan the image, the log files indicate that the build worked though. Has anyone else any experience of running instaDMG on XSAN?

I will find some more drive space and try again!

[Stephen Buckley]

Conclusion:

Moving from a Xsan volume to a locally attached XRAID fixed the build issues. I guess I should submit this back to Josh Wisenbaker.

Thanks for listening, I’d love to know if anyone else is seeing this.

Thanks,
Stephen

[larkost]

This is definitely because the shell is seeing a ._ file that ends in .pkg. I just checked in a large change to the code around this yesterday that would partially get around this (it would attempt to run both name.pkg and ._name.pkg), but I will make it more explicit to handle this case. But I would not run InstaDMG off a remote volume, not even an XSan. Latency is going to kill you on this. InstaDMG is very dependent on IO speed, and it is very hard to have better IO through a network cable than a ribbon cable.

Update: ok… I have checked in code to exclude ._name.(m)pkg files. But I still don’t think you should be using InstaDMG from anything other than a HFS+ volume.

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