update on my progress…

[tristan_mason]

hi all

just thought i’d share this with the group. i was introduced to the modular method of image building last year in june with a quick and dirty 2 hour session at a conference in sydney. about 2 months later i started in earnest to learn how to produce something simple. this worked well. then about a month later i tried in earnest to use the method to reproduce what i had been doing for our labs and faculties in the old monolithic method. this turned out to be a great leaning curve and i have been working on it ever since. i did come to realise and be told/shown that not everything should be done in the image creation process and that MCX is a better way to achieve a lot of the user customisation and that an apple server is a better way to get things done and manage them. this came with another learning curve. so, it’s time for me to roll out new images for semester one this year but i’m not totally ready with my new ways so i’m going to use a bit of both until semester 2. i do want to thank everyone from this forum who has helped me to get to this point. it’s been a lot of learning and a lot of fun. also a lot of waiting as any image thats around 45 gig in final form takes about 4 hours to bake. so it’s onto the images now and research when they are finished.

cheers tristan

[Allister Banks]

Cheers indeed, Tristan. You’ll get there! The short answer is ‘nobody’s got it all figured out’. The real answer is you always weigh what’s worth the time and knowledge investment, but you can make great strides once you stumble across a few guiding principles:
1.Automate
2.Document
3.Improvise
Thanks for joining the conversation. Oh, and we’ve been talking about fast I/O setups on the twitter recently, SSD’s like they benchmark on anandtech and and setups on barefeats may cut your wait time down considerably…
Best of luck,

Allister

[tristan_mason]

twitter you say! what names should i be looking for?

and thanks for all the help to date. once i’ve imaged and deployed i’ll be looking to add mcx to the instaDMG workflow to round it off. more research on the server side!

tris

[knowmad]

tristan,
your image is 45GB? thats kind of on the larger size.
Why is it so big?
Hows is your progress going with these things?
What kind of post install management system are you using?

[tristan_mason]

45gig is big? my Art School image is bigger. CS5 and Final Cut Studio will do it. As we do not control AD but everyone has to use it for login we have to try and put as much in the image as possible which is not ideal or best practice but to use an ITILism is a “workaround”. we just never get to effect a solution…

i do have a snow server which i use for deploy (studio), netboot and general storage for me but not managed prefs due to the AD situation. i have thought of AD and OD binding but not had time to try it out. i would love to use managed users and prefs however i’m not sure i will be allowed…

[Author]

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