[blake]

Digging this thread back up…
I’m seeing this behavior when connecting to our exchange 2007 servers with 10.6.4 lately. Anybody come across a plist setting that increases the timeouts for mail.app in the last 5 years??

Sure would be nice,
blake

[blake]

A simple reboot has always fixed this for a few days to weeks. Currently we just avoid leaving server admin open.

[blake]

We collect input from the user about what localization the want before restoring the disk. This information is stored in nvram and durring firstboot the script customizes the system. People like to kick the process off and not come back until it’s fully done.

The ideal solution would be a .plist configuration file that we could feed to apple setup. That way after the restore is done you could just write a configuration file to disk and let apple setup handle all the details. Hmm no I didn’t just wish for sysprep on mac os x 😈 😈

Blake

[blake]

The images I’m building are used for software testing. They boot up and run a script on first boot. This script allows the image to be localized in 13 languages or to run Apple setup depending on the testers need. The image itself does not have any home folders at all until this script runs and creates them.

Additionally I do not like putting any files into our images. It’s much cleaner to modify the ones the OS creates as it boots up. You can immagine putting a bunch of 10.5.x preferences into a 10.6.x image. 95% of the time it would work without issue. But that other 5% I have the angry mob at my door blaming me for making a bad image. After a few years of making images from apple pre-release os builds you get very conservative with the process.

The up side is we dont have any non-Apple OS X software in our testing images. At least I get to avoid that mess 🙂

Blake

[blake]

Yes I considered using defaults with the old school syntax but decided to nut up and get a handle on PlistBuddy this time. You are correct that I had PlistBuddy setup to write into an array. In my process of isolating the commands I’m building they got separated from the ones that create the array. After putting things together it’s working as expected.

If these commands run before the ones in my original post those commands work because the array get’s created.
[code]
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “Add AppleEnabledInputSources array” /Users/user/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.HIToolbox.$UUID.plist
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “Add AppleEnabledInputSources:0 dict ” /Users/user/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.HIToolbox.$UUID.plist
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “Add AppleEnabledInputSources:0:\”InputSourceKind\” string Keyboard Layout” /Users/user/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.HIToolbox.$UUID.plist
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “Add AppleEnabledInputSources:0:\”KeyboardLayout ID\” integer 0″ /Users/user/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.HIToolbox.$UUID.plist
/usr/libexec/PlistBuddy -c “Add AppleEnabledInputSources:0:\”KeyboardLayout Name\” string U.S.” /Users/user/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.HIToolbox.$UUID.plist
[/code]

Thanks for the defaults example Karl!

[blake]

Sounds like a bug that was fixed with the version of SIU that came with 10.6.2 Server update. Make sure your host system you are using to build the images was updated to 10.6.2.

[blake]

Ok got a little help from our apple SE on this one..
Turns out the syntax I was using to modify the /etc/bootpd.plist was wrong (not surprised). The servermgrd attempted to verify the contents of the bootpd.plist and decided they where invalid. It then renamed the file to /etc/bootpd.plist-corrupted and created a new /etc/bootpd.plist from scratch (big surprise).

Here is the code I ended up getting to work.
[code]
relay_enabled
relay_ip_list

10.0.0.2

[/code]

So if you are hacking up config files and the changes are flushed check for a -corrupted version of the file.

[blake]

“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.

[blake]

Yep netboot relay is the goal.

[blake]

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.

[blake]

I don’t believe that the neboot “shell” os created by the Snow Leopard System Image utility has a vnc or ARD server running. However I’m going to be digging into that soon to find out. Sounds like Snow Leopard only hardware may be just around the corner.

blake

[blake]

Yep we saw this issue. I have added the following command to our firstboot.sh script. I tested it with 10.5 and running it doesn’t hurt anything.
[code]sudo update_dyld_shared_cache[/code]

[blake]

I have a shell script that downloads a webcam image every 5 minutes and updates the desktop pattern. Here is the code I use to update the desktop.

[code]
dtpat=/Files/images/stevens.jpg
osascript -e “set ufsdtpath to do shell script \”echo $dtpat\”” \
-e “set hfsdtpath to POSIX file ufsdtpath” \
-e “tell application \”Finder\”” \
-e “set desktop picture to hfsdtpath” \
-e “end tell”
[/code]

You can simplify this if you just want to hardcode in the HFS path.

Blake

[blake]

I went ahead and filed this as a bug on the google code InstaDMG site.

Anybody tried to use the iTunes 9 pkg yet?

Blake

[blake]

I was building snow leopard images with instadmg 1.4b4 for a while. However I have moved over to using apple’s SIU. With apple providing a supported tool now I don’t expect InstaDMG is going to be modified to work with snow leopard.

blake

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