[bw38]

joshmac777

14.2.2 still had the problem but the new 14.2.3 seems to be fine.

I am not putting dropbox links because I do not have access to the volume installers at the moment

Could you explain further? What do you mean that 14.2.3? Is that to say that 14.2.3 doesn’t need to be patched? It will work as is in InstaDMG?

apologies if the post I am replying to doesn’t get posted properly. still getting used to the reply feature on the new forum upgrade.

[bw38]

I THINK this is what you’re looking for. Hope it helps anyways. This was an older article on the AFP548 website.

Downloading Hardware Specific Lion Installers

By Josh Wisenbaker

August 11, 2011 6:20 pm

With the change to the Mac App Store for delivery of OS X, Apple has stopped putting install media in the box with your shiny new Mac. If you want to re-install the OS then you use the Recovery HD and it installs right from the Mac App Store.

This presents a challenge for people with managed system deployments as you never have an installer disk for new hardware that comes out after whatever is on the Mac App Store for download until the next release. There is away around this though to get a nice fresh copy of the installer for whatever new hardware you have.

Read on for more.The Mac App Store is Smart

The Mac App Store is smart enough to know what kind of hardware is requesting an re-install of Lion. By looking at the type of Mac and serial number it will then push down the InstallESD.dmg for that hardware directly to your computer.

Then the Mac restarts from the image it downloaded and re-installs OS X.

This is great for your mom to re-install Lion with, but it also deletes the image after it’s done installing. What you need to do is grab that InstallerESD.dmg before it has a chance to do away with it.

Mac Sysadmins are Smarter

It’s very easy to use the Mac App Store’s smarts to our own advantage and gain access to a copy of that hardware specific OS build. Here’s what to do:

Boot the hardware you need an image for from the Recovery HD by holding Command-r at power on time.
Plug in a JHFS+ formatted external disk.
Select the Re-install OS X Lion option and target the external disk.
Once the Installer finishes downloading, simply shutdown and unplug the disk.

Now when you mount that external disk you will find a directory named Mac OS X Install Data on the root. Inside of this folder is the elusive, hardware-specific, InstallerESD.dmg image that you can feed to SIU or any other imaging tool of choice. Having this installer will now allow you to build out re-deployment images for all of your hardware until rollup installers are available.

Also, do not expect Snow Leopard to work on newer Macs. That’s just not how Apple goes about supporting older OSes. Usually they stop supporting older OSes on newer hardware and focus on making sure the current latest OS will support the newest hardware.

[bw38]

Strange. What’s the command your running? Any idea what rev you previously had?

You could try a simple reboot to see if it starts working again.

[bw38]

I went back and created a new image for Lion with only the Apple updates and Firefox and Text Wrangler.

I’m still experience trouble when I manually try to update both applications.I get that Replace dialog box and it won’t let me replace it because it says a file is locked.

I’m just not sure what I could be doing wrong here.

[bw38]

Check this thread out. It might help:
https://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?forum=45&showtopic=29935

Also, I believe Apple has released 10.7.4. Not sure if it’s updated on the Mac App Store, but if it is, you could simply use that Lion installer which shouldn’t suffer from the expired certificates. This would of course require that you also update the vanilla catalog as well since I’m not sure that has been updated today. You would need to find the build number for that installer and make sure to exclude the 10.7.3 Combo update from the vanilla catalog along with other updates that may not be required.

[bw38]

I take it you are referring to this:
http://blogs.adobe.com/oobe/2012/04/sneak-peek-of-aamee-3-0.html

In the comments they talk about InstaDMG specifically.

[bw38]

So I finally got around to testing this out. And I don’t believe it’s the preferences I’m packaging up or where I’m putting them.

I created a base OS image that has only third-party apps and a dock plist copied to User Templates.

And Firefox v11 won’t update to v12.

Open Firefox.app. Check in “About” for updates. It gives me a link to download it instead. I do so and quit Firefox.

But whenever I try to manually install (drag and drop) I get the message whether I want to “Replace” “Keep Both” or “Cancel”. I click Replace and get:
“The operation can’t be completed because some items had to be skipped. For each item, choose File > Get Info, make sure “Locked” is deselected, and then check the Sharing & Permissions section. When you are sure the items are unlocked and not designated as Ready Only or No Access, try again.”

So I do as it says and notice under Get Info -> Sharing Permissions that:
system has R&W
admin has Read Only
everyone has Ready Only

Looks pretty normal (unless someone says otherwise).

I check owner/group access for Applications and notice everything in Applications that comes with the OS by default is root:wheel except those third-party apps which are root:admin. Again, pretty normal, right?

So I try this with another app: Text Wrangler. Same thing exact thing happens as above. This time I was simply replacing TextWrangler v4 with v4 instead of upgrading.

I try something similar with VLC. Except this time I did not open VLC player which was originally added using InstaDMG. I simply replace the app (drag and drop) and it works without any problems.
Try the same thing again with VLC (re-imaged, so I could use the same VLC that was added using InstaDMG). This time I do open VLC and close it. And try to a drag and drop replacement. It works fine.

I wanted to rule out that opening the application and then closing it may have been causing some file to lock. That wasn’t the case at least for VLC. So I tried the same for Firefox and VLC: 1. open and close app and then replace it and 2. don’t open app and simply replace it. But I constantly get that message and can’t do a simple replacement of the app.

But once the apps are replaced (I have to delete the app first and then drag/drop from dmg installer), I can easily replace them thereafter. No problem.

I get the feeling that something is locking Firefox and TextWrangler, but I’m not sure what. I’m going to go back and re-create the image. This time in doing so I’m going to make sure that no apps are open during this process. Not that I think it should cause any problems, but just in case.

Could someone do me a favor in testing this out:

Using InstaUp2Date, make a simple Lion image with Firefox v11. Open Firefox. Click on “Firefox” menu and click on About. It should automatically start checking for updates.
Firefox v11 here: http://download.mozilla.org/?product=firefox-11.0&os=osx&lang=en-US
Could try the same with TextWrangler as well if you feel so inclined.

Are you getting problems updating? If you try to manually update, do you get the message above about some items being locked?

[bw38]

You already found the answer. Hopefully someone can update the sha1 for the 10.6 vanilla catalog too.

Just wanted to note Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 8 should have:
sha1: 9eeb5d74f7bd6b69547b04918bc322a21030f6a5

[bw38]

when you download InstaDMG, try doing it via Terminal using the following command:
svn checkout http://instadmg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk InstaDMG

Try to create a basic vanilla image 10.7.When you do this though, make sure to set the date on your computer is before mid-Febuary 2012. This will create a base cache image. The output file is of no importance.

To create the basic image, try command:
sudo ~/InstaDMG/AddOns/InstaUp2Date/instaUp2Date.py -p 10.7_vanilla

Then set the computer date to present date. Then try to create another basic vanilla image 10.7. See you if you get the error message then.

It shouldn’t matter how many InstallerDiscs you have in your InstaDMG repo. Just make sure the vanilla catalog is only pointing to one build # for the disc you wish to use to create your image.

[bw38]

have you tried downloading a fresh copy of instadmg and working off that instead?

also, when you say the InstallESD.dmg is only two days old, what do you mean? where did you get this copy from?

[bw38]

Wouldn’t that only be applicable though if you are upgrading to SP2? If it’s a clean install of Office 2011 which is then getting SP2, then it shouldn’t be a problem…I’d imagine.

[bw38]

I believe this is the issue your running into: https://www.afp548.com/forum/viewtopic.php?showtopic=29957

You probably don’t have a cached base image in InstaDMG. And the installer you’re using has old certificates and/or old apple updates.

[bw38]

Could you post the catalog that is causing you the issue? An guess, would be to check and make sure lines are tabbed properly. I’d use a text editor like Text Wrangler.

Another possibility, some packages get modified after being run through InstaDMG. It could be something like a minor dummy file that was created. Don’t ask me why this happens. All I can say is that I’ve seen it before (with Office 2011). When this occurs, it causes the checksum to change as well which means you have to run a checksum on that package again and update the catalog accordingly.

But you’re saying this is happening with multiple packages so I’m guessing something else is at play here.

You can also try doing a restart of the machine. Sometimes that fixes weird error messages from InstaDMG.

[bw38]

Hmm, it looks like the root cause was the fact that I kept running InstaDMG in the past (set machine time to 2 months ago). This apparently needs to be done so that InstaDMG can create the cached base image initially. But the updates won’t work I presume because the new security certificate is only valid AFTER a certain date and BEFORE they expire (sometime in 2019?). Anyways, if you starting from scratch with InstaDMG, the trick appears to be to set the clock back before security certificates expired (any time in Feb 2012 should do). InstaDMG will then create the cached base image, but the final output file (the “10.7vanilla.dmg”) will not contain any updates. Change the machine time back to the current date and run InstaDMG again. This time it will use the cached base image that was previously created and will process the apple updates successfully.

Hope this helps anyone who may have run into this.

[bw38]

Here are the flags that I found available for InstaUp2Date:

Flag/Option Information
-h or –help Print the usage information and exit.
-v or –version Print version information and quit.
-p or –process As described above, runs InstaDMG after successfully setting things up, along with any of the following options
-a FILE_PATH or –add-catalog=FILE_PATH Add the items in this catalog file to all catalog files processed. Can be called multiple times
–instadmg-scratch-folder=FOLDER_PATH Tell InstaDMG to use FOLDER_PATH as the scratch folder
–instadmg-output-folder=FOLDER_PATH Tell InstaDMG to place the output image in FOLDER_PATH
–add-catalog-folder=FILE_PATH Set the folders searched for catalog files
–set-cache-folder=FILE_PATH Set the folder used to store downloaded files
–add-source-folder=FILE_PATH Set the folders searched for items to install
–restore-onto-volume=VOLUME After creating the image, restore onto volume. WARNING: this will destroy all data on the volume

Doesn’t look like there is a way to turn off paranoid-mode using a flag at least. Or maybe I’m missing something obvious. I’m hoping someone else can provide a better answer.

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