[jdyck]

Anyone had any success with SP2 yet?

[jdyck]

Funny enough I was struggling with a completely different problem that adding the Permissions Repair step has also fixed…

In my case, using InstaDMG to build a Snow Leopard image with iWork 09 was resulting in an image with a bug – the iWork applications would crush together the larger fonts (such as in the Newsletter templates). After quite a bit of playing around trying to narrow down what was causing the problem, this has fixed it.

Perhaps we should get the Permissions repair step built into InstaDMG so we don’t have to keep adding with with successive updates?

[jdyck]

And wouldn’t you know it, the build that finished minutes after posting my message worked ok for the createUser part of the above question. Not sure what I did differently except for a restart of my build station. Go figure, I guess 6th time is the charm.

[jdyck]

Hey, just reread my last post and wanted to clarify that I wasn’t really complaining about InstaDMG (although it kinda came out that way), more about the non-standard installers and companies like Apple who keep changing their Installer pkg methods in ways that break tools like InstaDMG. I greatly appreciate InstaDMG and all the work you and some others have put into it, trying to keep up to said changes. Just wish that there weren’t so many companies trying their hardest to make your task impossible ;).

Cheers

[jdyck]

Oops, you’re right, I didn’t include that info. I’m building a 10.5.8 image from 10.5.8 (server) machine. My image builder is an Intel X-Serve running OS X server, so that may be causing issues, but it hasn’t had problems in the past.

For whatever it’s worth I’m also struggling with Office 08 now… Was using an Office 08 (12.0) dmg with an installerchoices xml file and SP1 then 12.1.9 updaters, but with updating my image I updated to a SP2 dmg file (we’re a site license) and the 12.2.1 update, but nothing shows up in the final image unfortunately. For now I’ve created a Composer custom install but again I much prefer to use original installers, even though it’s a bit slower.

Also the iTunes 9 installer has the usbmuxd issue.

I love the InstaDMG workflow for building images, but find myself getting frustrated with all these installers that are doing oddball things and taking all this extra time to get working. To be honest I’ve been thinking about going back to having a standalone machine with my master image on it. For all the issues InstaDMG solved for me, I’m finding myself spending way more time updating images than I was before – mostly because of the oddball installers, which is too bad.

[jdyck]

Another question, you said you can get a successful 10.5.7 build when run from a 10.5.7 host OS. What version of InstaDMG were you running that with? I can get 10.5.7 to install no problem, but if I start looking closely I see that things like Mail aren’t getting the 10.5.7 version installed, so it’s not a successful install unfortunately.

Also, am just looking at the InstallerChoices stuff, but when I go through the process of getting the choiceIdentifiers, I’m ending up with pretty much no options – for both Safari 4 and OS X 10.5.7 I’m getting the following choice options:

choiceIdentifier
manual
—
choiceIdentifier
__ROOT_CHOICE_IDENT__

Doesn’t seem to offer much in the way of choices unfortunately. iLife Support has a bit more, but nothing obvious like the OS X System disks.

I’m almost considering using Jamf Composer to try and repackage 10.5.7, but don’t like getting off the main path so to speak, as that means way more QA testing.

[jdyck]

Thanks for the reply – the sudden new package style that doesn’t work is frustrating and just lost me a bunch of time (on a deadline), and also I missed it in QA on another image that is being put out as we speak, so I’m frantically trying to rebuild a new image to replace the now known-faulty one before it goes out to 3500 laptops. I get a bit frustrated with Apple sometimes when these sudden changes aren’t very well documented.

I guess I’ll try the InstallerChoices, and if that doesn’t work will continue with what I’m doing right now – building the perfect 10.5.6 image with InstaDMG, then image it to a machine, update to 10.5.7, remove cruft, and manually create a new DMG. Hopefully that will work.

Re: the job loss, that totally sucks – we’ve never met, but from what I’ve seen on AFP548 and the work you’ve done for the community you seem knowledgeable, hard working, and willing to share. I suspect the company doesn’t know what they’ve lost. All the best in the job search.

[jdyck]

Sorry for not posting an update earlier – my custom package worked fine, but really unsure what changed between 08 and 09. I much much prefer using the original installers so this is a bit frustrating. Oh well, it is working now so on I go.

[jdyck]

I just built my own package, the InstaDMG workflow is chugging away as I type this, so I should know if it worked tomorrow. Am very disappointed it didn’t work as smoothly as 08 though.

[jdyck]

Joel,

That sounds promising and I’m going to give it a try this week, but just wanted to clarify my understanding of how MCX gets refreshed…

My understanding has always been that it happens at login, which in my case, with the chances of a laptop being plugged in (Wireless is specifically disabled at loginwindow due to intermittant login to AD issues) being very very small, the laptops aren’t getting updates to the MCX settings…

As an example, we had a school that wanted to add a seperately purchased application for their students – easy enough to develop a proper installer for ARD installation, and to update the MCX settings, all remotely… But then we need to plug each of the laptops in and do a login cycle before we see the changes… And due to our intermittant AD issue, it seems like half the machines won’t work, requiring an unbind and rebind procedure. Since our Sites are scattered over 1000s of kms and this can mean having to fly a tech to a site it’s not very good.

But you just said something about MCX auto-refreshing and I’m wondering if perhaps I’m missing something? Is there another mechanism going on that perhaps I can tie into? Meanwhile, I am going to experiment with the commands given.

Thanks,

Jeff

[jdyck]

OK, my most recent build seems to be good. I made 2 changes – I put in the updated Installer mentioned above, and I put Sketchup as the last item in the catalog file. I’ll have to make a few more builds next week to confirm for sure that this was the problem, but this is my first fully successful build in weeks of trying and getting increasingly frustrated.

[jdyck]

Hey, I’m still fighting with this, but think I might have a hint anyway – have a build running right now so will soon have a better idea if it does the trick…

Here’s the things I’ve tried so far:

1) Downloaded fresh Instadmg onto brand new computer (an X-Serve that I have dedicated for building images, packages, etc).
2) Adjusted the permissions of the install folders as noted in a previous post.
3) Rebuilt a lot of the trouble installers (while it’s random, there do seem to be some that do this way more than others).
4) Rebuilt the trouble installers as 10.5 only flat packages.
5) Redid my catalog from multiple nested files to one long file, in case it was the nesting.

I thought 5 had done the trick, as on my second to last build only one application was missing, but then on the next build I had about 5 files missing. D’oh!

Today I imaged a MacBook with the most recent build, with the missing installs, and attempted to install one of the applications that was missing (Comic Life – a custom built package that installs the application and our site license). The strange thing was, although the installer ran fine, it did NOT install the application!

So I looked in the logs, which is when I noticed something very, very peculiar…

It installed the serial number file into /Library/Application Support…

But when it came to installing the Application, I get a whole bunch of messages like the following:

Dec 5 13:52:34 Macintosh payloadExtractor[1998]: Diverting “./Applications/Comic Life.app” to “/Library/Application Support/Google SketchUp 6/SketchUp/Resources/fr/helpcontent/tip/tips/images/artab_off_lcttext.gif”

Sure enough, if I burrow to the .gif file specified and double click it, up pops Comic Life. Not only that, but when I look around I see another ‘graphic’ file at 24MB, double clicking it opens ImageWell, another of the missing installs.

WTF?!? This needs to be investigated! So I look into it some more…

Using the pkgutil command line I got the computer to “forget” the Comic LIfe install, and then also deleted the Sketchup receipt and tried again… Same thing. I then looked into my install build file in PackageMaker and when I investigate my install, beside the Contents tab is a Components tab – it lists Comic Life and has a tick to “Allow Relocation”. I turned it off, rebuilt the installer, and tried again on the test machine – this time it worked fine.

I just rebuilt a few of my installers, turning off the “Allow Relocation” option, and am waiting for the final result. It may not be the issue, but certainly worth checking.

I’m also wondering if (at least in my case) the Google Sketchup installer is wonky? Not sure why else my installers would be throwing things into it’s files. Which does bring up a question, is anyone else with this issue using the Google Sketchup install? It’s a .mpkg installer, so perhaps that might be the issue as well… If this build doesn’t work, I’m going to remove the Sketchup install and try again.

Anyway, I’ll do some more testing and see if that resolves my issue, but in the meantime it is something for people to look at.
Will update more later next week.

[jdyck]

I’ve been busy working on other stuff so hadn’t had a chance to try this yet… Got around to it today, but it looks like 8.0.2 might have resolved the issue, as my iTunes seems to be managed again. Go figure.

[jdyck]

Knowmad,

Did you have any luck with the permissions issue? Did that seem to fix the missing packages? I’m still struggling with this and getting quite frustrated. Like someone above said, if you can’t trust the final image it kinda destroys this whole methodology. I’m getting completely random packages not installing – some application installs, others are more configuration installs – the app ones are usually fairly easy to notice that they’re missing, but the missing configs can be a pain to double-check.

Any other ideas greatly appreciated

Jeff

[jdyck]

I may try repacking a few of them, but to be honest I’m not at all confident that’s the problem for the following reasons:
1. It’s never the same package(s) that fail – so far it seems completely random.
2. Some of the failed packages are things like iMovie 06 that are fresh from Apple and have worked numerous times before.
3. All of the packages have worked in the past at least once, and
4. Most of my packages were built in PackageMaker 3.03 (I had tonnes of problems with 3.0 crashing on me)

I just finished building a new dedicated InstaDMG machine (fresh install of OS X on an X-Serve with lots of HD space and RAM) and got the first build there started last night before I left. Will see if that made any difference, although I’m not sure why it would.

If the problem continues I”m going to pull out all of my more recent Packages and slowly add them to see if perhaps one Package is causing the issues, although, again, the complete randomness of it has me stumped.

[Author]

Posts