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Try it with rev188 that has a new trick that should get around this.

But do not grab anything after that at the moment (they are intermediate ones while I make some large changes)

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The way we call the installer we basically tell it to ignore any of the normal safety measures that would prevent this. I wish we didn’t have to do so, but that is how things work.

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I think that the important question here is: Are you running an OS other than 10.5.x as your “host” OS?

10.4 does not work, and it has decided that we are officially abandoning 10.4 as a host OS. I am not adverse to submitted fixes to get 1.x branches to work on 10.4, but have no hardware to test or do development on that run 10.4. So I will break it there. Additionally future version are going to start relying on systems introduced in 10.5.

10.6… well I can’t comment on that on a public forum other to say that it does not work, and I am working on fixes for a future version of InstaDMG.

PS: as a warning to people, I am doing some major overhauls right now, and so am committing to the repository even when I have not tested things. So for the moment builds after rev188 might be broken. But I don’t think that that is the issue for thespider.

[larkost]

[QUOTE][u]Quote by: rtrouton%40yahoo.c[/u][p]What are you using to create your server images, the stock InstaDMG with the -s flag, or the InstaDMG_server that larkhost is referencing?
[/p][/QUOTE]

I should note that the ‘-s’ flag on the normal version does nothing at this point (as is indicated in the -h output).

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Right now I know that the current SNV version does not work on the 10.6 Developer Seeds due to a few changes that Apple has made. I have not really been working on the 1.x builds for it, but am building the 2.x betas on 10.6 now. Unfortunately due to NDA this is all I can really say about 10.6.

As to things writing to the HD, that is something I have been working to prevent very hard. Right now the version of InstaDMG 1.x that is in SVN has some new code in it to prevent installers from writing to the main drives, and have been playing with the sandbox/seatbelt system to try and close out any other possibilities of writing anywhere but the main disk, but have been having problems with changes in a certain OS…

But in general I really, really, REALLY think that your first mistake was running InstaDMG on a production server. I always run on workstations that I can afford to have go down. The first reason is if something goes wrong I can just pull the plug, and the second reason is that InstaDMG is a real resource hog. I see slowdowns on my machine during a build (especially when it is hunting for bad symlinks).

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Two notes:

– My understanding is that there are some odd corners to the MacOS X Server installer, especially when it comes to the licensing part. I have never explored this myself, so can’t say for certain.

– The old project to make a version of InstaDMG work with ‘Server can be found here:

[url]http://instadmg.googlecode.com/svn/branches/instadmg_server/[/url]

– InstaDMG does not work by merging updates. It works by installing everything to a dmg, then ASR scanning the resulting image so that it can be rapidly imaged onto a target computer (about 10 minutes, more or less). The installer never runs on the target machines, and I am not sure that this is going to work with ‘Server (but have not explored much).

[larkost]

There was a side project to get InstaDMG to be able to build MacOS X Server images, but I don’t remember there being a final product in that direction. As the person doing most of the main-line work right now I will say that I don’t have any need of it, so probably will not put any time into that directly. I am very open to patches to support it though.

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Woops… thanks, I corrected it in the original post.

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There are two passwords that it is going to ask you for, one if your admin password, and the other is the password for the ActiveDirectory admin (an account that can add computers to the default container). Are you sure of which you are working with?

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First off: how is this InstaDMG related? Please remember to put the right questions in the right forums.

And then your answer is going to be to make a launchd LaunchAgent and make sure that the LimitLoadToSessionType is “LoginWindow”.

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[QUOTE][u]Quote by: Cameron+Kay[/u][p]
The only 2 lines of the script I’ve changed are:

ASR_FILESYSTEM_NAME=”System”
CURRENT_OS_INSTALL_MOUNT=”/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD”

[/p][/QUOTE]

Rather than trying to mess around with the working internals, just make sure your image has the right name: either “Mac OS X Install Disc 1.dmg” or “Mac OS X Install DVD.dmg”. The image caching will only identify it if it is one of those two names. And rather than hard-coding the filesystem name, why not use the ‘-n’ option?

[larkost]

I in the Seeding group for Snow Leopard, and would probably be considered the lead developer for InstaDMG at this point. However, I don’t have access to those developer forums, so I can’t see that message. If you would like to contact me directly, or if you have access to the Snow Leopard Server seeding list we could exchange bonifieds there.

I have not yet begun to work with Snow Leopard and InstaDMG, partially because I was waiting to see if Apple was going to do anything new in that space. I did peek under the covers of the installer a little bit, and noticed some changes, but have not taken the time to figure them out yet. But I think it is about time that I start to really look into what the next version of InstaDMG is going to look like, and to concentrate on making sure it works with 10.6.

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If you have a look at InstaUp2Date in the AddOns folder you will have a good idea of how I handle all of that.

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The best way of doing this is to:

1) Install PackageMaker (part of the developer tools, and available in other forms as well, third-part tools are also useable)

2) Use PackageMaker to create a new package, put in your organization in reverse-dns notion (ie: com.example.division).

3) Projects -> Add Snapshot Package…

4) Click on “Start”

5) System Preferences -> Accounts, then authenticate (click on lock), click on Guest Account, check the “Allow guests to log in to this computer”, wait for it to be done

6) Back to PackageMaker, click on “Stop”, wait for it to process, click on Next

7) Weed out all the extraneous changes that got made while you were working. In this case that is everything but:
[list]
[*]/Library/Keychains/System.keychain
[*]/private/etc/apache2/users/Guest.conf
[*]/Users/Guest
[*]
[/list]

8) Click on “Save” and then finish creating the package

Note that this implies that your system keychain is the same on all your system, otherwise things get interesting. Unfortunately systemsetup does not offer this as a feature.

This general procedure is useable to capture many system settings.

[larkost]

10.5.4? That might be your problem right there: Java Update 3 requires 10.5.6.

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