I'm curious if there are any other ehMacians involved in imaging multiple Macs and what they're using.

Been a while since my school board days. Deploying images was always the easy part.

With a solid server and good 100 Meg switching, net boot deployment could often be accomplished in a day, and half of that time was devoted minor tweaks after the image was deployed. In some cases we deployed the image from an external drive. The real headaches were the older computers that probably should have been removed from the system but still lingered on, usually for economic reasons. Saw some huge improvements coming along about the time I left and would love to know how this works 5 years later. One of these was having the computers pull their Work Station name from the server based on their individual MAC address listed on the server. That was a big time saver.

The biggest chore was building and testing the image even though we started from a standard board wide image. Every school had unique software additions that needed to be included and needed to work even though these programs often lagged the OS by two or three generations.

i do it daily using DeployStudio - I've created a number of images (create a disk image, install OS X to it, point the latest OS X update at the dmg, install software) and found that DeployStudio is by far the most intuitive deployment method. Start up a Mac holding the 'N' key, select a workflow, and it's all automated from there. Takes about 4 minutes to partition a disk, install Snow Leopard Client onto the first partition and Server on the other.

20372

Personally at work we're using a mix of InstaDMG to make a thin image (just Mac OS X + updates + iLife) which we then deploy using DeployStudio (AWESOME product) and then use munki to manage 3rd party apps.

Theseus: I have to say it's nice to see an example of usage like that; I've always reverted to using it as a replacement for NetRestore and for imaging and installing some bootstrap packages. Boy is it fast.

I'm oldschool (but I also don't have to do re-imaging very often anymore) ... I tend to use .... asr (and multicasting). :D

I'm oldschool (but I also don't have to do re-imaging very often anymore) ... I tend to use .... asr (and multicasting). :D

Come see the light of DeployStudio! (And munki and InstaDMG too!) ;-)

Next time I need to do any imaging I'll check it out. Sadly not much of that stuff going on for me anymore, used to do a fair bit in the education market but the TDSB has changed a lot of policies regarding that sort of stuff so hardly any outside contractors are allowed to do squat anymore :/ Lots of the schools have seriously locked down networks now too (all controlled by the main board techs, not individual schools any longer), so you can't even netboot or use any other sort of LDAP auth except theirs now -- it's all filtered at the switches ... and they also implimented strict restrictions on 'lifting' your network (no more private subnets, firewalls, routers, servers, nadda). Sadly the last of the networks I worked on there were so messed up configuration wise it was painful to even try to do anything with them either ... 5MB/second is not exactly ideal when you're trying to re-image a lab of 26 machines. We ended up doing sneaker-net and several FW drives and had to also retire the OSX server that they used to managed the lab and students logins/homes with :( Innovation at it's finest I tell ya.

+1 for Deploy Studio. I use it daily at work as well to image machines, it also holds our software update server that automatically downloads any new updates, and deploys them over the network. Much faster than downloading through conventional means. Before this, a round of updates that would normally take an hour now takes 8 minutes.