HS Mac lab: what's the lastest best way to do a mass system install?

[john-o]

Paul Filmer, are you out there? ;-}

It's that time of year again, and about two dozen eMacs need a clean up-to-date system installed in a local high school Mac lab. I had a discussion about this last year (over on the *cough* *cough* forum), and I think Paul was involved. We discussed CCloner and the associated stuff that comes from the same developer that was supposed to make doing this a breeze. Well, IIRC, it didn't prove to be all that smooth and simple. All I remember for sure is that each 'clone' over the network took freakin forever!

Well, since last year, they've bought ARD 2 and I'm wondering if anyone here can tell me if that's the best way to do it. I just read the manual, and it looks very straightforward, except for some stuff about having to make sure everything is labelled "Macintosh HD", for some reason. That can't be really necessary, can it?

Any and all advice would be very welcome!

TIA,
John-o

[PeterB]

IIRC, the cleverest/most elegant way to do it was to Firewire daisy-chain the Macs, then install on the first Mac and clone to all the others...

[microchip13]

Firewire is the way we did it at my school, Just having a single external drive with a boot partition and an image, boot up to the boot partition and image the hard drive off the image on the external as well.

Pretty effective, and inbetween imagine you can sit back, relax and drink some coffee(Or tea if you prefer).

You could do network imaging, but I believe the eMacs only have 10/100 so you'd experience similar slowness as 100 is somewhat slow, firewire is 400.

[john-o]

Yeah, well I remember we did it via FW one year, but it required a fair bit of babysitting. I wish there were a way to do all the machines at once via FW! It sounds like that's what you're recommending, PeterB, but I can't imagine how that could work. Plus, I don't have that many FW cables! I have a half dozen probably, but they get expensive too…

Hmmmm…

[microchip13]

True....


Hmm...

Maybe, maybe(I've never done it, but it's an idea) if you have a powerful enough server you can netboot them all(I think this does require a server edition of the OS, but as with everything I'm sure there is a way around it) and then use disk utility to copy over a set image.

[PeterB]

john-o, look here:

http://forums.dealmac.com/read.php?4,255...16#2556516

(The search function over there is not working properly, I'm reasonably sure I remember a discussion either here or over there about daisy-chaining them and doing them all at once, or in a "domino" fashion, where easy one is doing it on the next... my remembrance, which may be faulty, is that the person here to ask is Paul F.)

[mattkime]

firewire with a boot partition is going to be the fastest way to image a single machine. target disk mode is sloooow - but maybe you don't mind that if you're using finished machines to clone the next batch.

i think netboot would be the most convenient way.

[TheTominator]

If it is such a hassle to manage system re-installs, it sounds like shifting to using NetBoot is the way to go. It is my understanding that this would require one Mac OS X Server. All the other Macs would boot up from a Mac OS X netboot image served off of the OS X Server. You would never need to re-install Mac OS X again. Any time one of your Macs is rebooted, it would automatically boot to the image you have on the server. Booting would be a bit slower but of course you rarely need to reboot these anyway, right?

Note that I've only netbooted home-built Linux machines. I'm just throwing this out there as food for thought.

[Baby Tats]

[quote john-o]Plus, I don't have that many FW cables! I have a half dozen probably, but they get expensive too…

Hmmmm…
Firewire cables are cheap compared to what your time costs. 10 of these http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=103&cp_id=10301&cs_id=1030103&p_id=35&seq=1&format=2&style= will cost you less than $25 shipped.


BT

[Markintosh]

Ditto the firewire and SuperDuper combo. I'm currently banishing all Macs without firewire from my sites for this reason (ie less than iMac 350).