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Hi-

We have been using casper for a while and want to make it better at our location.

One of the ideas we are tossing around is a 3 partition scenario.

We are thinking this out for our future builds with casper. Most of our facility is 10.5.8. We were 10.4 and migrated to 10.5.
We did this by loading a drive with 10.5 and all the packages, installed that as a second drive and moved over all the user data.
Not how we want to handle upgrading to 10.6 or beyond.

10.5 offers on the fly partitioning, making the 3 partitions a reality. Our thought is to have a "live" partition with 10.5 and all the apps.
Second partition with the user data and the 3rd a restore partition.

With this model we are thinking we can use the restore partition as a upgrade partition. When we are ready for 10.6, install to the restore partition, link the user files,
and reboot. Some of these computers we have to support are not local.

Does this sound like a good or bad idea?

Thanks

Dan

Hi Dan. We use a three partition scheme that's kind of similar: a System HD
(bootable with local accounts) a Maintenance HD (bootable and limited to
admins) and a Storage HD (an empty partition that we encourage our end users
to store their local data). We don't use a Restore partition at our HQ
building since we can boot off the Maintenance HD and reimage from JSS. Our
store locations do use a secondary Restore partition with a disk image since
they can't see our JSS server.

Something I'm interested in pursuing is using the Storage HD to host the
User account folders, so that the user's home folder is on the Storage HD. I
know that during the imaging process you can create an account and path the
home folder to a different partition. But I'd like to be able to do that
with Active Directory (network) accounts, so that when a new associate signs
in their home directory is pushed down to the Storage HD.

I know symbolic link can host the /Users folder, but that seems to cause a
bit of a performance degradation when logged in, particularly with network
accounts. I just starting to do some homework on utilizing fstab to
accomplish the same thing.

Robb Gibson
System Engineer - eMMS, Publishing Systems
(630) 864-5242

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