Migration

If your client machines all have an admin account in common, you can enter that account's credentials into Recon when you do the network scan.

If there are several possible admin accounts, you can enter all of them in the Recon scan.

You only need one valid admin user's credentials per machine to manage it.

If your machines are already managed, you can add a new admin account via Casper remote or a policy.

Miles Leacy
Senior Macintosh Technician
Polo Ralph Lauren
212-318-7603
miles.leacy at poloralphlauren.com

If I understand correctly, your environment requires you to have a local
account for the assigned user, and a local user for freelancers.

Does your organization make IT or the end user responsible for user data?
Do you know who is assigned to each computer?

If the end users are responsible for their own data, and you know the users'
names, then you can image the machine (after giving warning and an
opportunity to back up), and add the necessary user accounts through autorun
data.

Hi-

I've gotten a brandy new Xserve in house (oh she's a beast) and will be planning server migration soon. I've read through the migration bit in the documentation and it seems straightforward enough, though I have two questions:

1. Is there anything "out of the ordinary" that people ran into during a migration that they weren't expecting?
2. I currently employ a two server strategy - one for the JSS, one for the SUS - but the new server is certainly beefy enough to do double duty. Ideally, I'd like to go "big bang" and get it all done in one fell swoop, reassigning everyone's SUS to the new JSS. Advisable? Pros/Cons?

FYI, the JSS uses DNS rather than direct IP so cutover is a breeze.

j
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Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Infrastructure and Operations
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

Though we haven't exactly "migrated" from one server to a different one,
we have backed up all data and the JSS and wiped current servers for a
fresh install. And in our experiences here if you make sure and back
everything up properly and per JAMF's instruction you should have no
issues. What took us the longest was zeroing the drives and
re-installing the OS. The casper piece went quickly and smoothly.
Too smoothly in fact, I spent the next couple days digging for issues
that I never found. Also out of paranoia we took screenshots of all of
our settings and printed a list of all of our policies just in case
something went wrong we'd at least know what was set before hand to redo
it. I'm pretty sure we never looked at them.

Hopefully your experience goes as well. Good luck!

-Dusty-

Dustin Dorey

Technology Support Cluster Specialist

Independant School District 196

Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan Public Schools

dustin.dorey at district196.org

651|423|7971

I just did a full export of my old JSS and then imported on the new
server last summer, pretty painless procedure to be honest.

We migrated from a PowerMac G5 to a Xserve with JAMF 5.1. Ditto to what
Dustin mentioned:
'The casper piece went quickly and smoothly. Too smoothly in fact, I spent
the next couple days digging for issues that I never found. Also out of
paranoia we took screenshots of all of our settings and printed a list of
all of our policies just in case something went wrong we'd at least know
what was set before hand to redo it.'

Jason

Migrated from a G5 xServe (10.4.11) running Casper 5.1 to an Intel xServe
(10.5.x) running Casper 6 last summer - no problems.

Jeff
Glendale, WI

As everyone else has stated already it just works. I migrated from our PowerPC Xserves to our new Intel based Xserves with no issues.

We also have DNS for the SUS so we don't need to change anything but the DNS entry point for a change in SUS servers as well.

My two servers are quite large, but I still separate out services, JSS on one and Netboot, ASUS and VMs on the other. It's also my backup replication point.

Life is good.

Craig E

The only thing of note that I'll add is the only settings that don't come across in a migration (did it last summer) are the local server settings such as Tomcat 64-bit and memory settings, backup jobs, log cleaning, etc. as those are local LaunchD items on the server and not part of the database. Everything else works great. I'm a fan of keeping it seperated. Our JSS is a server, and the SUS is a server with our OD, then our Netboot/fileshare is another server. If you're doing it now, there is no versioning of the JSS to worry about. Last I heard 7 was do out by the end of June though...

John

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John Wetter
Technology Support Administrator
Educational Technology, Media & Information Services
Hopkins Public Schools
952-988-5373