OS Upgrade via Caper Imaging

Can you describe the goal of using Imaging for OS upgrades? What's the expected advantage over a policy?

Sure @JPDyson, in summer's past we have had all of our faculty and students drop laptops off for "summer updates" which just included application updates (pre-casper) and OS updates to Leopard, Lion and then ML. Last year we just had a config in Casper Imaging for ML that we would kick off to get the laptops updated in our staging area. This year we are rolling out Mavericks with Self Service and its working great, but there are some people that don't want to do it themselves. For these users i was just creating a configuration that we can use to update to mavericks rather than having my teammates have to start the machine up, go into Self Service etc. Its quicker to line groups of 20-30 machines up, netboot and kick off a config

Gotcha. I assume you need to retain user data, otherwise this would just be a typical config that replaces whatever is already on the system and we wouldn't be having this discussion.

If you're using Casper 9, I thought you could just drag the "Install OS X Mavericks.app" into Admin and use that for imaging and updates (that is, not compiling it or otherwise modifying it). Have you tried that?

I'd probably just scope a policy to those machines I was upgrading for recurring check-in and just fire them up. Once they check in, the policy gets kicked off. No N key required.

Yes we need to retain user data on these machine in particular @JPDyson. Yes I tried the Install OS X Mavericks.app, compiled and not compiled. I will try again before I leave today

@johnnasset Cant create a policy for them in that fashion. We dont know who is going to walk through the door that wants it done on the spot, no way to predict

Not following you. Takes about 15 seconds to add an individual machine to a policy scope. Once that's done, plug into ethernet, start or wake up and let the policy run.

@johnnasset I suppose we could do that too but I really want this working in Casper Imaging. For large scale groups, it just seems easier that route for my Team members

How are you installing it from Casper Imaging? Are you running "Install All Cached Packages" checkbox from Casper Imaging?

@tron_jones Have a configuration in Casper Admin called "10.9.2 Upgrade". In there I have the Install Mavericks.InstallESD.dmg. In Casper Imaging, select the "10.9.2 Upgrade". I don't see any option for "Install All Cached Packages" "

@johnasset is right. i think thats the best way to achieve what you want.
You could also create a policy with a custom trigger, scope it to all machines. then just boot the machine, log in to your local admin account run the policy. Probably as fast if not faster than netbooting and running casper imaging to be honest as im sure most users will drop their laptops in still logged in and turned on (from my experience in similar situations). a quick su to your local admin account and then another quick sudo jamf policy -trigger upgrade_to_mavericks and bam your done, move on to the next one.

@tommyday I meant through Casper Remote. Set a policy to cache "Install Mavericks.InstallESD.dmg" upgrade downloaded form the App Store. When the staff comes in use "Casper Remote" to "Install All Cached Packages". You could do them as a group or set them off one at a time as they come in.

Ah I see @tron_jones I'll play around with it today. I am going to continue trying to get it to work through Imaging as well.

Just wanted to close the loop up on this as I have our 3 upgrade method working now. In addition to being able to update to 10.9.3 via Self Service and a custom trigger in Terminal, our Team can upgrade to OSX 10.9.3 via Casper Imaging. Overall time to complete the update is definitely a little longer than the other 2 but its nice to have options in the vent that others aren't working for one reason or another. To get this working I added the same custom installer we have cached for Self Service and the custom trigger method but the important setting in Casper Admin for our OSX 10.9.3 Upgrade configuration are to have the Package Options set as:
- Priority: 1
- Requires restart
- Install on boot drive after imaging

Thx for Everyone's input on this.
-Tom

@tommyday, regarding your last post, how did you build your custom installer for automating the 10.9.3 upgrade? I haven't needed to rely heavily on automated, no-interaction upgrading, but I'm positive I'll need something in place when Yosemite is out and working reliably.

@tommyday, Thanks for sharing that. I'm looking forward to trying it out.

@cstout Glad to pay it forward, have gotten so much help from Jamfnation and The Mac Admin Community. I took a bunch of notes through the process so hit me up for future questions on it.