AutoCasperNBI - open beta

@neil.martin83, i did originally have a more "caffeinated" energy saver settings set, but removed them in favour of Apple's NBI defaults.

Let's have a talk about this later.

Thanks for all the help so far.

@bentoms No problem, able to generate the NBIs faster now as am doing it on a server with a nice Pegasus R6. I think I've got time to try one more (same settings but expanded to 20GB) before I leave here - will restart SMB, AFP and NetBoot in the NetSUS.

Fingers crossed and looking forward to meeting you later. :)

@bentoms Last one from me for today - not able to create an expanded NBI, got an error whilst creating dyld caches - here's a snipped from AutoCasperNBI's log:

Wed Sep 3 16:22:53 BST 2014 Trying to expand /Volumes/USS-RAID/Testing/10.9.4AutoCasperNBI.nbi/NetBoot.reduced.dmg to 24.4GB Wed Sep 3 16:22:53 BST 2014 Trying to mount: '/Volumes/USS-RAID/Testing/10.9.4AutoCasperNBI.nbi'/NetBoot.reduced.dmg Wed Sep 3 16:23:31 BST 2014 Mounted to: /Volumes/10.9.4AutoCasperNBI 1 Wed Sep 3 16:23:31 BST 2014 Trying to disable Spotlight Indexing on /Volumes/10.9.4AutoCasperNBI Wed Sep 3 16:23:32 BST 2014 Disabled Spotlight Indexing on /Volumes/10.9.4AutoCasperNBI Wed Sep 3 16:23:32 BST 2014 Creating dyld shared cache files on: /Volumes/10.9.4AutoCasperNBI Wed Sep 3 16:23:45 BST 2014 Error: Creating dyld shared cache files

See you in a while. :)

Just grabbed it and made a 9.4 NBI, worked great! Nice work

Does the OS.dmg to NetBoot.dmg copy take some time? It seems to be hanging on that process for me.

@neil.martin83 have you been able to test with Casper Imaging 9.4? I've a fix in the next commit for the expand issue.

@sgorney the time is dependent on your OS.dmg's size & whether you're using an SSD or spinning disk.

@bentoms Just done some testing this morning.

I actually managed to generate an expanded NBI on a freshly installed Mac (no errors) and tried Casper Imaging 9.4. Left ARD enabled. Still hanging on reboot. :(

@neil.martin83 dammit!

I'll need to somehow spin up a NetSUS to test, but I know this has worked on a NetSUS for others.

I wonder if the same NBI works on a NetBoot server.

@bentoms Yeah it's frustrating. Things are hotting up here, students starting soon etc so my spare time is disappearing. Next time I get a chance I'll disable the NetSUS and try the NBI on our old Mac Mini Server which was used for NetBooting before.

UPDATED

0.15
— Round all the sizing! (yep i missed some, should work on non-english
macs)
— Corrected Admin check behaviour
— Removed a few hundred lines to get over the stack error.
— Changed behaviour so only build process window is shown during build.
— Correct the logging so shouldn’t rollover when writing past 00:00 on
a day, & will start a new line on launch
— Corrected an issue when expanding the NetBoot.dmg

Same link as in OP

@bentoms how are you addressing FV2 encrypted drives on this? is DiskUtil included? NetInstall Creator is cool, but lacks tools like DiskUtil on the menu & dock.

@wmateo Disk Utility is kept even when reducing the image.

I started testing this today with .15 and it worked really well, no observed issues at all. Great work!

Thanks for testing folks!

If you weren't, it'd have been pointless.

@bentoms, I just wanted to say that this tool is pretty awesome. I have been playing with it since .12 and it has worked out quite well. Thanks for your effort so far.

So this works great. Thanks for all the hard work! Would you consider 2 additional options: a) hide dock and b) hide disks ? We work completely unattended, remotely so I actually edit the info.plist on Casper Imaging.app to add <key>LSUIPresentationMode</key> <real>4</real>
forcing full screen at launch. The problem is that the launch daemon takes several seconds and the desktop is still visible inviting tampering. It would be great if you would add these 2 options in advanced mode! Thanks for consideration.

This is working perfectly in our environment, and has resolved some issues we were having with new machines. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

This works perfectly, thanks for sharing. @bentoms will jou be adding a feature to add JDS certificate in the mix so we can get installation files from JDS? (when they get it working).

This is a great tool. We were having problems getting the nbi files created and working. Since we have been using this all our issues have gone away. Thanks for all your hard work on this.

@ega, i'll have a look at the full screen. But tbh, once I get the additionals tab working.. you'll be able to customise it as you wish.

@Bendelaat][/url, thank you! AutoCasperNBI will try & grab the JSS's cert if you enter the JSS url.. it's then set as a trusted root cert on booting the NBI.

@dmueller][/url, @tsharrison][/url & @MikeF, Thank you too! Glad it's helped.

This is honest-to-god one of the best tools I've ever used. Well done, sir.

@bentoms Have you tested this with Yosemite yet?

Anybody else having trouble getting Diskless Mode to work? I needed to make the change suggested here to my rc.netboot file for 10.9.4: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=6443#responseChild33353

/url">@activitymonitor][/url If you look at Options => Advanced there is a checkbox for rc.netboot. it works perfectly the last tim I needed NetBoot to use RAM for the user cache data. see: [http://cl.rummel.co/image/38132p3B0A3D

Also, if you are dealing with an OS X Server that has been upgraded in the past years, review http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4316 to see if your netboot users have the correct FileSharing permissions. This was the root cause to need the rc.netboot checkbox.

- Justin

@justinrummel The modified file gets installed, but it is the 10.6/10.7 era file, which does not work (for me at least) on 10.9. I changed both instances of kextutil to kextload and it worked great.