AutoCasperNBI - open beta

@bentoms

Apologies if this has already been asked, but is it possible to feed settings to AutoCasperNBI directly versus letting it reach out and pull them dynamically from the JSS? We have a JSS that is on a restricted access network, so this would be very helpful for us.

Cheers,

--Andy

@anyinindy

If there are any extra settings you need to make you could package those settings files up and add them as a install package.

@andyinindy, I'm not sure what you mean. Have you given AutoCasperNBI a go & found something amiss?

@bentoms, unfortunately we do not have an easy way to run autocaspernbi on the same network as our JSS (it is on a highly restricted network), so the tool cannot contact the JSS as usual. That is why I am interested in the possibility of feeding these settings to the app manually via a config file, versus letting the app reach out and grab them from the JSS.

Does this help to clarify?

Thank you @bentoms for an amazing product. This is going to save me hours of pain in the future. I have a quick question and I apologize if I missed something obvious here. I see under the "Always Set" section all the options you are enabling. Is there a way to allow us to modify these checkboxes? I find the LaunchAgent in 10.10.1 takes awhile to load Casper Imaging. I'm not sure if this is a behavior of launchd being slow in Yosemite, or if we need to add the LimitLoadToSessionType to Aqua in the LaunchAgent plist?
I ended up using the com.apple.loginitems.plist for root and adding Casper Imaging to that which loads Casper Imaging quick. The only reason I'm doing this is because I work for a K-12 and I can already see Campus Techs thinking its not launching Casper Imaging and launching it themselves then have two copies of Casper Imaging running. Just want to avoid future phone calls. Thanks!

@andyinindy, sorry for not replying sooner, but yea AutoCasperNBI will work with the JSS url specified but not available.

Unless i've missed what you mean & you're talking about the NBI?

@ssrussell, cool.. that should work pre-10.10.x too.. Can you log an enhancement: https://github.com/macmule/AutoCasperNbi/issues with an example of the com.apple.loginitems.plist?

Sounds like something I should add.

@HempfieldTech, just to close off your issue with 10.7 NBI's.. if i remember correctly.. a new 10.7 OS.dmg created via AutoDMG worked?

@bentoms I was wondering if there is a way you can add in the Options menu maybe under advance to add start up scripts. For example when I make netboots to deal with the encryption I add a script to the netboot image that will run with a login hook. The scripts checks the drive and removes Apple CoreStorage. The command I use to make this login hook is: sudo defaults write com.apple.loginwindow LoginHook /path/to/script. If you would like to see the script that I use let me know.

@sgoetz You could create a launchagent to do this, then create a package to install your launch agent and script. Then add this package to the additional packages section in AutoCasper. I do a similar thing.

Running the NetSUS appliance provided from JAMF as the netboot server (centos), I can't netboot images (its autoDMG'd from 10.10.1 installer) that were build with the rc.netboot advanced option. That was for putting shadow into ram right?

I can boot the netboot image if it was build without the rc.netboot option, but it does utilize shadow space via AFP on my netboot server. I'd like to avoid that if I could. Is this possible?

Does the rc.netboot option not support 10.10.1?

I've created a 10.10.1 image from AutoDMG, fed that into AutoCasper, enabled rc.netboot option. No problems booting. What errors are you seeing on the client if you put it in verbose mode? How much RAM does your client have? The rc.netboot file creates a 2Gb RAM disk, you'll need another 2gb for yoyo to play ball.

@sgoetz, maybe this will help: https://macmule.com/2015/01/02/casper-imaging-corestorage-volumes/

@gtucker, i've booted into 10.10.x NBI's with & without the rc.netboot change. Difference is they have been hosted on OSX server.. So not if or how the NetSUS changes things,

First, taking a fresh OS.dmg file (actually got it from a JAMF CCA course), I get the error of Could Not Find OS Version. If I mount the DMG before opening AutoCasperNBI, it gives me the green light, however it sees the version of my OS, not the mounted DMG. I then get green lights on everything and go to build to my desktop and it fails everytime with Error: Cannot copy contents of to '/Volumes/AutoCasperNBI'. I see it make the .nbi folder, and mount the NetBoot.dmg within it, but then cannot copy anything.

I've even tried having the DMG mounted when opening CasperNBI to get the version check green light, and then unmounting before hitting build to see if it needs to mount it fresh for the copy.

@rhs615, weird.

You shouldn't mount the OS.dmg, instead let AutoCasperNBI do it.

Thank you @bentoms, but that is what I am trying. I have the OS.dmg on my desktop, I open AutoCasperNBI, choose that DMG from the desktop and get the spinning wheel and the message Could not Find OS

@rhs615, please open an issue at: https://github.com/macmule/AutoCasperNBI/issues & post your log.

@bentoms - thank you for any help!

I'm having an issue that I can't seem to resolve. The NetBoot image that I created with this app doesn't appear to be allowing a block copy of my base OS (create with AutoDMG.) The same base OS will block copy with my older hand-built NetBoot image. I'm going to toggle some of the various options (modified rc.netboot, etc.) but if anyone might know the specific setting I might've selected to cause this, that'd be great.

I have been seeing the same issue recently. Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed.

I had the same issue, where Casper Imaging would show Macintosh HD at /var/netboot/, and not at /Volumes. I checked the modify rc.netboot button and haven't had a problem since.

I have that option selected and am experiencing the issue. I just toggled it and am building a test image right now.

@bmarks & @jyoung, does both the AutoCasperNBI & the older NBI's have the same version of Casper Imaging? Are the Macs your trying to images running yosemite? What version of Casper Imaging?

Yes, there are some variables between my older image that works and my new image:

Old image = 10.9.2 + Casper Imaging 9.32
Attempted new image: 10.10.2 + Casper Imaging 9.63

Additionally, I toggled very one of the optional settings and created a bunch of one-off NetBoot images, but they all exhibit the same behavior.