Automate Casper Imaging

[esl-francois]

Hi There,

Looks pretty basic but…

I will stop re-imaging computers from scratch. I think Apple has made a decent job with the Restore partition, and I prefer to keep the installed system on new macs.

So I have to choices : netboot and install software without re-imaging/erasing drive (easy), and launching casper imaging from the booted system.

Now I would love to ask my freelance to just do the initial setup, then launch casper imaging from a USB thumb drive. Installation would be automated by PreStage. So I need to figure out a way to embed a plist with server IP, port, username and password. Is it possible ? How can I do this ?

Is there a better way to do that ?

Thanks in advance,

Francois

[Chris_Hafner]

You're either looking for Recon, or a USB boot drive with Casper Imaging... I think (questions below). You could use Recon on a USB drive. You could also make a "quickAdd" package with recon if you knew the credentials of the various units. Separately you can run Casper Imaging from ANY boot drive, be it USB, FW or TB and that will do it all for you if setup properly. Heck, you could also do this on live systems by making various automated or self service policies if you didn't want to run through any sort of imaging process. Either way JAMF has a lot of software that will let you do this in any of the ways you mentioned above. The process that you're talking about is commonly referred to thin-imaging (there is a lot of info about it here on the site).

What are the specifics that your trying to accomplish? Thin-Imaging 100 brand new computers fresh from Apple? Deploying software and settings to 100 computers already deployed and being used? A dozen in a lab?

[stevewood]

If I understand correctly, you have a freelance person who unpacks the machines from Apple, powers them on, and goes through the initial setup of the machine, entering user info, etc. Correct?

You can skip that all together with Casper Imaging and Pre-Stage imaging, if that is all your freelance person is doing. Setup a Pre-Stage in the JSS, use the serial # or MAC address of the machines in the pre-stage, and then either boot from a NetBoot that has Casper Imaging set to run on startup, or boot from an external USB with Casper Imaging.

If your freelance person is doing other configuration things (like setting network search order, date and time, or other stuff), you simply need to create a post imaging script that "tweaks" those settings for you, and set that to run after imaging. That script will run after the restart when imaging is done.

Make sense?