best practices for "unattended" OS upgrades via... netinstall & casper

[#1]

I'm trying to leverage Casper to automate upgrading our Leopard Macs
to Snow Leopard over the wire.

My goal is to get a 10.6.8 NetInstall image hosted on our xServe which I can
then set to autorun as a Casper policy to targeted assets. I want this as
close to zero-touch as possible. If you have a different method or practice,
I'd love to hear it. Seriously.

Because I'm running into some problems

I easily created a working 10.6.0 netinstall image.

Using a Neagle tip posted on Bukowinski's website, I included the
OSUpgrade.pkg file into my netinstall image as outlined here:
http://yourmacguy.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/leopard-to-snow-leopard-upgrade-netinstall/

I also choose to include the 10.6.8 combo updater. To be safe, I
altered the file located at /Volumes/Mac OS X Install
DVD/etc/rc.cdrom to provide for a 2GB run file since the 10.6.8 combo
updater is over 1GB in size.

But my resulting NetInstaller only partially works: it only upgrades a
Leopard client in place to 10.6.0, not to 10.6.8.

My questions are, then:

1) how would one properly include the combo updater into a netinstall
build so that it gets included in any update? my automator build
includes is but... the resulting image doesn't lay it down.

2) having worked with answer files in InstDMG, can i use a pre-set
answer file to eliminate the wizard that launches on my netinstaller?
if so, is there a default location for that file?

cheers, ya'll.

[stevewood]

If your NetInstall image is successfully upgrading your machines to 10.6,
then all that really needs to happen is for the combo updater to be applied
to the systems. You can do this with a policy in Casper and a line in your
post install script to call that policy. I'm assuming you have a post
install script, of course. I use a script that Tom Larkin provided me a few
years ago that I've modified, and it sets things like time zone, time
server, an extra hidden user, and other things.

I would create a policy in Casper set to "other" and give it a trigger of
perhaps "1068update". Then in my post image script, at the end of the
script, I would call that policy:

jamf policy -trigger 1068update

That would run the combo updater and should restart the system after it's
done. You could scope a smart group to catch this system on restart and
then run a second policy to run all software updates perhaps.

If that's not clear, or you need more help, just shout and I'm sure someone
on the list can assist!

Steve Wood
Director of IT
swood at integer.com

The Integer Group | 1999 Bryan St. | Ste. 1700 | Dallas, TX 75201
T 214.758.6813 | F 214.758.6901 | C 940.312.2475