Casper failing to deploy base OS package

Not applicable

We have been finding that Casper is very unreliable with deploying the base OS package - has anyone else seen this happen?

We are in the process of a round of image deployment to our 180 public Macs and we have seen that over 10% of the time Casper will fail to deploy the base OS. We currently have one of our sites where 5 out of their 14 Macs are repeatedly failing in this way...
Our setup is that we netboot the iMacs in order to image them and the sequence that we observe is that Casper says it is doing a block copy of the OS (despite the fact that the 'No Block Copy' file is in Casper.app/contents/resources), this then fails and Casper formats the hard disk and then it should deploy the base OS before doing all the application packages however this does not always happen...

We cannot see a pattern to when this occurs - eg it doesn't seem to be related to server load. Sometimes it happens repeatedly on one Mac and other times when a Mac is reimaged again all is fine without making any other changes.

We know that Casper has been released but it's really not possible for us to move to a new Casper version right in the middle of an imaging round.

Sent to the list for comment from others please and also to jamf support so that we can get help in resolving this problem as soon as possible

many thanks
Clare

--------------------------------------------
Clare Bartlet mailto:cpb10 at cam.ac.uk
Macintosh Support phone: +44 1223 334723
University of Cambridge Computing Service
New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH

1 REPLY 1

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

We saw similar happen when moving from 10.3 to 10.4.
On Wednesday 7/23/08 6:35 AM, "Clare Bartlet" <cpb10 at cam.ac.uk> wrote:

Our "Restore" partitions were 10.3 but when booted to them Casper wouldn't
properly install 10.4 on our "Macintosh HD" partitions. No amount of
retrying would work.

I worked around it temporarily by enabling the root account on the Restore
partition and logging in as root until I could later erase and install a
10.4 Restore image.

Hope this helps!

--

bill

William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
MCS IT
Merrill Communications, LLC
(651) 632-1492