Customized USB install OSX

Goober22
New Contributor III

Does anyone have a guide on how to create a customized OS X El Capitan USB installer?

7 REPLIES 7

thoule
Valued Contributor II

What is a customized USB installer? What is the goal here?

Goober22
New Contributor III

I want to create a usb install of El Cap with all of my companies apps and the administrator already set up on it so that all I have to do is run the installer and hand the user the computer.

rderewianko
Valued Contributor II

There are better ways to achieve this than a monolithic image.
If you can, explore DEP. You'd essentially have the user boot the machine and then it would do all the magic on its own.

Goober22
New Contributor III

I have had that talk with my company and that is not the way that they want to go. They have been doing a USB image and that is how they want to keep it for now.

mpermann
Valued Contributor II

@Goober22 are you a Casper customer? If you are, you might want to consider making use of Casper Imaging to fill this need.

chad_fox
Contributor II

Look into AutoDMG.

https://github.com/MagerValp/AutoDMG/releases

As well as create user.pkg

https://github.com/MagerValp/CreateUserPkg

It's possible to have all of this information on one image. The issue is that if one application needs changing you'll need to recreate the whole image. The beauty of caper imaging you can make granular changes on the fly.

thoule
Valued Contributor II
I have had that talk with my company and that is not the way that they want to go. They have been doing a USB image and that is how they want to keep it for now.

Sorry? Management is making process decisions for sysadmins? And basing those decisions on what they have been doing in the past?

DEP is a better way to do things. But if you want a hard drive based solution, use Casper Imaging. You can use a local repository if you want things to be faster.

But if you insist on using a monolithic image, consider accessing JamfNation via the wayback machine (https://archive.org/web/).