Deploying Mountain Lion via Self Service

[xDunes]

I have followed instructions at https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=173 and for the most part had reasonable success. I did encounter the issue where casper management account was deleted during the upgrade process. However, I managed to get around it by setting a launch daemon script that would lay down our policy via a script and re-install quickadd package.

The problems I'm coming across are the launch daemon does not run on first boot after installation, but executes and runs perfectly on a new reboot. I was wondering if there are better solutions to execute our policy script that would hit the computer immediately after the upgrade (it has to run as root).

My second problem and one that is completely out of my scope of knowledge. When using self service on filevault 2 encrypted computer during the initial restart the mac hard crashes after authenticating to filevault 2. However, after powering the computer off and starting it back up it the installation starts up and works properly. Any suggestions how to prevent the crash would be greatly appreciated.

[rtrouton]

xDunes,

For your second problem, what's the crash symptoms you're seeing?

I've got a post showing how it should look when upgrading your FileVault 2-encrypted Mac to 10.8.x. It's not using Self Service (I'm running Install OS X Mountain Lion.app manually) but the overall upgrade process should be the same:

http://derflounder.wordpress.com/2012/07/28/upgrading-your-filevault-2-encrypted-mac-to-mountain-lio...

[xDunes]

1. Logged into my FileVault 2 encrypted Mac
2. Launched Install OS X Mountain Lion.app from /Library/SelfService
3. Selected my boot drive and let it proceed with the upgrade.
4. The upgrade restarted the Mac.
5. The FileVault 2 pre-boot login screen appeared and I logged in.
6. Hard crash, it spit up garbage on the screen and restarted to a screen stating there was a problem (I'm working on re-imaging the computer back to 10.7 and encrypting it right now so I can possible take a picture of the screen when it crashes)
7. Hold power button to turn it off
8. Turn the mac back on
9. The FileVault 2 pre-boot login screen appeared and I logged in. 10.The upgrade automatically proceeded after the FileVault 2 login screen

[rtrouton]

Do you have another machine you can test on? This may be a machine-specific problem.

From what's reported in step 6, it sounds like it kernel panicked.

[xDunes]

yeah, it is a kernel panic. I got an image, however it came out blurry since the message goes by rather quickly http://i.imgur.com/jguk9.jpg

Imaging a different mac to 10.7 to see if i get same results.

[rtrouton]

If I'm reading it right, it's kernel panicking because it can't boot from the BaseSystem.dmg disk image. If that's the case, it sounds like something isn't being written correctly to system memory. Doing the power-off may be clearing the problem data from RAM while leaving the bless settings intact, which is why it works right the next time.

You may want to build a new 10.8 installer using Greg Neagle's createOSXinstallPkg and see if that works better:

http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2012/07/25/son-of-installlion-pkg/

[xDunes]

I'm attempting your recommendation to use createOSXinstallPkg. I'm having trouble figuring out how to launch the pkg from a bash script. "/usr/sbin/installer -pkg /Users/Shared/InstallOSX_10.8.2_12C60.pkg -target /" gives me "The upgrade failed" error message. Is there a way to launch the pkg that would display the GUI from a bash script?

[rtrouton]

Are you using Composer to put the InstallOSX_10.8.2_12C60 installer package inside another disk image, like you were doing with Install OS X Mountain Lion.app?

If you are, don't do that. It's easier to just add the InstallOSX_10.8.2_12C60 installer package to your Casper repository using Casper Admin and select the InstallOSX_10.8.2_12C60 package in the Packages tab of your policy.

Using this approach, you won't need the Run After script. Casper will just install the package like it would any other Apple installer package. At that point, you'll either need to set the policy to reboot the machine automatically or pop up a message asking the user to reboot.