Distribution Points

[swright_mm]

Our company has 5 distribution points. SF, Chicago, London, NY, and Boston. All the distribution points have the proper credentials. They mount just find when replicating and everything replicates over to all distribution points from the mastershare. But when our team in one of those locations go to image a computer using Casper Imaging, it skips over the OS and installs everything else onto the drive. But when we use the master point to image everything works fine. What is causing this issue? I hear this is a common problem. We use netboot to boot up the system and image from there. All files replicated properly, none are missing. But it's not imaging the system.

[bpriscott]

Is your replication being done manually? or automatically?

Do you have network segments specific for those sites? Inside network segments you can specify which distro that network will pull from... and which site is the failover and so on... We have 19 including the master and it works when we replicate, and would do this before you scope anything...

[calumhunter]

JDS?

[swright_mm]

@bpriscott Ahhh I didn't set up Network Segments for the distribution points. I'll set that up and see if it fixes the problem.

@calumhunter No I am using the file distribution shares.

[swright_mm]

Adding the network settings didn't work. After the system was done imaging I got the "?" on boot.

[merps]

@swright.mm Depending on specifics, the ? on boot might not be a terrible thing. This happens to a lot of our machines if we are moving from our old method of fat images to the new method using AutoDMG. The fix is as easy as selecting the proper startup disk.

Not sure if this is your issue also, but all we have to do is hold option at boot & select the proper disk (labeled EFI boot until the Casper Imaging process finishes). Holding ctrl while selecting this disk will change the startup disk permanently.

[davidacland]

Bit of a long shot but I've seen this in a few cases and its been an issue with the netboot image. Is it a different netboot server and image per site?

[alexjdale]

We have ~40 global sites and have not seen this issue, but maybe there is a problem with the replicated image DMG (permissions or corruption)? Does Casper Imaging show the DMG being block copied to the drive?

[swright_mm]

@davidacland there is only 1 image and netboot server per site.

@merps @alexjdale I don't think it's a boot up problem, It has something to do with the block copy because it speeds straight threw that part of the process. It still works when imaging from the master distro point but when i try to do it from the other sites distros it doesnt work. That's after replicating all the distros. The imaging process starts, it erases the drive then starts block copying but then goes threw that in only 1-2 seconds. and then trys to install everything else.

[mpermann]

@swright.mm if you launch Disk Utility and use it to repartition/erase the disk then try the imaging process do you get different results?

Edit: If you can't re-partition/erase the drive in Disk Utility then it's likely that your Netboot shadow files are not being saved on the Netboot server or in a RAM disk. I'm pretty sure Casper Imaging needs to unmount the internal drive in order to block copy the OS to the internal drive.

[bkramps]

@swright.mm , we had a similar issue and it turned out to be a setting in OSX Server Netinstall, not the actual distribution point.

Whenever we booted to the misconfigured Netboot Server we got the same quick block copy failure like you. To fix we had to change the Edit Storage Locations to "Images and Client Data", which created /Library/NetBoot/NetBootClients0 folder. You should check your netboot servers, assuming they are OSX and not Linux, to make sure that folder exists.

Can you confirm how the process fails, though? Is this a workflow instance:
Boston Office Mac --> Boots to Boston's Netboot --> Images from Boston's DP = Failure
Boston Office Mac --> Boots to Boston's Netboot --> Images from Main DP = Success

If that is the case, then the Netboot may not be the issue. You can put Casper Imaging into Debug mode to get more info. On a netbooted client, quit out of Imaging, run sudo touch /Applications/Casper Imaging.app/Contents/Support/debug (the location of Casper Imaging may differ), reopen Imaging, remove the reboot and try again. This will generate a log file in ~/Library/Logs/. This will be something along the lines of ~/Library/Logs/CasperImagingDebug.log

[jkuo]

What version of Casper Suite are you running? We had this exact same issue when we were on 9.63, but it was resolved when we went up to 9.72.

The only way we were able to get around it at the time was to deploy an image from a computer using target disk mode.