Firewire Drive - JSS Replication

[#1]

Good Folks,

A question for you all out there in the Casper land.
We are preparing and expansion that involves remote offices in other countries and have identified JSS Replication on an external drive as a solution to get us off the ground. Down the road we will get serious and setup JSS servers there, but as the first few folks roll in we just need a quick dirty solution for imaging Macs.

The current goal is to send a replicated drive to the offices with imaging instructions for techs there.
The ability to replicate on to an external drive and then image a computer off the network is Awesome!

But,

Does anyone have any experience with modifying the access via the Imaging Application?
As in, we don't need to include every single installer and configuration that we have. It would be great if we can reduce it down to just one config or maybe even just one compiled image.

The fall back plan is to explore just sending one image and applying it with SuperDuper or even CCC, but it would be great if we could use the Imaging app to get these techs started on using our JAMF solutions.

Nick Caro Desktop Support Technician
Phone 212-839-1587 Fax 212-946-4010 nick.caro at rga.com<mailto:nick.caro at rga.com>

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[tlarkin]

Nick

Sorry if I am a bit confused, but you want to use Casper to do imaging
over firewire in remote locations? Is that what you are trying to do?

[#3]

yes.

Take a look at p.108 in the Casper Suite PDF.

The scenario I'm seeking is to limit the amount of data that is replicated. It would be nice to send out a drive that only has one configuration and not the entire contents of our JSS.

Nick Caro Desktop Support Technician
Phone 212-839-1587 Fax 212-946-4010

[donmontalvo]

I would caution against using CCC for deployment. Mike Bombich's own words:
Nick Caro Nick.Caro at rga.com wrote:

The use of CCC for mass deployment is no longer supported. Please look to NetRestore for your deployment needs. If there is a feature in CCC that is not present in NetRestore, please post your concerns to the NetRestore troubleshooting forum.

I'm a bit surprised at the number of references to using CCC for creating images for mass deployment. I'd like to re- emphasize that I really do not think you should do this. NetRestore Helper offers this functionality using a much more robust method (and the same as Disk Utility, which has support implications). If there's some particular reason you're still using CCC, please let me know so I can enhance NRH.

Steve Wood (Dallas) invited me to his shop to see how he uses Casper. One of the things he showed me was how you can run Casper Imaging right off the Firewire drive. I asked, but forgot the response, is it possible for the Casper Imaging tool on the Firewire drive to connect to JSS and run using the distribution point replicated on the Firewire drive. This way you can manage the process.

If it were me, I would get a dual drive enclosure, and use SoftRAID4 to set up RAID1 for redundancy. I would replicate the entire distribution point (unless there's a real need to shave down the contents). Further, I would come up with a way to keep the Firewire drive in sync with the master distribution point. Maybe boot into the drive and rsync it somehow?

Don

[talkingmoose]

We haven't used external drives to image Macs in quite a while, so the
On 4/20/10 8:30 AM, "Nick Caro" <Nick.Caro at rga.com> wrote:
information I'm telling you may be old.

My understanding is that preparing the external drive is an all-or-nothing
replica of your master repository. Of course, you can do this manually by
placing the necessary packages, compiled configurations and scripts yourself
on the drive, omitting everything you don't need. Or you can replicate the
drive and simply delete unnecessary items.

File level replication, primarily between distribution points, is a request
we've submitted before. We simply don't need to replicate every package and
script on every distribution point. I'm sure if JAMF ever addresses this
then your issue would be addressed as well.

--

William Smith
Technical Analyst
Merrill Communications LLC
(651) 632-1492

[tlarkin]

Here is what my co-worker did, since some buildings do not have netboot servers... Hook up a FW drive to a Mac and launch Casper Admin and sync the drive. Then delete anything he didn't want off of there. The FW drive also had an OS loaded on it. Then boot from the FW drive, launch casper imaging, and image over FW. It needs to do a full sync if it can't hit the JSS to get info off the database. That is my understanding....

I can ask him for more details, as he is the one that does local imaging, I do everything via netboot.

-Tom