FirstRun does not run, name computer or bind to AD

[btaitt]

I am a new Casper user so forgive me if I mix up some of the vernacular. Here is my setup...

We're trying to setup a workflow that involves imaging MacBooks Airs over Thunderbolt with Target Mode Imaging from a few workstations have have a local copy of the distribution point on them. However, I'm having a terrible time getting it to work.

Initially I had a full workflow setup (Install OS, name, bind, Install Office, install Adobe Reader, etc.) but when it wasn't working, I paired it down to simply installing the OS, installing Office, naming it and binding the computer to AD. I have no issue with manually binding a computer in Directory Utility.

However, over TMI, none of this happens. It doesn't log in automatically, it installs the OS but it doesn't rename it (only keeps the name from my base of PCXXXX) and and it doesn't bind it to AD. In fact I can't even tell that any script runs at all.

If I just try to image one at a time (the non-TMI imaging method) it does appear to auto-login, install some apps but still doesn't bind it to AD.

Any help would be appreciated with this, we're running up against a deadline!

[nextyoyoma]

I am staying keyed into this one, because we are having EXACTLY the same issues with the EXACT same setup. Macbook airs, target mode, sometimes no scripts run, sometimes the machine won't boot at all. Here are some things we've learned:

• You can look in /var/log/jamf.log to get some information. I would also recommend adding >> /var/log/jamf.log to important parts of all your scripts so that they get written there. Using this method, we can see whether or not the scripts ran at all.

• We ended up writing our own AD binding script because we needed to change the pass interval and also needed to insert a restart after all was said and done, and we could not do this with the built-in AD binding method.

• Uncompiled configurations tend to work better. Not perfect, but better.

• Sometimes a particular package will fail to install, which also causes the startup scripts not to run. Sometimes you can isolate down to a single base image + scripts (no packages) and see if it works.

• Most of all, this issue does not happen consistently. Yesterday I did about 6 or 7 computers in a row. The first two were fine, the 2nd would not boot, the 3rd would not run any scripts, the 4th was fine, the internal drive would not even mount on the 5th after restart, and the 6th and 7th were ok. So we had about a 40% success rate. Pretty discouraging when you have over 700 computers to image.

• It does seem that the success rate drops the longer you do the imaging. Restarting the source computer seems to help get a few good ones (sometimes).

So anyway, we are in this together! If we make any headway we will let you know!

[btaitt]

I worked with Grant from JAMF a little bit on Friday and, although it's not a complete fix, the best thing we found was to create a QuickAdd package and it to the image configuration.

Our issue, when looking through logs, was that certain scripts weren't running because they weren't able to contact the JSS during imaging time. Thus, we couldn't bind to AD and it wouldn't run anything else. However, adding that QuickAdd package did the trick! I'm going to do more testing with it but so far so good.