imaging and network adapters

A lot of people here believe strongly in the InstaDMG method where your base image is a clean never booted machine (and this issue wouldn't happen).

I prefer the casper admin capture OS image approach and recently ran into this myself.

Before cutting my OS image, one of the very last things I do is run the following which seemed to resolve the issue for me. I tested so far on Macbook, Airs, and iMacs (this is a Lion base image).

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences NetworkServices

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences CurrentSet

sudo defaults delete /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences Sets

sudo chmod 644 /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist

sudo rm /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist

Thanks Sally - this seems to work well on a new Retina MBP.

FYI, here's a version of Sally's script that I'm now running as part of my imaging workflow. I have it set to "After" in Casper Admin.

#!/bin/sh

echo "Deleting Network Interfaces on $1"
defaults delete "$1"/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences NetworkServices
defaults delete "$1"/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences CurrentSet
defaults delete "$1"/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences Sets
rm "$1"/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/NetworkInterfaces.plist

FYI: for those following JAMF article #313, "Creating a Minimal Base OS Image" https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=313, Composer.app excludes /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist by default (see Composer.app Preferences). That's accurate as of version 8.64, which we're currently using.

Just saying, because the interesting steps above are somewhat moot here.

I started to use the script here posted by cbrewer to have one image for all my machines and fix the 10.8 computer name issue. It works great, but i am now seeing an issue where when i go to recon a machine the computer name does not show up. Its set correctly on the machine and in the JSS but does not show up in Recon app.

Any ideas?

FWIW - I'm not longer using that script. I'm now just deleting the entire preferences.plist and NetworkInterfaces.plist files out of the image after I capture it with Composer. Removing the entire preferences file seems to address the missing name issue.

First thanx for the solution.
Now I am doing Mavericks 10.9 and there is no "NetworkServices" anymore...
Should we instead delete in addition:

airport.preferences.plist
CaptiveNetworkSupport

What do you think?

@michaelhusar - did that work in Mavericks?

Hi pblake

I still delete the stuff, I deleted in 10.8.5 for Mavericks - so far so good. The issue was (back then) that my machines "lost" their name when re-imaged.
So far all names are holding - imaging working great (pimped) netboot 10.9.2 and deploying 10.9.2