Imaging from a External Drive

[wmateo]

Fairly new to Casper, I want to create an Alternate Bootable and DP option so I can quickly image machines from my External Drive. What is the best practice for doing so? How many Partitions are recommended? Recomended Utilities, etc.

[rderewianko]

It won't work as a DP for self service, but for imaging just fine.

It can be any size partition.. Easiest way is to plug it in, open casper admin drag the disk into the Left where the rest of your deploy points are listed

Then select that replicate there.

You can do a bit of magic to shrink it if you want just the image, although you'd manually have to update that every time you update packages... Its just easier to keep a full deploy.

In Imaging, you just select Local Deploy Point

[Chris_Hafner]

Believe it or not, you can use an external drive as a DP if you REALLY wanted to. A few of us wrote a simple tutorial about a year ago that outlined various methods for doing such. Most focused around installing is OS x server on an external hdd and treating it as a normal dp. This was mostly for the purposes of using an external hdd during a prestage. There are
Other simpler ways as well if that didn't matter (like the method mentioned above).

There are also plenty of other alternatives if the first answer here doesn't exactly fit your needs.

[JimAllsop]

@Chris_Hafner can you give me the link to the tutorial you wrote?

[Chris_Hafner]

... it's funny. I honestly can't seem to locate it. However I wouldn't mind writing it again. Please keep in mind that it was designed to allow a bootable hard drive to run a pre-stage. That was the entire purpose (and a rather specific one at that). There are many many ways to accomplish remote HDD based imaging. Can you give me the driving factors and I should be able to give you a more specific solution.

P.S. Essentially, it involved building the external HDD as a full OS X server with associated, fully qualified DNS address. This way, you can use it as a normal DP which allows you to use it in a pre-stage environment. For almost any other purpose it's actually a huge wast of time and resources.

[mm2270]

@Chris_Hafner][/url - it took a little work, but I think I located the thread you're referring to. It wasn't in a discussion, rather within a Feature Request, which may be why you couldn't locate it before.

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/featureRequest.html?id=1230

[Chris_Hafner]

Nice! That is exactly why I couldn't find it!