Installer Caching

mpermann
Valued Contributor II

I was wondering if anyone has experienced any issues caching installers with Casper. Our setup is as follows; JSS is 8.73 running on Mac Mini with Mac OS 10.7.5 Server with a Promise Pegasus thunderbolt array acting as the distribution point. The workflow is a 3-policy setup designed to install Mavericks. The first policy is set to cache the installer and update inventory when completed. The second policy does some maintenance tasks, installs a dummy package, updates inventory and reboots the computer. The third policy launches the cached installer and then the system restarts into the installer and completes the installation. The problem is happening at the first step. The installer is not being completely downloaded by Casper, but the policy is saying that it completes successfully. If I check the size of the file in the waiting room after the policy says it's completed successfully the size is too small for it to have downloaded correctly. The file is being downloaded using http. My test is being conducted from my home with a 15 Mbps DSL connection with the computer connected to the network via gigabit ethernet. The energy saver is turned off and there is nothing else being downloaded besides this. When I have forced the policy to use AFP I have been successful in downloading the installer. But using AFP isn't going to be a viable option as staff is often in locations where they won't have access to the Casper share via AFP. They also won't likely have their computer on long enough for it to get cached all at once. So we really need the resumable download capability that http gives you. Does anyone know what mechanism Casper uses to verify the file it has downloaded actually got completely downloaded? Does anyone have any suggestions on what could be causing this and how I can resolve it? I've noticed the same behavior when I tried installing some software to a workstation in one of our branch offices just the other day. The file size was much smaller, around 350 MB. The policy said it completed successfully but the package wasn't properly downloaded, so the policy that runs the cached installer would fail with a very generic message. I've seen this generic message many times before but I have never attributed it to possibly trying to run an installer that hadn't successfully been downloaded. But now I am beginning to wonder.

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