Installs triggered via self service but via a locked thumb drive

[chuck3000]

Scenario: We have a large group of individuals who work out of remote offices. For some installs, we can point them to our internet-facing JSS, however, larger installs (LIke Adobe Creative Suite) would take forever to install over the internet. I'm considering a packaged install on a locked DMG installed onto a thumb drive, and I'd like a Self Service policy that would allow me to ship the user a thumb drive, which they can then connect to the Mac and via the SS policy, run/install the software that's locked on the thumb drive.

Has anybody done anything like this? Any thoughts? Suggestions? Recommendations?

[calum_carey]

i'm assuming that your users are not admins so they can not simply install the package from the USB stick? If you know the name of the volume on the USB stick. I suppose you could just have a policy in self service to run a script something like

#!/bin/sh
usbdisk="/Volumes/USBFlash/"
pkg="adobecs6.pkg"

/usr/sbin/installer -pkg $usbdisk$pkg -target /

Many ways to skin a cat, hope this points you in a direction that works for you

[mm2270]

Yes and No. I have a script floating around somewhere on my hard drive that I put together awhile ago for a very similar situation. We were looking for a way to get a USB drive with a password protected DMG that contained a corporate Win 7 ISO for VMware Fusion on it. The idea was that, for users that needed it, and had a managed Mac and were remote, they could obtain it through a Self Service policy, as long as they had the USB disk. The ISO is pretty large and too big to deploy even within the internal network, so sending it to them any other way wouldn't be possible, and we were looking to make sure the ISO didn't fall into the wrong hands since it had a corporate designed Windows 7 image on it that would bind to AD when set up.

I have to dig up that script. The upshot is we never actually went forward with the plan because in the end, the number of users who needed the ISo turned out to be pretty small and so it wasn't worth the effort to test it and put it into production.
So although we never went forward with it, its definitely possible to do this.

[ScottyBeach]

We have trouble deploying Adobe software that's been packaged with AAMEE. Our work around is to wrap the installer .pkgs in a .dmg which Casper Remote or a policy then copies to a location on the target system. Then we run a command to install the .pkg files locally on the target system.
This could be done using your USB drive as a source location. The command could be issued by Self Service or Casper remote. Name consistency will be important for your USB drive so your script or command will be able to find the install files.
- Scott