Just got OS X licenses for JSS

[lehmanp00]

Hi all,

We have been using Casper for iOS management for years now. Just this month we bought a ton of licenses to begin managing Macs! I'm very excited because Apple's native solutions have become more and more...rudimentary.

Just some background. We are a public K-12 with 7 schools. All schools connected with 1Gig fiber. We have full Aruba wireless network setup. Most sites have 1 AP per classroom. Right now I have 3 2011 Mac-mini servers (on 10.9.5) running Profile Manager, Netboot and Deploy Studio. We use AD and have mobile accounts (no syncing!). We are looking at ~700 Macs (Macbook Pros and iMacs mostly) to start on JSS.

I was hoping to get the communities' recommendations on how I should proceed; best practices kinda thing.

My main questions so far:

Imaging. I think I should try to stick with Netbooting from the Minis's. But I will have to create new NBI's with the Casper image app on it. Does Casper have a utility for this? or is AutoCasperNBI the way to go? Should I try to get some FW/TB drives just in case? AutoDMG for the OS image?

Printing. We use Windows print servers with Papercut. Best way to deliver printers with Casper? (Profile Manger was awful!). We will need all the driver settings as users do use things like hole punching and secure print etc..

Auto-mounting network shares. Looking for the most reliable way to do this.

We will have mostly mobile users, but there are a handful of iMac labs that get heavy use too.

Any other advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
PD

[JPDyson]

Imaging: Look at AutoCasperNBI. I think you'll be pleased.

Printing: Note that with Casper you will need to package and deploy printer drivers as well as a printer configuration. Seems like you could probably just image with your drivers and deploy the print queue itself according to location.

Network Shares: Are these listed in the AD user object? If so, just tick that box when you set up the AD bind in Casper Admin.

[wdpickle]

We are also a K-12 with Aruba wireless, 1GB between 24 buildings. With AD.
For imaging - we netboot when doing mass imaging. For 1 offs we use Casper Imaging with thunderbolt drives (6 ~10 minutes depending on the image.)
For printing - we let the buildings decide how to limit. We have print drivers on the image for the 4 types of printers we support
For network shares - we use login scripts for common and home directories

[davidacland]

Imaging: +1 for AutoCasperNBI. It does what it says on the tin.

Printing: I'm a big fan of pull printing systems wherever possible so you only have to deploy one queue. For sites where we have a mix of different printers we capture them with Casper Admin and deploy with policies. It works ok for us. You can use network segments to scope the right printers to the right locations. We normally deploy all potential printer drivers to the Macs at their initial setup so we don't have to worry about bundling them with the policy later.

Network shares: For these we use a script added to the JSS with variables $4, $5 & $6 to specify server, share name and protocol which can be filled in when creating the policy. For laptop users, I like to create an applescript app that calls the policy so they click it and mount the drive when they like. I tried config profiles mounting network shares (via login items) and it was a bit unreliable.

[JPDyson]

^ Added bonus to applescript for the share mounting is GUI prompts in the cases where you're using cached credentials.

[bentoms]

@lehmanp00 Welcome!!

I have a couple of posts that might help:

• My imaging workflow

• Map AD Drives & Printers

[lehmanp00]

Thank you for all the responses so far!

Bookmarking macmule.com.....

[Look]

You can compile images out of Casper and deploy them using deploy studio with no real issues as well, if Casper Imaging doesn't quite work for you, they are monolithic DMG's that you deploy same as usual and then run the quickadd to join them to Casper for management