managing 1000s of Macbook Airs

[tlarkin]

So,

Our new request for purchasing our next refresh in our 1:1 is going through the board soon. Nothing is set in stone but the budget plan is to cycle in 6,000 new Macbook Airs to replace our 4 year old Macbooks right now. This means that by the time it goes through I will probably be receiving them with 10.7 and having to upgrade all servers to 10.7. 10.7 is going to be it's own set of concerns, but here is my main concern with casper.

6,000 Macbook airs means several hundred USB to Ethernet adapters, all with the same MAC address. I want to manage machines, auto run data, smart groups and so forth by the Airport MAC instead of the Ethernet. That way each computer has a unique ID in the JSS. Has anyone done this before? I am sure I can do an extension for this, but that means I gotta image them all manually once. There are some building specific settings/packages that need to be filtered for auto run data, and of course we want to keep standard naming conventions as well.

Thanks,

Tom

[rob_potvin]

I am not getting 6000 but we have about 800 coming and I am looking for a solution too, will be paying attention to this thread

thanks

[jarednichols]

Tom-

Maybe I'm not following quite right... but why would you have, "several hundred USB to Ethernet adapters, all with the same MAC address?" Wouldn't you just pre-register your USB ethernet dongles as removable devices before imaging anything at all?

j
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[tlarkin]

No I would have several hundred USB to ethernet adapters tied to thousands of machines. I will have to make an exclude list of those MAC addresses in the JSS so it will technically (as I am told by a Jamf employee) that it will grab the Airport MAC address instead and set it to the machine's MAC in the JSS database.

-Tom

[RobertHammen]

In Casper 8.1 (don't know for sure about previous versions):
On Jun 14, 2011, at 10:03 AM, Thomas Larkin wrote:

Settings->Inventory Options->Removable MAC Addresses->Add Address and enter the MAC of each USB Ethernet adapter (the hardware address is in each adapter, so there would be "hundreds" of them, for your 6000 Air's). Would be nice if you could get a list of them from Apple ahead of time, as well as mass import them into Casper - perhaps time to check with support to see if there's a more elegant way to do this - but this will resolve your issue.

Hope you guys get to hold out until the new Airs are supposed to come out later this month - chances are, if you guys jump on those, before 10.7 ships, you won't have to go to 10.7 right away. If it's end of July, may be a different story...

--Robert

[jarednichols]

Yep, Robert's right on with this one. The removable MAC address feature has been in the Suite as long as I can remember (6.0)

j
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[#7]

Am I the only one who finds it annoying that Casper won't let you identify a machine by anything other than a MAC address? I think my suggestion of using a unique identifier created at imaging/recon time would be very useful...

[Matt]

Almost as annoying as the JSS not controlling the computer name. It bugs the hell out of me that users can change computers and the JSS won't do anything about it.

--
Matt Lee
FNG Sr. IT Analyst / Desktop Architecture Team / Apple S.M.E / JAMF Casper Administrator
Fox Networks Group
matthew.lee at fox.com<mailto:matthew.lee at fox.com>

Need Help? Call the Help Desk at (310) 969-HELP (ext 24357) or online at http://itteam<http://itteam/>
Help Desk Hours: Mon-Fri, 6AM-6PM PST

[jarednichols]

You're not the only one. In fact, Microsoft is right with you as a UUID stored in the registry is what they use for SCCM to identify machines. This prevents machines from going rogue when they get main logic boards replaced.

j
---
Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

[nessts]

there is an MCX setting to keep the hostname set properly.
--
Todd Ness
Technology Consultant/Non-Windows Services
Americas Regional Delivery Engineering
HP Enterprise Services

[#11]

It makes it very difficult to set up a useful test lab with one Mac of each type we use. If they could have multiple partitions with different UUIDs, they would have no conflicts. Or multiple hard drives, in the case of the Mac Pro.

Incidentally, this explains why the JSS got confused when I deployed an image to two MBAs using the same Ethernet dongle. I will have to mention this problem to the higher-ups; they need to know this before they purchase any more MBAs.

[jhalvorson]

Will you use each unique USB Ethernet adapter when imagining or reconing
each MacBook Air?

We have a few USB Ethernet adapters owned by the install techs. Those few
are registered in our JSS as 'Removable MAC Address'. After the MBA is
imaged using the tech's USB Ethernet , the Ethernet Adapter that came with
the MBA is boxed up and sent with the MBA. I guess the downside is we may
never know the MAC of the user's Ethernet Adapter.

If you can control which USB Ethernet adapters are used for imaging or
during the first recon, you should be OK.

Jason

[tlarkin]

I only have 1 Macbook Air in my possession and 1 Ethernet dongle and the budget order hasn't been approved yet, it goes in front of the board tonight. Though I am pretty sure it will go through. So I have never dealt with removable MACs. OS X already generates a UUID for the Mac itself, but I am not sure how unique it is among thousands of machines. So I am testing the waters on mass deploying Macbook Airs. For one I think I will like these better. No moving parts, no optical drives, which hopefully means less end user support...????

bash-3.2# system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | awk '/UUID/ { print $3 }' 00000000-0000-1000-8000-0019E3450AA0

This of course would probably change if a major hardware component were to be swapped out. Serial numbers are also constant and have to be unique and there are tools to "re-flash" your firmware on a new main logic board to put the serial number in System Profiler. I know I got duplicate machines in the JSS because of Main Logic Boards being swapped out and it making a second entry for it.

-Tom

[#14]

I was not aware of this UUID; I'm not sure how it's generated, but it might work for this purpose. I am strongly of the opinion that anything specific to hardware is not appropriate for the identifier. Hardware can change, without changing the underlying installation, and (more importantly), there are non-trivial cases where multiple instances of the same software needs to use the same hardware. I would never be able to get the higher-ups to approve buying four Mac Pros, just to be able to test the different variants of CS5.5. Casper needs to be able to handle this in some form.

Generating a UUID has the added benefit of working on Windows, and probably iOS too.

[John_Wetter]

I guess I'm not following this thread on how Casper doesn't make a test lab possible...

If you have a lab with computers with multiple partitions, but that isn't how you're deploying them, there are several tests here that wouldn't be valid tests. We've seen this a couple years ago as there are some AppleScript items that act differently with multiple partitions, especially in Tiger and Leopard.

What are the multiple partitions doing? Different software loads? When we're testing, it's either just against the base, individual apps, or complete loads... What others am I missing?

The removable MAC's are the best way to handle Airs as Robert mentioned. Once registered, most of the rest of the discussion should be moot. The only issue is throughput as the USB will be a bottleneck. Maybe we'll see a Thunderbolt to ethernet adapter in the future? I don't know if Thunderbolt has the necessary logic or not. Can Thunderbolt do target boots like Firewire can? I think firewire is on its last legs in Apple's line-up.

To the original topic of imaging the Airs, it looks like once the USB dongles are registered, it's just a standard imaging workflow that'd be in order.

John

--
John Wetter
Technical Services Manager
Educational Technology, Media & Information Services
Hopkins Public Schools

[John_Wetter]

Care to share it? I haven't seen that one.

--
John Wetter
Technical Services Manager
Educational Technology, Media & Information Services
Hopkins Public Schools

[mcrispin]

Yes, Thunderbolt acts identically to FireWire. In fact there is a little floating Thunderbolt symbol next to the FireWire symbol, and depending on which one you are using, the other symbol will disappear. Kinda gives a new meaning to holding down the "T" key :)

That was probably just a happy accident.. Thunderbolt Mode anyone? Notice how there is also now a stand alone monitor capability in new iMac's as well (so they can be used by other things).

I wouldn't make assumptions about FIreWire however - it's still and will continue to be a dominant standard in Video for some time. I just wouldn't count on FW1600 FW3200, those - I think it is fair to say - are dead (if they ever were that much alive to begin with)

And yes -- you should assume that the MacBook Air's will have Thunderbolt (to be announced with some peripherals, hopefully this week) - -and that should save a lot of headaches as far as managing MacBook Air's go. It's the Mac Mini Thunderbolt that should be much more interesting for us Enterprise folks. Thunderbolt switching anyone with terminal services?

If you might recall - the issue that Apple never implemented native external SATA was a) couldn't get it to Target Disk Mode in any stable kind of fashion, and b) It didn't deliver power over the same wire. There are other reasons of course (limited trajectory of future bandwidth), but this tells the story of why Thunderbolt is getting the big push.

Michael Crispin
Duke University

[rob_potvin]

A fruit (not an orange) just told us that on Thursday they will announce the new macbook airs and they come with 10.7 and cannot be downgraded to 10.6 (I asked the fruit). That is what we have been told because next month about 800 come! I didn't want 10.7 on our machines. Wanted to at least wait a year or 6 months before upgrading.

Oh well guess I have to sign up for the mac developer so I can get 10.7

Cheers