Mass Mavericks upgrade - risk mitigation

[dpertschi]

I'm in the planning phase for using Casper to upgrade 800 machines to 10.9.x. Half of these are 10.6.8.

Those of you that have gone down this rabbit hole already, can you comment on any unexpected results on the older machines and or other pre-planning concerns?

I'm mostly unsure with print drivers and printer configs. Will I potentially have to install new drivers and configs for all MFP's we use, or will I luck out and they'll just continue to work?

Application incompatibility from 10.6.8, can't wait for the users to tell me what doesn't work after upgrade. The only option that comes to mind is to pull application usage logs and manually scan through for things that are being used frequently and research the version/OS compatibility.

No FileVault here to worry about, and yes we will pilot/test with maybe 50 machines in a variety of locations.

[daz_wallace]

Hi dpertschi,

Taking the use of Casper to one side, I typically, at best, have had to install updated drivers in each Os upgrade and, at worst, I've had to re-add them all so I'd suggest planning for this eventuality.

To be honest, in a lot of these things your milage may vary, so all I'd suggest is to test out what your planning on doing on as many different Macs, with as many different combinations of usage and software as logically possible to check that your system works as intended.

Hope that helps,

Darren

[ncottle]

We have been bumping machines up from 10.5-10.6 to 10.9 for a few months now. Like daz_dar said there will be a few printing issues though in the ones I have done personally I have had the printers work more than half the time. Coming from 10.5 we transitioned through 10.7 and then on to 10.9. About a month ago we set up a system to go straight from 10.5 to 10.9 with the same positive results. User data has not been impacted and we haven't lost a whole lot of programs. Mainly ones that were installed by the user or site vs. ones that we approved. Even those have been pretty easy to deal with.

By going to 10.9 you have access to the newer iWork and iLife apps. I have been looking for the link for how we fixed it today and can't find it. Basically since those updates come through the App Store now your users will get prompted to update those in 10.9. If they each have their own issued Apple ID from you that's OK but in most instances I think that's not the case (could be wrong though). We push out a dummy receipt for those programs so that it doesn't ask for the updates anymore. You do have to keep track of updates and get them from a test box, package them and push them out to keep everything up to date but so far it has been working well for us.

Hope this helps you out a little.

[scottb]

@nick.cottle][/url, @dpertschi][/url: One of many threads on MAS iApps.

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=10240#respond

[ncottle]

@boettchs Thanks! I quite literally have that search open right now.

[dpertschi]

@nick.cottle thanks for that. I'll probably add creating dummy receipts along with disabling the setup assistant prompts to an after script. Good call.

What's the volume of upgrades you've got under your belt, hundreds? Did you simply accept waiting until till after the upgrade for users to advise on applications that didn't work and/or needed upgrades. Or did you have tight control and understanding of what was out there already?

[ncottle]

We have a pretty good grip on what is out there and what is going to break. I personally give the machine a quick look and discuss what might happen with the users. Most of them could care less because they are getting bumped up to the "latest greatest" OS. In the shop we may have 100-150 done with a lot more to go that we need to keep an eye on. We also have a couple thousand that we know will have issues but are wiping and re-paving regardless.

The link that @boettchs posted for the scripts was awesome. I hadn't looked into it for a while and the answer in that post was a huge help since it discusses re-directing the App Store downloads. Pretty cool, hadn't even considered that before.

Overall the upgrades have gone very well. There are the little hiccups that we all see but so far pretty much everything works and works well.