Mountain Lion, sandboxed apps and symlinks. Fail.

[TimT]

Hi All,

Whilst this is not a Casper issue per se I was hoping others may have come across this issue and have any advice.

My company's workflow is to partition the main drive into two, Macintosh HD and Users incorporating a symlink to the Users partition. Makes re-imaging easier and has worked fine in the past.

We are moving forward with 10.8.2 (build 12C60) and are finding most sandboxed apps crash on launch due to the Users symlink on the Macintosh HD partition. I have tried various attempts to script the symlink post image etc but nothing has worked. As soon a sandboxed app is launched it crashes mentioning "Sandbox creation failed: failed to compile sandbox profile:" in the error report which is to be expected by the very nature of a sandboxed app.

Strangely though that when I use a machine specific OS build (e.g 12C2034) as opposed to a vanilla OS and use that to image other machines with the Users symlink the apps launch fine for both existing and newly created users.
This could be due to the way that specific build is created. Not sure on why it works. Suffice to say I'd rather not be using a machine specific build over a range of macs (although have done that in the past with no issues) and use a model agnostic build instead.

If anyone has had this experience and worked out a resolution I'd love to hear it.

Cheers
Tim

[tkimpton]

Your answer is fstab. I trick the system to say the Users is on another hard drive

http://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=5678

[powellbc]

We are dealing with this as well. My question sis, how is this NOT a Casper issue? I am deploying it per the instructions on the JAMF KB, including the recovery partition, and capturing the image using Composer. The configuration erases and partitions the drive.

Is there a better workaround than this fstab option?

[tkimpton]

I've found the Casper kb flawed. The only stable way is fstab.

It not a Casper issue because its a hack. Just JAMF are pointing joy in the right direction.

Unfortunately in admin there's no such thing as one way or the right way. What you may find works for someone doesn't work for another and so we test test test and test some more :)

[powellbc]

I see what you are saying, but I don't have multiple partitions. There is a recovery partition as part of the config but it is hidden. There is a single drive after imaging and this is still occurring.

[tkimpton]

Have a look here

http://macmule.com/2012/07/31/how-to-use-fstab-within-a-casper-imaging-workflow/

Symbolic links won't work.

It's hard to explain and my brain this evening is full if Adobe Loathing ( Adobe scrapping TLP and CLP) which has tired me out again.

[CarrieNZ]

I've had this same issue deploying 10.8.2 via Casper Imaging and creating the recovery partition as part of the config.

[powellbc]

I tried the script described in the linked article and it did not address the issue. I'm not fluent enough in what is going on to understand how to modify it to meet my needs. Again, I am simply deploying 10.8 and its recovery partition without any other changes.

EDIT: I did change the script to be Macintosh HD (the only viewable partition on the imaged machines) but it is still crashing with the same error.

[powellbc]

Well, now this is occurring when I do not deploy the recovery volume (just the OS partition). I'm at a total and complete loss now.

[powellbc]

Well, at least in my case, I found out the cause of this issue.

Our configuration included the HP Printer Drivers package 2.12 (direct download from Apple's support downloads) and through trial and error I discovered the installation of this app was causing these app crashes. I removed it and everything was fine. The newer 2.13 driver package also caused this issue.

Tim, my advice is to see what is installing as part of your configuration and see if that is causing it.