Hi all,
I'm getting my feet wet with Casper suite with a Mac standardization
project in a large corporation. I've been using ARD to manage about 500
Macs across the USA, Europe and Asia and am now graduating to the Casper
Suite with a master JSS, and about 10 distribution servers. We are
starting a project to reimage all the Macs to a corporate standard build,
tied into AD (using Centrify), and managed mostly by myself (California)
and another tech (Florida) with a little help from the local PC techs. The
sites have anywhere from 100 Macs down to 2-3.
Now that you know a little about my set up, I have a few specific
questions, and also just want to run a sanity check to solicit tips and
suggestions and maybe a horror story or two to try to avoid some pitfalls.
We are on a tight time constraint on this project, so little delays that
can be avoided would help a lot.
The larger sites have a server, but not all sites. I do have some G4's
sitting on a shelf I can ship out to serve as a distribution point locally
(versus the WAN) for no cost other than the shipping charge.
We want to give the departments the option of running CS3 or CS4 (design
standard) and I was thinking Self Service would be the best way - as it
would allow them to switch over as a team when they decided was best for
them.
Some sites are small and have no on-site technician. I was thinking of
creating an emergency boot partition. I saw an option to hide a partition
in Casper. Haven't tried it yet - has anyone used this type of thing to
enable a remote reimage?
I think I have most of the printer drivers installed into the master
image. I plan to have a local tech map one machine to all the printers and
use Casper Admin to capture the printers and make a rule to add those
printers to that site, or select them during the Casper imaging run. Is
there a way to make the printers show up in Self Service? I gave it a shot
the other day, but it didn't work.
In JSS setup, if you schedule a replication, it should start immediately,
then follow the schedule, correct? If I click "remove Schedule" will that
stop a rsync that is in progress? Or does it go until completion? If I
copied an image to a local server in the CasperShare/Images directory,
will the sync replace that with the one from the JSS master server at the
next replication? That isn't a bad thing - but trying to work around
having our master server in a data center 3 time zones away and making
updates to our master desktop image (6GB) that I have to copy over the WAN
for 1/2 a day, then replicate back locally over another 1/2 day before I
can start imaging systems.
Sorry for the flood of info and thoughts - but I do appreciate any
insights/tips/gotchas/resources you are willing to share.
Rich Barron
