Like David, we're building a new full package. I'm using Casper to simply
uninstall the old and install the new.
Someone asked me just yesterday why we don't just do a diffs package that
updates only needed components and then use ARD to push the new package.
These are my reasons:
While I didn't know about the script on MacEnterprise that David referred
to I did look at the Vise log and I really didn't want to have to parse it
pull the changed components. I would then have two packages that I'd have to
maintain rather than one. Or I'd have multiple packages to incrementally
update a base package. To me, less is more and the Microsoft Office
installation is soooo simple that I can easily work on a package manually if
I need to.
We maintain a Frankenstein set of workstations running custom software
and rely on Casper heavily to make small changes 2-3 times or more per week.
I'm not crazy about uninstalling a 500MB Office package and then
reinstalling another 500MB Office package across the network for dozens of
machines but I don't want to change my method for one large package that
gets installed occasionally compared to many many smaller (<10MB) packages
that get pushed out all the time.
I want to maintain the ability to roll back. If I were to push a diffs
package that for some reason breaks after the rollout I would then have to
uninstall multiple packages and then reinstall multiple packages just to
roll back. By doing the entire package, I can uninstall one large package
and install one large package.
In our testing here, uninstalling the older version and installing the
newer version takes less than four minutes on a 100MB network. This is
acceptable to me.
bill
--
William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
Digital Information Systems Support
Merrill Communications, LLC
(651) 632-1492
