Prepare and Setup 125 new Macbook Airs, Tips? Tricks?

[irod87]

In a few months my district is getting about 125 new Macbook Airs for teachers to use. (Replacing old Macbooks) What is the most efficient workflow to get these up and running? Would I image over the new OS or build onto it? Just looking for a direction to begin my research.

I recently prepared 30 new iMacs. On those I went through the setup enough to get them to the desktop then I ran them through casper imaging and laid some packages down that added the rest. I did that cause it was 30 machines but this time around im talking 125 to 250 total machines.

[pbetancourth]

Have you decided on Yosemite or sticking with Mavericks? How are the users logging in? (AD, OD?)

[davidacland]

Assuming your using a directory service (AD or OD), I would leave the installed OS as it is, create a Configuration in Casper Admin that can apply an initial setup script and then install any core applications on top. User choice items could then be made available in Self Service.

There are a few recent issues to watch out for though:

- 10.10 has a load of teething issues including this one: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=12287 - When we've been ordering Macs recently, some have been shipping with 10.9 and some with 10.10 - The ones we've been receiving with 10.10 we've been re-imaging with 10.9 to avoid creating a big support problem

Hope this helps!

[jescala]

Are you able to enroll these Macs using DEP? Thin-imaging with DEP and Yosemite is one option. Target-mode imaging with a lightning cable is another good option.

[irod87]

We currently run AD and OD but we plan to move to transition fully to AD before the hardware swap. I was planning on using Yosemite since that is what I assumed they will ship with. Most of the district is running snow leopard machines with the occasional mavericks admin machine. I personally am using Yosemite on a couple of devices. I just recently upgraded to casper 9.6.1 in preparation of this swap.

[jescala]

An old-school monolithic image installed using a lightning cable with target-mode imaging is a sure thing if all the laptops will be configured identically. Thin-imaging using DEP is the new thing all the cool kids are doing. Note that DEP requires Yosemite 10.10. If I was asked to do those 125+ laptops and Yosemite was tested and confirmed to work on our wireless network, I would probably go with the later route because it will save you time and trouble in the long run when the new versions of OS X are released and image forks happen.

[irod87]

Thanks jescala, I will look into the method you are describing. Sounds like it might be worth the effort to do that instead of my current process.

[calumhunter]

Can you not use netboot?
Netboot them and apply a configuration from casper imaging. easy as. no need to create a monolithic image - thats pretty much bad practice these days - too much work required to clean it up afterwards.

If you do need to create an image for re-imaging etc then use AutoDMG to create a never booted image https://github.com/MagerValp/AutoDMG

Personally i'd netboot them and use casper imaging to bring them up to spec, way faster than anything else.

If you have deploystudio you could use that as well, just install a casper quick add package as your workflow, have it trigger an on enrollment policy in casper that fires off your policy(s) to bring the machine into spec.

DEP is cool, but if you haven't already got it setup for your org, then you're probably too late, it takes quite a while to go through the process to get it setup with Apple. But that for sure is the right path going forward.

[jescala]

@calumhunter By "monolithic" I meant "compiled." Sorry for the confusion. I suggested that because it is much faster to image a large number of devices that way when using target-mode imaging. But faster than TMI is not imaging at all. Just hand the devices to the user and let DEP take care of the work for you.

[gachowski]

Yep to netboot to Casper, and a pre-stage to install configure what you need. If you need to install X.10 you can use netinstall image to do that too...

With the improvement in X.10 and Casper it's possible to do zero touch with AD and FV : ) C

[jescala]

By the way, @calumhunter makes a good point, getting set up for the DEP can be a bit of a bear, so if you are pressed for time and that hasn't already happened, you may want to wait until next time.

[denose]

With target-mode imaging, anyone every experienced is with the Apple Remote Desktop agent on machines that were target-mode imaged? So to go on a tangent but thought could ask if you guys have done multiples. Thanks.

[lwindram]

We use Thunderbolt drives and Target-mode imaging to image all new devices. The image is an OS created with AutoDmg and a firstBoot script. Everything else is sent via policy. This is very fast for mass-imaging, and if you keep the image simple it is not too difficult to keep the drives synced to the distribution point. I used 2 drives last Friday to image 40 machines in about 90 minutes. The physical logistics of unboxing, labeling, etc are more time consuming than the imaging process. Working alone I could not have kept up with more drives. When we do mass imaging we get a small crew together and use 6-8 drives. Apple has white paper that talks about this process: http://images.apple.com/education/docs/Apple-ThunderboltWhitePaper.pdf

If you are concerned about hardware costs, you can use cheap external drives intended for backup without too large a time penalty. I bought some $70 500 GB USB 3.0 drives from Amazon and the imaging process takes about 30% longer than with our $500 Thunderbolt SSD drives. I don't think it's too much of a penalty given the cost savings.

A couple of tips:
1.) Install OSX on the external drive (you can do this using the restore partition on an attached Mac) and set it to autologin as root
2.) Casper Imaging needs to be installed at the root of the drive in order to run automatically - once the distribution point is replicated, you will not need to provide any authentication during imaging
3.) Do your Replication on a machine with a wired LAN connection. If you are using an air, get a USB 3.0 - LAN dongle.
4.) Rich Trouton has a firstBoot script at https://github.com/rtrouton/rtrouton_scripts/tree/master/rtrouton_scripts/first_boot that will help you get an environment appropriate script running. If you setup the wireless at this stage you can skip establishing a wired connection completely.

[sgoetz]

You could also create a policy that gets applied with the enrollment trigger. That policy would contain all the Applications you need installed that is the same across all machines. Including a AD bind. Than any one off stuff can be installed through Self Service. Once the enrollment polices are created you would just log in and enroll the machines through https://jamfurl:8443/enroll. You can even assign the laptops to the user on that page. No need to wipe the image only to re-apply the image.

[Chris_Hafner]

As you can see there are many way to do this. At our Academy we image (compiled image via netboot/pre-stage) about 365 laptops of varying model (anything from a mid-2010 MBPro to the most modern Air or Retina) in just a few hours. I can't imagine a faster way of doing this. However, it is cheaper to use external TB/SSDs but there are a number of issues there as well.

Hit me up if you ever want to geek EDU style!
chris_hafner@brewsteracademy.org

[SeanA]

Yep, plenty of ideas exist, pretty much dependent upon your workflow, resources, and temperament.

Another idea---that I read about while researching a WiFi issue---is to start the initial deployment (mainly OS) on a wired connection, then move them to a storage room where they can finish downloading software and configurations on a wireless connection.

See https://www.afp548.com/2013/03/06/automatically-enable-wifi-at-login-window/ for details.