Prestage Imaging

[dmeridith]

I have brand new mac book air's and im trying to prestage them and when it is booting some of them are asking for a username and password and the others are booting in and automatically starting i have checked all of the serial numbers if they are in jss or not and none of them are in jss. Im not sure why this is hapening and where that settings might be.

[mm2270]

How are they being named in the Pre-Stage? If you assigned the names by entering them manually in the Computer Names field, one thing I recall about Pre-Stage is, once it runs out of names to use, it will atop auto-imaging, regardless of whether the Macs are in scope with their serial #, MAC address, etc.
Meaning, if you've input 20 Mac names, and you have 22 Macs you're trying to image, the last 2 to boot up and launch Casper Imaging won't have a name to pick from the list and therefore can't automatically image.

There are other possible reasons for this, such as some of the Macs not actually being in scope for the Pre-Stage. Are you certain all the serial numbers or MAC addresses were entered in the scope? Or is this using a Network Segment?

My very first thought was that the Local Authentication section wasn't filled in under the Install tab, but that's not likely to be it since some of them are auto logging in and imaging and others aren't.

[dmeridith]

well i am naming them with the serial number so I shouldn't be running out of names and I am imaging on network segment for this building. I will remake the prestage to verify thanks dm.

[Chris_Hafner]

For the units that arrive at the username and password screen: Are your sure they are netbooting in the first place? If you had run out of names or otherwise mis-configured the Pre-Stage the units should still boot properly into the nbi and launch Casper Imaging. They would just get stuck with an error there.

[justinworkman]

Another thing you might check is the date limitation on the prestage. Sometimes I forget to stretch it out and it lapses the day I make it.

[znilsson]

@mm2270 Sorry for thread resurrection but I'm having trouble with prestage imaging and I think your post hits on a couple possibilities as to why:

one thing I recall about Pre-Stage is, once it runs out of names to use, it will atop auto-imaging, regardless of whether the Macs are in scope with their serial #, MAC address, etc. Meaning, if you've input 20 Mac names, and you have 22 Macs you're trying to image, the last 2 to boot up and launch Casper Imaging won't have a name to pick from the list and therefore can't automatically image.

OK so I may be doing this part wrong: What I wanted was for my prestage to input the first part of our naming convention automatically, which would be the same for every Mac we image, the second part being its asset tag. So like this: COMPANYMAC-123456. So in my prestage I have the naming section set to "Computer Names" and then in the box I have COMPANYMAC- which leaves the second half open for asset tag number entry. And I have "image automatically" turned off to give the tech the time to enter the asset tag first before hitting the Image button.

But I think this may be my problem - it says run count 1 and remaining 0. Presumably because in my testing I've used up the one run where it used the name properly because my prestage did work as expected exactly once, and then not since then.

There are other possible reasons for this, such as some of the Macs not actually being in scope for the Pre-Stage. Are you certain all the serial numbers or MAC addresses were entered in the scope? Or is this using a Network Segment?

I thought this may have contributed too - I'm using network segment, but everything is all entered and checked, so the actual scope shouldn't be the problem here. Since my test Mac is an Air I thought the issue might have been because it has to use a thunderbolt adapter for ethernet, but that also seems less likely than the naming issue above.

So is anybody aware of anything that can be done to put a custom string of static text in the computer naming box for a prestage image without preventing it from working after one use? One possibility could be setting it to Serial Number instead, and then putting my string in the prefix box, which just means the imaging tech would need to replace the serial number with the asset number, but it shouldn't "run out" of uses that way.

Am I close, or way off on this one?

[znilsson]

I'm solving the issue above using the serial number option, which gives me the ability to just add a huge number of runs. It means we have to manual overwrite the serial number with our asset tags in the computer name but that's fine. I'm noticing a number of other issues with prestage that I was hoping somebody had some insight into.

1. Prestage imaging not working – casper imaging loads but prestage data does not load. So I end up needing to manually enter an admin account, and AD domain credentials, and then manually choose my options for Casper Imaging because it's not pulling any of that data from my prestage config that's set up on the JSS.

2. When Casper imaging does load the correct config, it’s still not actually loaded. Have to switch the config to empty and then back to the config in order for it to load all the packages and scripts correctly. This is intermittent. Sometimes it does this and sometimes it doesn't.

3. After prestage imaging completes, says it’s rebooting, Mac does not reboot.

Has anybody experienced this stuff? At least for me, because of these issues it seems like prestage imaging is kind of unreliable. And just now in my latest test, after manually choosing the settings in Casper Imaging because it didn't pull my prestage data, it didn't enroll it in Casper either.

Any ideas why any of this is happening?