"No Image" compiling issue with Standard Configuration in Casper Admin 8.71

[cosmosb]

Good people,

We are having an issue compiling a Standard Configuration that only contains 25 .dmg's and .pkg's made with Casper Composer 8.71. We want to use this as a "No Image" workflow for about 750 new MacBook Pros we need to add applications to out of the box. Since they already have an OS we don't want to add that to the config so we can save time.

When we compile this config, both compressed and uncompressed, it compiles within 5-10 mins and only contains MS Office suite and Text Wrangler and is missing the other 23 applications. Does anyone have any advice? We want to use Target Mode Imaging to image this fleet. Using thunderbolt with about 10 machines with local JSS and Casper share to image the 750 mbps.

Any advice is appreciated!

thanks,
cosmos

[talkingmoose]

No answer for you but what happens if you remove Office and TextWrangler from the mix? Does nothing install or do you have two different applications that install?

More than likely one package is causing issues or possibly one method of packaging. Consider the divide and conquer method of troubleshooting: Remove half the packages and test. If that fails remove half again. If it succeeds add half of the remaining. Keep doing this 'til you narrow the problem down to the package(s) causing the issue.

[cosmosb]

Thanks talkingmoose! We ended up compiling the appz with an OS. So made the base OS the standard config and the cluster of appz the smart config. This works without issue. I would try to do some of the testing you mentioned but we are under the pressure of time. I think in our jumpstart we were told we could we could easily set up a config with no OS that could work block to block. Obviously compiling would be necessary so perhaps we misunderstood.

[Dtwerdohlib]

Thanks for the info cosmosb! I was trying to do the exact same thing as you. Once I made a SMART Config and put a base image in there, it started to work! I guess a "thin image" configuration can't be compiled.

The thing that was really strange though, was when I looked inside the failed compiled dmgs, there was a log file inside of there saying that it couldn't install any of my packages into the compiled dmg because the packages could not be found on the server. So for a while I was going through my package permissions, file share permissions, afp/http settings, etc. Definitely wish the log file said something other than that!

[ShaunRMiller83]

I just got done with Casper 9 training and was talking to the instructor about doing something very similar to this.

The answer I got was that you couldn't compile a standard config without an OS package. The reason I was given is because when you do the compile what is actually happening in the background is the OS package is being installed to a what sounded like an empty DMG emulating a blank hard drive. The other configurations items are laid on top of that, and when you use that config in imaging its a straight block copy.

When you use a smart config with an OS in the standard config its essentially doing the same thing but the OS is "cascading" down from the top level config containing the OS package.