Slice Catalina (or big apps) installers

hepvd
Contributor

Hi,

Due to the COVID-19 crisis I'm facing difficulty with users which have a very poor bandwidth. Since we cant resume download I was wondering if some of you tried to slice the installer and then push it part by part using policies

Lets say cut Catalina in 8 parts and proceed to push one after the other using policies. If the part 001 is uploaded, proceed with part 002 and so on and when all the part are uploaded cat all the parts to the final installer.

I'm dreaming to big right ?

2 REPLIES 2

hdsreid
Contributor III

I do not think there is a way to do this with Jamf without a bit of ingenuity. Best I can think of is uploading the zipped parts as separate packages, and then creating a policy to cache each zip, run a script afterwords to unzip and join them to one file. from there you can have the same policy execute the upgrade or count this as the caching and create another policy to actually run it, but this will also have to be a script as "installed cache" isn't gonna work
For things like Catalina, it may be best to allow the machine to download directly from Apple. I am pretty sure it will be able to handle resuming a download

a download resumption feature would be nice. the PC management tool we use has this function and it is very useful for this exact reason. only thing we ever break up still is windows build upgrades, and that is because when we replicate to remote area DPs, it does not support resuming.

sdagley
Esteemed Contributor II

@hepvd Once upon a time I did what you describe when the only DP I had was using SMB. Besides being a PITA to set up and maintain, it was not reliable. If you don't have a DP that can reliably deliver 8GB worth of installer, it's still going to do a poor job with 1GB chunks. Enabling https for my DP was the ultimate solution since it does support resumable downloads. It also has the advantage of being a protocol your network security folks will probably allow to be exposed through your firewall as opposed to the spit-take one (should) get asking for SMB.