Target Disk Imaging via SSD Workflow

Hey @azevon!

I covered this last year in my JNUC talk:

Unwrap the Imaging Enigma

It's towards the end of the talk where I talk about TMI and Offline Imaging. What you are describing is Offline Imaging. The basics are this:

• Boot from the SSD
• Open Casper Admin from the SSD
• Drag the SSD hard drive icon into Casper Admin
• Click on the SSD drive in Casper Admin and click Replicate

Note: the replication is not selective, so it will pull down EVERYTHING from your distribution point.

Once you have the drive replicated, place Casper Imaging at the root of the hard drive. Boot your laptop off the SSD, run Casper Imaging from the root of the drive, and select the local drive as the distribution point.

TMI, or Target Mode Imaging, is where you have Casper Imaging running from one machine, then boot a second machine into Target Disk Mode and connect to that first machine via Thunderbolt. Casper Imaging will image that machine and then you can disconnect and connect another machine. Basically you can hot swap machines until they are all done.

To clarify, when you are doing TMI, under Target Drive you choose Target Mode Imaging.

A couple of tips that may smooth your workflow:

1.) Set the external drive to autologon as root
2.) Place the casper imaging app at the root level of the external drive and set it as a login item for the root user

When you have replicated the distribution point to the SSD as @stevewood mentioned above, you will not need to provide any authentication unless using one of the newest versions of Casper Imaging. The catch is that it won't check in with the JSS for updates, so you will need to replicate the drive if you make any changes. I have been having success with Imaging 9.65 for 10.10.3 FWIW laying down 10.10.3 seems to be much slower than previous OS versions. This somewhat reduces the effectiveness of thunderbolt imaging.

This method will work regardless of whether you are laying down a new OS or not. With a new device my preferred method is to use Imaging to install only a first boot script / launch Agent combo. The script sets up wireless, local user accounts, enrolls the device, and sets some misc. preferences. If you wanted to go this route, you should check out @rtroutons github page for his sample script.

Depending on how you plan your rollout, I will share our workflow to see if it makes sense for your scenario. We are 1:1 and have about 1000 Macbook Airs. We are deploying 90% of them at the same time since we are a school.

We set up about 10 Macbook Airs as "Masters" and use them to run Casper Imaging and image the "Client" Macbook Airs via Target Mode Imaging. We first just get those packages that we need, basically a replication, except we get rid of the packages that aren't needed for the image. We copy these files to the root of the "Master" Macbook Airs drives. We then run Casper Imaging on each "Master" and then just start hotswapping Macbook Air "Client" machines. It takes about 3 minutes a machine then we are on to the next 10. You can obviously do as many "Masters" as you would like.

For one-offs we have an iMac that is a replication point that images the Macbook Airs using the same method.

Thank you all for your responses. VERY helpful. Just a few questions:

1. Because I'll be doing offline imaging, I understand there is no method to enroll the devices at the time of imaging. Is that completely true? Is there no way to also incorporate a script or something that also enrolls the devices at time of imaging?

2. lwindram mentioned to set the SSD to autologon as root. Not sure I know what you mean?

3. Once I have 1 SSD with the Casper Admin contents copied onto it successfully (and tested), can I then just copy all that data from SSD to SSD? Or do I need to download the data from Casper Admin onto each individual drive?

Thanks all!

Andy

@azevon - glad to help. I struggled a lot with this when we were getting our imaging methods in place.

1.) Device enrollment had been a headache for us. The key to scripting this was to get hold of a multi-use enrollment key. Steps are: a.) login as a local admin user b.) open recon and build a QuickAdd Package - use account and password info as appropriate c.) right click on the generated QuickAdd package and choose Show Package Contents d.) navigate to Contents -> Resources -> postflight and open with TextEdit e.) the enrollment key is this line:

####################################################
## Run enroll
####################################################
/usr/sbin/jamf enroll -invitation xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

copy this and paste it into your firstRun script. Make sure that you run it after you establish the wireless connection

2.) There are only two steps required to set the drive to autologin as root. Open Directory Utility and select "enable root user" from the Edit menu. Then go to System Preferences -> Users and Groups -> Login Options and set the Automatic Login field to the root user. The root user will show up as System Administrator on the list of users.

3.) Each drive will need to be set up individually with an OS and the associated settings. I haven't tried copying over the contents of the packages file since Casper 9.x was released. I can verify that it used to work with Casper 8.x. The largest problem I have with replication is that all the packages on the distribution point will copy over to the target drive - this can result in some long transfer times and can necessitate the use of large external drives.