Using Casper Suite with other tools

[bpavlov]

I hope this is OK for discussion. I wanted to know who uses other tools in conjunction with the Casper Suite. And if you do, why are you using that other tool rather than the built-in Casper feature/tool? Hope some are willing to share their experiences. Note: The other tools do not necessarily have to be free or commercial. They can be in-house tools that you've developed too. I just want to get an idea of how others are managing their fleet of devices.

[calumhunter]

AutoDMG, AutoCasperNBI, AutoPKG, Munki, Patchoo! DeployStudio, Reposado, bsdpy, netsus

I've used all of those tools in conjunction with a Casper install - not all at the same time or at the same site

The simple reason is that Casper is a framework which gives you a lot of functionality out of the box, but I don't think it will ever be able to cater to the needs of every environment. These tools fill gaps in Casper's functionality or are simply more efficient ways to achieve the same result. I'm an extremely lazy admin, by that i mean i hate double handling and repeating work, i will automate at all costs so that i only have to do something once. Most of these tools make my life easier by reducing the amount of work i need to do.

[Look]

We are using Deploy Studio for image deployment, basically it's fast and simple and what we already had it in place.
We use Casper for image creation and most management tasks.
Then of course there is Active Directory, so prevalent these days as to not really be counted as a "tool" but deifinitely part of the Mac management puzzle.
We have custom scripted quite a number of parts of Casper to suite our needs, ie: Network share mounting, AD binding and naming from out internal database of names, Printing. Some are in conjuction with what Casper provides, others completely replace it.

[elliotjordan]

Shameless plug for AutoPkgr. :-)

AutoDMG is also invaluable for building base OS images for use in Caper imaging. We use DeployStudio and Munki at other places, but not typically in conjunction with Casper.

[bpavlov]

Why use DeployStudio over the built-in Casper Imaging tool? Don't get me wrong, I've used it in the past, but I want to get down to the specific reasons why you've chosen to use it over the built-in feature (a little more explanation than they're just better if you will). AutoPkgr/AutoPkg I can understand as there is no equivalent like feature in Casper.

By the way, thanks for sharing information on bsdpy. Never heard of it. Very interesting project. Will dig into a bit further. It's been the last tool that really hasn't been done better than Apple's built-in service as of yet. Netsus appliance from my understanding has limitations where you can't netboot across different subnets which is a non-starter.

By the way, I hear you on the lazy part. Lazy admins make great admins because they look for ways to get things automated.

[elliotjordan]

@bpavlov Until recently, it was much easier to create a NetBoot set for DeployStudio than it was for Casper. Also, DeployStudio has some nice built-in workflow tasks that Casper Imaging doesn't have. Finally, I've found DeployStudio to be extremely stable. Casper Imaging is better than it used to be, but still has a few quirks.