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Hi all,

I'm a new admin at a school and have not had much experience with JAMF Casper or OSX Administration and this is my first post on jamfnation. I've jumped in the deep end and am working on learning as much as I can. I'm happy to be able to participate this community, and hope that in the future I can help others rather than just ask for help. So here goes:

I've been running into an issue with Casper Admin throwing me an error when I try to compile a Configuration to use on a block of our school Macs. Previously we used Casper Admin to sequentially (modularly) wipe a drive, install a base image, packages and scripts with some postflight configurations. This works great, but is time consuming (I've been testing my configurations using this method without a problem except for the time it takes) . Apparently, our network isn't the speediest and gets congested when we try to image multiple computers at a time (I wasn't here last year for this part) so they have gone one to 3 at a time using an autoCasperNBI to perform the install. I wanted to test using target disk mode on the end machine and using Thunderbolt or Firewire to block copy a single, compiled image from a local Replicated Distribution Point to each machine so I can eliminate the network and make use of the speed of block copy.

I built my updated packages and have successfully imaged my test machine with the CasperNBI. I tried compiling an image this morning, and after 4 hours CA stopped saying I didn't have enough space on my Distribution Point. I went and backed up, then trimmed quite a few old OS images, Recovery Partitions and Packages that were just sitting in our server and verified that we had 240Gb of space on the Distribution Server. I tried compiling the package again and got the same result. I searched jamfnation and found this post which shows the error I received (I didn't think to take a screenshot at the time) :

https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=8805

but it referred to a bug that had to do with virtualized servers in a Windows environment (2008R2) and smb shares not connecting properly. We are running on a physical Mac server with the JSS share native to that machine. Our JSS and Suite are both 9.91.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Am I trying to do something that isn't going to save me time in the future?

Thank you all for your help!

Regards,
Austin Z

It's been a while since we used compiled images but one thing I do remember is because we had Windows SMB shares we had to force the compiling Mac into SMB version 1.

@azaletel Welcome to the Mac admin world! The distribution point you are running on that Mac server, is it an SMB distro or an AFP distro? You can figure that out by going into the JSS and looking at Computer Management -> File Share Distribution Points. Click on the distro and determine what protocol it is using.

File Share Distribution Points

If you are running an SMB distro, that may be what the problem is. Just a thought.

Also, as far as your image goes, there are two things you might try. First would be to create a monolithic image, upload that to Casper Admin, and then replicate that to a local repository.

Second, you do not have to compile the configuration to use Target Disk Mode imaging. You can replicate your distribution point down to a machine and then image the machine with Target Mode Imaging. You will not get the benefits of block copies, but it should be faster than over a NetBoot. It might be worth testing.

We are using AFP for the server share, I believe, though I am not at the office currently and cannot check.

I thought that I was creating a monolithic image by compiling it with Admin? Is there a different tool that you could suggest to do this?

I just completed my replication this morning, will get to testing the speeds asap. Depending on the size of my images/packages, I've found that the process takes between 1 hour and 1.25 hours. If we could shave off even half of that it would be great.

I have also contacted my 'Casper buddy/assistant' and he has referred me to the casper support for more information, maybe there is another issue that we don't know about.

Thank you all for your help! I'll post my results regarding my speed tests and the results of my Casper Support communications.

Cheers!
Austin Z

I have noticed that during the compiling process it requires admin rights several times. I have noticed that if I get busy with other stuff and wait several hours with the login prompt up, once the image completes I get that error. Don't know if this helps or not.

You can avoid the prompts by enabling root access and logging in as root when you do the compile. I think it's under one of the menus in Directory Utility. Obviously you don't want to be running as this all the time, but for compiling it does help.

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