Opinions needed: Base OS images

I have a laptop, desktop, and mac pro base image. I could probably eliminate the desktop build and use the laptop image on iMacs - but mac pro was necessary for us because of some hardware difference the regular image wasn't handling right (multiple NICs or something, can't remember).

Our "base" is always the RTM from disk and the latest combo updater so that it's following a clean installation every time. We prefer to preserve vendor logic for any installations when we can.

j
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Jared F. Nichols
Desktop Engineer, Client Services
Information Services Department
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
244 Wood Street
Lexington, Massachusetts 02420
781.981.5436

you should avoid hardware specific builds and use instadmg instead. as long as the most recent combo updater works across all hardware (10.6.8 does), you don't need a specific hardware type for your build machine.

http://code.google.com/p/instadmg/

you can do similar things with System Image Utility and probably Composer, though I've never used Composer to create a modular image.

I've only had 1 base image. Created on Mac Pro with latest combo update.

I've then used scripts to create the network interfaces.

Regards,

Ben.

This is how I do it, but of course this is just my opinion on best practices, and my method is not the only method.

1) create OS X image via instaDMG with nothing in it. No users, no profiles, no management, no packages, just the vanilla OS and all combo updaters. I just edit the catalog file and added the 10.6.8 combo updater to the catalog and let her rip.

2) Toss the base OS into Casper Admin, then add all apps I need standard. MS Office 2011, iLife, etc. Then compiled it as a base image that goes on all my (now 14,000) Macs at our school.

3) Set up Parent smart configurations that run asr script to block copy the image file, then set up children configurations to do building, department, and user/group specific packages.

4) Post flight image shell script configures clients, adds local user accounts, and then MCX does the rest.

This way I only ever have to maintain 1 single image. If anything specific needs to go to a specific smart group I can use my compiled configuration as a parent smart configuration and build child configs off of it. It is very flexible and modular, and best of all it works across the board on every single Mac since it is not built for anything hardware specific.

Do note that if you are compiling previous version OS X images or say newer ones (Lion) the apple installer is probably going to mess it up. So, when you compiled a 10.5 image do so on a 10.5 machine, 10.6 for 10.6 and so on.

Just my 2 cents

-Tom