Building a Leoaprd NetInstall Image: Best Practices
I am building a master NetInstall Image for 10.5 (Leopard) now. All
of my Mac desktops laptops and servers are Intel based. No PPC
hardware here. I have 100 iMac 20" Desktops, 40 24" iMacs, 25+
MacPro towers, 50+ 13" MacBooks and 30 15" MacBook Pros. I even
have a couple 17" MacBook Pros.
Do I need to build a NetInstall master image for EACH hardware
architecture that I have, or will 1 image work for all Mac systems? I
have tested a few scenarios, including imaging a 15" MacBook Pro and
then restoring the image to a 20" iMac. All seems to work fine.
Likewise, I did the opposite and built a master NetInstall image from
a 20" iMac and restored it to a 15" MacBook Pro and everything
worked, including hardware specific things such as keyboard
backlighting, etc. All the NICs and interfaces show up fine. No
kernel panics, now thermal issues or fans spinning up into hyper
drive. Even power management on the laptops seems to work as expected.
I assume that Leopard is totally "unified", and that "one size fits
all" in terms of hardware compatibility (at least in terms of Apple's
newest modern Intel architecture). I dont mind building multiple
images if I have to, but it sure would be nice to have 1 master
Leopard image that I update a couple times a year, rather than
building and managing 4 or 5 new images each time for each type of
Mac that I manage.
Any ideas or suggestion regarding how many images I need?
My process for building and deploying images is simple:
Take the newest hardware I have and make it the master Mac to image
from.
Install 10.5 LEopard from DVD clean.
Add any custom applications, settings and tweaks (other than stuff
that may be managed later via MCX/OD etc)
Build the master image using Apple and 3rd party tools - Disk
Utility, NetRestore Helper, Carbon Copy Cloner etc.
Boot from an external drive and make an image of the Macs internal
drive.
Push the master NetInstall image to another external drive or partition.
Test the newly created NetInstall master image by "pushing" it back
to a Mac via ASR, DiskUtility etc. (Verify that the image is good etc)
If all succeeds, put the image on my NetBoot/NetRestore/NetInsall
server (which is running 10.5 Server (Leopard Server)
Test another Mac via NetBoot. VErify that the NetBoot/NetInstall
process works. (make sure TFTP, NFS, BootP, AFP, etc works)
Done.
