System Deployment & Maintenance

Revised: 2006-06-15 devin

Table Of Contents
    Apple Network Assistant 3.5.1 is a network management software package. You can provide assistance to end users, get system profiles, reconfigure system settings, & distribute applications across hundreds of computers-all from a central location, over both TCP/IP & AppleTalk networks.

    Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is a Mac application that allows you to remotely manage, assist & monitor clients, distribute software, and provide in-depth hardware & software reports. This section has multiple presentations on ARD and implementations.

    ASR for Mac OS X, which is now available to the public as a command-line tool in Mac OS X 10.2.2, allows you to create mass-deployable OS 9 or OS X images for ASR or NetBoot. Scott will give an overview of ASR's capabilities, and demonstrate some third-party tools which automate creating ASR images. Including Disk Copy 10.2.2, Carbon Copy Cloner 2.1.1 and ImageJaguar.sh.

    The Casper Suite from JAMF Software is client management software for the Macintosh platform. In this presentation, you will get an overview of the Casper Suite and its functionalities, from inventory management to imaging and remote, scheduled maintenance. This introduction to the Casper Suite will discuss how this Macintosh native solution can help with lab management as well as automated, pro-active support of student, faculty, and staff computers. This demonstration will provide a look at how the Casper Suite can provide an easy, supported enterprise solution to Macintosh managers in education.

    Deep Freeze instantly protects and preserves baseline computer configurations. No matter what changes a user makes to a workstation, simply restart to eradicate all changes and reset the computer to its original state. The latest release is Universal and support Apple Remote Desktop.

    With the NetRestore End of Life, DeployStudio offers another solution for image management with great flexibility and ease of use. DeployStudio leverages Apple Software Restore and can be used locally from an external hard drive/partition, or remotely using images hosted by a server.

    Entman is a collection of scripts, modifications, tools, graphics, and more that the University of Utah's Student Computing Labs uses on their student, staff, faculty and special purpose Mac OS X computers.

    Eccles Library has developed a solution for distributing image files to Mac clients from a Linux server using Samba for file sharing, ssh for secure logins and asr for restoring the images.

    LANrev Network Management includes tools for Application Management, Change and Configuration Management, and automated Patch Management.

    These pages document the University of Utah's Student Computing Labs deployment of Mac OS X. They are meant to illustrate how we plan to transition from our current Mac OS 9.x environment to Mac OS X in a tentatively scheduled six to eight month period. We will periodically update them as we successfully complete each part of the overall plan.

    An overview of MacAdministrator, a client security and authentication package (and more).

    An overview of Macintosh Manager, Apple's powerful computer/user administration program.
    This is a presentation on munki - a set of open-source tools for managing software installation and removal on Mac OS X using webserver-based repository of packages and package metadata. It attempts to address some of the limitations of using the Apple package format for managed software installations and removals.

    The NetBoot service in Mac OS X Server enables multiple Mac systems to boot from a single server-based disk image, instead of from their internal hard drive. This allows you to create a standard configuration and use it on all of the desktop systems in a department or classroom — or host multiple images customized for different workgroups and needs.

    NetInstall is Apple's new method of performing automated software installs over a network. With a few customizations and the help of NetRestore, a third-party tool, you can use NetInstall to mass-distribute Mac OS X ASR images to an entire lab. Scott will give a brief overview of customizing NetInstall images using NetRestore, and distributing ASR images via NetInstall.

    A powerful administrative tool that allows you to maintain computers, install and update software, and much more.

    An overview of creating and restoring ASR images with NetRestore and NetRestore Helper 1.5.

    Puppet is an open source solution for configuration management. Puppet lets you perform normal administrative tasks (such as adding users, installing packages, and updating client & server configurations) on any number of systems, even if those systems are running completely different operating systems.

    PSU Blast Image Config (aka "BIC") is a complete software solution to quickly restore and configure a Macintosh back to a known state. It allows users to configure and set the Open Firmware security, restore a master disk image quickly to a Mac's internal hard disk, and configure the network settings on the restored disk.Scott will provide an overview and demonstration of Blast Image Config.

    This presentation will provide an overview of the features in PSU Blast Image Config ("BIC") and how it's used at Penn State University to image and configure the 600+ student computing lab Macs. Justin has been developing BIC since 2003, and has presented on it many times at MacWorld conferences, along with WebCasts hosted by MacEnterprise.org.

    PSU Blast Image Config (aka "BIC") is a complete software solution to quickly restore and configure a Macintosh back to a known state. It allows users to configure and set the Open Firmware security, restore a master disk image quickly to a Mac's internal hard disk, and configure the network settings on the restored disk.It supports Mac OS X 10.2.2 and higher, including Snow Leopard (10.6) and restores ASR ready .dmg image. BIC supports pre & post restore scripts and customization on BIC to automate the process. Hence, BIC can be configure to a 1-click store. Topher will provide an overview, demontration of new features on Blast Image Config and also the performance comparing with alternative application.

    This presentation discusses Mac OS X file system maintenance using radmind. It includes an overview of radmind, and details on how the University of Utah, Student Computing Labs group uses it to restore & update OS and software; remove client modifications by users, OS & hardware bugs; track & deploy OS and software updates; and options for customizing use of radmind.

    An overview of the hard disk management software, and other related utilities used to enhance RevRdist's functionality.

    Xhooks is a collection of OS modifications, scripts, and utilities that make it easy to configure and automate maintenance on Mac OS X computers. The scope of Xhooks is fairly large, but it is modular so you can pick bits and pieces if you would like. It contains hacks and utilities that aren't available elsewhere (or aren't easily available like hping2, SetDisplay, and Screen Preserver) so you may want to borrow pieces just for that purpose.