Deploying Mac OS X 10.5.x With BootCamp - Part 1

Recently we deployed 110 MacBooks to faculty and students in our school.  We did not escape the process unscathed, and instead came away with a few process items that I want to pass along to others.  We looked at using Deploy Studio to automate our imaging process.  We also looked a Clonezilla which has worked really well on our Windows deployments in the past.  Clonezilla will take an exact copy of your drive, and replicate it of other drives of similar size, as you might expect.  We chose Deploy Studio for the additional post imaging scripting that was available.  You can build up a workflow that will automatically bind the OS X partition to AD, and to OD, reset the LKDC, and deal with the byHost preferences, along with numerous other thngs.

Setting up Deploy Studio was fairly straight forward.  We have an OS X server that was able to perform the role of our NetBoot server.  From there, Deploy Studios setup assistant pretty much configured everything cleanly for us.

We built up our perfect image, with OS X 10.5.8 and BootCamp providing us with a Windows XP SP3 partition.  Capturing that data with Deploy Studio was simple, and we were off to the races.  Or so we thought.  Off our 110 machines, all of them had “dirty” NTFS partitions pushed down to them by Deploy Studio.  About one-third of those machines ran ChkDsk in less that a minute and then booted up into Windwos Setup with no issues.  The other two-thirds of our machines had issues with security descriptors.  After more than an hour of ChkDsk repairing these descriptors, the machines would beet into setup and complain that ther were missing or corrupt files.  I spent an additional hour with 2 machines and some XP SP 3 CDs trying to locate missing files.  I never got the Windows partition into a fully bootable state.  Clearly something was very wrong, but what was it, and why was it affecting us so inconsistently?

We found that if we reimaged the failed machines, we would have roughly the same failure rate, but we would have more machines done.  We also at this time employed Clonezilla to bang out a number of machines, that would need subsequent handling from us to perform all that we were asking Deploy Studio to script for us.

Ultimately we got the image deployed to all 110 machines, but ended up with a great number of problems with our workflow (particularly on the manually configured Clonezilla machines)  We also had a disaster of a time getting the students logged in to the machines, which ultimately led us to a second imaging which I will talk about in Part 2 of this article.

Posted on Mon, 31 Aug 2009 08:40:40 -0700 in
AWS • Mobile • Network Administration • WLAN • Technology • Apple Computer • Macintosh • OS X • Open Directory • Microsoft • Windows • Server 2003 • Active Directory
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