Administering an Apple lab for the most part is pretty simple. Modern Apple computers tend to work without a lot of hassle and using tools such as Apple’s Remote Desktop and System Image Utility combined with a Netboot server has typically been enough to deal with network imaging and administration.
Yet recently Augustine Christian Academy purchased 15 new silver iMacs for their computer lab and decided to refashion the older iMacs into faculty desktops for the elementary teachers. Since the total number of Apple computers in the school has been regularly increasing, administration has become more complex. While System Image Utility could have still worked for imaging tasks, it was very slow, bulky, and did not allow for easy deployment of various types of machine images. I needed to find something better.
During my search I looked at many different tools including InstaDMG, JAMF Casper Suite, and DeployStudio.
InstaDMG was quite nice. It is free, extremely simple and fun to use. Unfortunately, I found it did not yet support Snow Leopard very well nor did it create a netboot image for easy deployment. JAMF Casper Suite looked quite nice but it was frankly too expensive for a small private school.
DeployStudio on the other hand was fast, agile, and free. It created a netboot image that can perform a number of tasks including imaging, installing packages, and deploying images. New machines can be added to various lists, by MAC address, and instructed to perform various functions by default on netboot.
Thus I was able to create a base image of Snow Leopard and various package sets to differentiate between faculty computers and student computers. When a faculty computer netboots it is instructed to reformat itself into the most up to date faculty image. When a student computer netboots it reformats into a student image.
Even more if a faculty member, for example, brings their laptop in and needs administration software installed, they can simply netboot and install the admin software packages without reformatting and all by using a simply gui.
As you can see DeployStudio is extremely flexible and easy to configure. Combined with Apple Remote Desktop, my life as an admin has become easy.
While there is very little helpful documentation for DeployStudio, or for that matter InstaDMG, DeployStudio is very easy to setup and figure out. If you need the ability to deploy software to many computers in your organization quickly and efficiently, I highly recommend trying out DeployStudio.
- Posted: Tuesday, Oct-20-2009
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- This post was filed under OSX and tagged with: DeployStudio, Mac Lab, OSX, Remote Administration, and Remote Imaging.
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