create live mac disk image with deploystudio

I’ll be referring to this as the “Netboot server.” See Greg Neagle’s post above for how you can use Imagr with existing DeployStudio NBIs. If you have an existing DeployStudio server running on OS X Server, that would be a perfect choice. The easiest way to accomplish this is with an OS X Server running the NetBoot service. I’d like to get into a bit more detail so that future admins who want to test can investigate this thoroughly. Improvements are being made constantly, and by many contributors, so you can get an idea of the excitement of the community around an open-source tool to do deployments with.ĭespite Graham’s excellent work at the wiki, getting a chance to play with it may be a bit foreboding to admins who aren’t sure where to start.įirst, I’d suggest reading Greg Neagle’s excellent starting point blog posts: Part 1 and Part 2. Imagr is in its early stages of development, so there’s obviously lots of rough edges and work to be done. Imagr now leverages the functionality of Pepijn Bruienne’s AutoNBI to make the creation of all-inclusive NetBoot Images (hereafter referred to as “NBIs”) easy and straightforward. Imagr is an open-source deployment tool that runs in a NetInstall environment and makes running scripts, restoring images, and installing packages easy. But since it’s not open-source, there’s not much the Mac admin community can really do about it.įinally, that’s about to change – thanks to Graham Gilbert and his incredible work on his tool called Imagr. Putting Mac Minis in the data center has raised eyebrows among the server purists and network neckbeards, but no one could deny how useful DeployStudio is. This makes many network administrators unhappy, as Apple does not offer an enterprise-level Mac anymore, not since the 2009 XServe was discontinued.

The biggest issue, of course, is that it’s OS X-only, meaning that Mac deployment relies on having a Mac in a data-center environment. Some of its functionality is almost black-box opaque, and we have to make some guesses and assumptions, and do some wrestling to make it work the way we want. This free tool has been the mainstay of many deployment strategies, and has been my old faithful for years.ĭespite its utility and functionality, it has some issues. For a long time, Mac Admins have been relying on the wonderfully useful tool DeployStudio.

Create live mac disk image with deploystudio