During the day I make my living as a techno weenie for a local ad agency. I manage the systems, network, and all that goes along with that. Part of the process of managing the systems is the deployment, or re-deployment, of desktops and laptops. Being an ad agency, this means deployment of Apple Macintosh systems.
For many years, all the way back to my days with Jeff Turner and Ad/Out, I have been a big proponent of disk imaging for deployment. Back then, in the days of OS 8 and OS 9, it meant carrying around a Syquest drive with a copy of a system on it, dragging that to the system and then blessing the System Folder. For those of you that remember this method, it was easy to do for one or two systems, but when you had over 100 systems to deploy, it took time. As the Macintosh system moved to OS X, imaging systems for deployment got easier and easier. Well, it got less cumbersome to do, and easier for large scale deployments.
For the last several years building an image usually meant one of two things: installing everything on a machine and imaging that (I call it fat Imaging), or installing a base OS and imaging that (layered imaging I call it). When a new machine comes in, you lay on the base image, then lay on the applications (done in packages of course), and away you go, or you lay on the fat image and away you go. The problem with this method has always been the amount of maintenance required to “clean up” the image after configuring preferences, installing apps, setting bookmarks, etc. You always wound up with “cruft” on the image.
I realize this isn’t new to a lot of people, in fact most sys admins already know this, and they already know about a great tool developed by Josh Wisenbaker from AFP548.com, InstaDMG. InstaDMG takes system imaging and deployment to a new level. Using a series of folders with a retail disk image, along with your updates and custom packages, InstaDMG spits out an image that is ready for deployment, having never been run on a computer. This means you don’t get the “cruft” on the system that comes from booting the image, and, best of all in my opinion, the image is Universal so it will work on PPC and Intel machines.
I realize this article is a re-hash of some, if not most, of the information on AFP548 about InstaDMG, but I am so jazzed about this tool, and about what it’s possibilities are, that I want to make sure more people hear about it, and more junior admins learn there is a better way than installing systems using CDs and DVDs.
