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Create a customized 10.3 'Rescue CD/DVD'
Authored by: nerkles on Aug 17, '04 01:26:55PM

If you have more than a handful of machines to manage, I highly recommend OS X Server and using NetBoot and/or NetInstall to image all the machines. I think it's worthwhile if you have at least 5 or more machines to maintain, because managing everything that can go wrong on so many individual computers (of any OS) will eat up all your time like crazy, and have you stressed out and working late all the time. You don't get to have a life or pay attention to more important things than fixing every little annoying problem that comes along--the hard way--only to have all that problem-solving work made pointless by the next system upgrade anyway.

My approach: if it's NetBooted, nobody can break it! Just reboot and you're back to a clean, working system. Or use NetInstall and if something goes wrong, you just wipe out the problems with a clean image (it doesn't take all that long). Bombich.com has a great utility called NetRestore for this, check it out. Also, imagine not having to install everything manually on each machine. Nothing will suck up a whole day like manual total system installs on a lot of machines.

If you only have a few to manage, you could use BootCD for maintenance. It automatically makes a minimally sized disk image with just what you need to boot, and there's room left to add in a few other utilities of your choice. It's worthwhile to have an emergency boot for any important machine, like a server.

If you build your bootable CD or DVD from your newest machine (which you should also do for your NetBoot or NetInstall images), it is more likely to boot the rest of your macs (really old ones, such as pre-G3's won't work, of course).

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Create a customized 10.3 'Rescue CD/DVD'
Authored by: imageworx on Aug 17, '04 02:58:01PM

This can't work for me. We have different applications with registration issues (can't have the same boot image) per user per machine.

Only use is to make a netboot image of each machine (once fully configured) and boot from that.

Is there a recommended resource to read more on Netboot and server-deployed OS booting? Tia~

---
To BeOS or Not to BeOS



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which apps?
Authored by: mikerose on Aug 17, '04 03:28:32PM

Which licensed apps are preventing you from imaging/NetBooting? There are quite a few network-serialization schemes that will defer to Keyserver -- www.sassafras.com -- for license management.

For NetBoot/NetInstall resources, start at www.bombich.com, then www.afp548.com, and finally www.macosxlabs.org.

--Mike



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which apps?
Authored by: sjk on Aug 17, '04 03:53:45PM
Maybe add PSU Blast Image Config to the list.

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