• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Automating Profile Manager Enrollment Through DeployStudio

    When planning to migrate from managed preferences to profiles, one of the important aspects to consider is automated enrollment. One of the more important aspects of automating a traditional managed preferences environment is to automate the binding to directory services. You do not bind to Profile Manager; however, you do enroll devices. Much like binding computers to Lion Server’s Open Directory (by default), certificates and host names are important aspects of the enrollment process. Much as with local managed preferences, management via profiles can be done through the command line and without any involvement from a centralized source. I had written an article awhile back on using profiles from the…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    DeployStudio: Creating a New Master Image

    Once you have been using DeployStudio for a time, you’ll invariably end up creating a new master image.  This is a hot topic this summer, given that Apple will be releasing Mac OS X 10.6 later this year and many people integrating DeployStudio want to make sure that they can manage the solution themselves during the subsequent updates.  Provided you have been leveraging all of the best in package based imaging this might be a relatively small file, or if you are using a monolithic image for distribution it might be a fairly large file.  Either way, DeployStudio makes it fairly straight forward to create a new master image.  To…