DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really simple script in most cases (according to how complicated your logic for assigning names would be).
To rename a volume, you can use the diskutil command along with the rename option. You would then list the existing name followed by the new name that you’d like that volume to have. In the case of DeployStudio the initial name of your boot volume might be “Macintosh HD” and to change the name to something like “Computer Lab” you would then use a command like:
diskutil rename Macintosh HD Computer Lab
It might then be logical to use a host name to rename a computer. Therefore, we could replace Computer Lab with the hostname command like so:
diskutil rename Macintosh HD `hostname`
However, this ends up showing the fully qualified name. Therefore, we could replace hostname with an scutil query for the ComputerName:
diskutil rename Macintosh HD `scutil –get ComputerName`
This would result in the name without all the .local, etc. But if you ran this as part of a DeployStudio workflow, you would end up calling the hard drive for all of your machines localhost. This is because the hostname or ComputerName will be queried from the DeployStudio set that you are booted to for running the DeployStudio Runtime. Luckily, DeployStudio has a number of variables that it can use in scripts. One of them is DS_HOSTNAME, which pulls the ComputerName being applied to the system at imaging. This means that if we were to rename the hard drive of the computer from Macintosh HD to the DS_HOSTNAME, you could use the following script:
diskutil rename /Volumes/Macintosh HD $DS_HOSTNAME
Now, one might think to oneself, couldn’t I just put $DS_HOSTNAME in the field for renaming the hard drive (part of a workflow). I tried it a number of different ways and couldn’t get it to work (in parenthesis, quoted out different kinds of ways, in different types of brackets and combinations of the above). If anyone knows of a way to use a variable in a GUI field within DeployStudio, let me know (I am guessing it can be done).
