I love answering a question with a question. Is asr still in OS X? Is NetInstall still in OS X Server? Can OS X still NetBoot? Does System Image Utility still work? The answer to all of these is yes. Therefore, the answer to “Is imaging dead” is clearly no. Is it on its way out, maybe. Debatable. Is it changing? Of course. When does Apple not evolve? What have we seen recently? Well, the rhetoric would point to the fact that imaging is dying. That seems clear. And this is slowly coming out of people at Apple. The word imaging is becoming a bad thing. But, as a customer…
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Changes in Mountain Lion Server
Mountain Lion Server is now available on the OS X App Store and as with the last few updates there are some things missing that you might be expecting and depending on. First up, three major services are gone: Podcast Producer, RADIUS and dhcp. You can still do dhcp as you always did with OS X client as those features work on OS X Server, but the more granular controls available in OS X Server are now gone. The biggest impact of dhcp is probably in testing NetBoot services when there are network issues and you need to prove to network admins that it’s the network and not your server……
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Create Groups Using dscl
The directory services command line (dscl) command can be used to create a group. Here we’re going to use dscl to create a group called Local Admins (or ldadmins for short). First up, create the group: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins Now give our ladmins group the full name by creating the name key: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins RealName “Local Admins” Now to give the group a password: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins passwd “*” Now let’s give the group a Group ID: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins gid 400 That wasn’t so hard, but our group doesn’t have any users. dscl . create /Groups/ladmins GroupMembership localadmin Why create a group with just…
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New 318 Video on NetRestore (less graphics)
Because people wanted less animation in the intro & outro I shortened them to a little less than half. Hope you enjoy:
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Mac OS X: Continuing to Reduce Image Sizes
We discussed reducing your image size by about 700MB in this article: Mac OS X: Alex.SpeechVoice But if you’re building your image from a host that has already fired up once then there’s likely to be a 2GB or 4GB file called sleepimage in /var/vm. This file is recreated on startup if it’s not present and needed. This will allow you to reduce image sizes by 2GB to 4GB. If you want to get rid of the file permanently on your imaging station you can run the following command: pmset hibernatemode 0 Since you’ll likely want systems to use this feature run the command on your imaged clients with a…