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OS 9 Businesses Operating Systems Upgrades Apple

Massively Updating to Mac OS X? 60

Posted by Cliff from the hassle-free-installation-on-more-than-one-machine dept.
Zerocool3001 asks: "I work for a school in California that uses all Macintoshes. All of the machines have Mac OS 9 on them. We would like to upgrade to Ma OS X 10.2 and we have a net install server with disk images ready to install. However, it appears as though net installations of disk images is not possible in Mac OS 9. If you have any way to install a disk image over a large network to about 500-700 computers, we could definitely use the suggestions."
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Massively Updating to Mac OS X? More

Massively Updating to Mac OS X?

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  • Assimilate (Score:4, Informative)

    by sebi ( 152185 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @04:34PM (#5993902)
    When I was at school our Macs were cloned from a master server every shutdown. The software they used was assimilator. [digitalriver.com] I don't really know if the master image has to be OS 9, or if anything will work. You can download assimilator's PDF manual on the page I linked to. Maybe this will help. You would definitely have to get the assimilator executable into the startup or shutdown items folder of the target machine though. But I suppose that would be a lot faster than actually installing OS X.

    • Re:Assimilate (Score:5, Informative)

      by Hollinger ( 16202 ) <michael AT hollinger DOT net> on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:41PM (#5994386) Homepage Journal
      From the blurb on the product page, Assimilator won't do, since the drive's fundamental structure and partitions will have to be changed. Nice program, though.

      • this works like a charm (Score:3, Informative)

        by mAIsE ( 548 )
        1. open a terminal and type
        man -t asr
        (this will print the man page to your default printer)

        2. read this manpage (then read it again :) ) keep it close for reference.

        3. setup a system in the way you want it to be cast, OS9, OSX and all your applications then make a disk image of it. (see the man page)

        4. boot to OSX via, NetBoot, or an external firewire drive.

        5. Cast this image either via http or local file system.

        #local filesystem method, pretty fast over firewire

        asr -source Library.dmg -ta

    • Re:Assimilate (Score:5, Informative)

      by plsuh ( 129598 ) <plsuh&goodeast,com> on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:50PM (#5994465) Homepage
      Unfortunately, Assimilator won't work for installing Mac OS X as there are hard linked files that Assimilator won't handle properly. Use a combination of Netboot [apple.com] and ASR [apple.com], or Netboot and Mike Bombich's NetRestore [bombich.com].

      --Paul
      • I stand corrected. Having only encountered Assimilator as a user I simply wasn't sure (I left school quite a while before they started the deployment of OS X).

      • Re:Assimilate (Score:4, Informative)

        by EMDischarge ( 589758 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @07:42PM (#5995147)
        You will also want to check out the radmind [radmind.org] tools. It's as close to a tripwire system as you can get in OS X (grrr... prebinding!) and will maintain lab machines and employee workstations exactly as you like.

        Another good resource is Mac OS X Labs [macosxlabs.org]. Full of good information about this sort of stuff.

        YMMV. Good luck.

  • Drink from the well . . . (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MaxwellStreet ( 148915 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @04:39PM (#5993932)
    Instead of asking people here on Slashdot...

    I'm sure that for these kinds of numbers, in a high-profile installation... -someone- over at Apple would be interested in making things go smoothly for you.

    I'd imagine that you could get help directly from Apple - and probably better than anything you'll find here.

    • Re:Drink from the well . . . (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward


      Youre assuming they paid for those licenses ;o)

      --
      Website Templates for Dreamweaver [dynamicexpression.com]

    • That's exactly what I was thinking. I can only think the reason they've gone to slashdot is that they're not paying for this. In which case, they are asking for serious problems as schools should not screw with Apple Legal.

      -Alex

      • Re:Drink from the well . . . (Score:4, Informative)

        by drunkenbatman ( 464281 ) <i@dTIGERrunkenblog.com minus cat> on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @12:10AM (#5996507) Homepage
        That's exactly what I was thinking. I can only think the reason they've gone to slashdot is that they're not paying for this. In which case, they are asking for serious problems as schools should not screw with Apple Legal.

        I doubt it's fair to just jump to the conclusion that they're using illegal installations... if you search around, you'll find that getting "official" advice or help from Apple can be pretty difficult at times. IE, even the maine laptop deal (one of the biggest educational deals in Apple's history and made a big splash) had those who were working on the project who called Apple's tech support and service for rolling everything out "inadequate".

        I know I used to volunteer at a high school awhile back and it was pretty rough sometimes getting basic help from Apple... they don't have that big of a "services" team either for enterprise or educational customers. In the PC world these gaps are often filled via VAR's (value added resellers) but Apple has cut a lot of them out.

        • All they need to do is contact Apple Education and cry for help.

          I've worked with Apple Ed in Public and Private K-12s and they've always been very helpful.

          Find the local area Apple people and ask.
    • I couldn't agree more. Sounds like Apple would enjoy getting involved in this scenario, as it helps their own folks keep fresh. They might even give you a discount for volume!

    • Talk to apple (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I used to work at a large University. When we upgraded from 8 - 9 we planned a whole bunch of ideas such as directory logins, samba servers home drives etc.

      Apple came and helped us out with planning. Yes we were buying about 100 new macs but they stills helped us out over several days for free. Talk to your apple rep. Apple corp employ many education specialists just for this sort of thing.

  • Netboot (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nocomment ( 239368 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @04:40PM (#5993940) Homepage Journal
    Wouldn't it be cheaper and worth the effort to do a netboot setup? THen you jsut go around to all the OS 9 machines and set the startup disk to be netboot (or whatever they call it I forget) and reboot :-).

    Of course you might want to invest in gigabit ethernet and some switches at the same time. Other than that, you'd have to around to each machine individually with the OS X CD.
    • This would be a good idea except for the fact that he has > 500 installs to maintain. Im sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but you need a seperate install of the os (at least for os9) for each machine you intend to boot. In other words, he would need > 500 copies of os9 on the server.

  • ASR (Score:5, Informative)

    by rsmith-mac ( 639075 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @04:43PM (#5993964)
    Based on your description, NetInstall is out of the question, so really all you can do is ASR. It's a bit trickey to get working correctly the first time, but when it works, it'll do a very fast setup of the machines in question. You'll have to do some digging though, as there several different ways to go about it on both Classic and X machines. Apple.com is probably your first best friend here.

  • Apple NetBoot on OS X Server (Score:5, Informative)

    by knightwolf ( 457910 ) <jwm05c@mizz[ ]edu ['ou.' in gap]> on Monday May 19, 2003 @04:49PM (#5994002) Homepage
    Apple has some links on booting and it seems they say such a thing is supported. Try contacting Apple for more info. You can also look at Apple netboot site [apple.com] for some more generic information (i.e. whitepaper PDF's).

    Aside from that, from what I remember, you can do some openfirmware stuff where openfirmware will allow you to remotely boot off of a disk. This way, you could automate most of your install. The problem with all of this of course is the hardware you're using - automating this all means lots of scripting to figure out which drive, save, etc.

    Regardless of any of the above, contacting Apple for a more direct contract on the install might be your best bet. Course, if you're cheap, you can always hire some students (i.e. get 3 hours of semester credit or whatever) to help do updates.

  • A couple of years ago CFEngine seemed like a good way to go to maintain large LANs, including not only OS but application updates. It became a GNU project. I haven't kept up, so I don't know present status. It did require initial installation of a small monitor tool on each machine. But that might be accomplished remotely by adding it to each machine's startup folder.

    Staying with pure Apple methods, you might be able to add a network drive to each computer's environment, than remotely modify/replace the

  • I could be wrong about this (Score:5, Informative)

    by kalidasa ( 577403 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:06PM (#5994122) Journal
    But this might be of use to you. Google is your friend. http://www.macos.utah.edu/Documentation/MacOSX_Dep loyment/Specifics_ToolsUsedDeploy.html

  • NetInstall has nothing to do with the OS (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:10PM (#5994151)
    The NetInstall process doesn't have anything to do with the OS the machine is running. It's just a netboot that happens to run an installer instead of a complete OS.

    The hardware you are running on makes a difference, though. It's best if you've got a B&W G3 or slot-loading imac (or better). These machines support "dynamic" netbooting... they also added the nice feature of just booting the machine by holding the "N" key.

    If you have older machines, then you have to be proviging IP Addresses (via DHCP) from the server that's doing the Netboot/Netinstalling.

    Firewalls can also come into play here. You have to have the appropriate port for NFS, TFTP, and Bootp open in order to Netboot/Netinstall OS X.

    I hope this helped...

  • NetBoot Possible From OS 9 (Score:5, Informative)

    by wayneh ( 602642 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:15PM (#5994179)
    NetBoot is possible from OS 9. I run an Xserve (with 10.2 server) and have been able to do it since I got the server. If you read through the NetBoot portion of the OS X Server Admin Guide (found here: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n120174). You should see that you need a specific (newer) version of the Startup Disk control panel. I believe they say that it comes on the server software CDs, but I got it from the latest OS 9 system software of a G4 tower. I would guess that you need to be running OS 9.2.2, but I'm not positive. Most of my troubleshooting CDs are still booting OS 9 and I needed to be able to reboot from them to a server image. It's worked well for me, so far.

  • Not a problem (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:27PM (#5994285)
    I have set this up on our small office network (30 Macs; 100Mb switched; xServe) and it works great. I'm a part-time tech person; no terminal.

    Go here and get NetRestore:
    http://www.bombich.com/software/netre store.html

    Go here and download the video, NetRestore in Depth:
    http://macosxlabs.org/webcasts/index.html

    The only thing I can add is that your clients need to be ugraded to OS 9.2.2 to netboot.

    With Netboot and NetInstall, coupled with Network Home Directories, I figure I can cut my time spent doing tech work in half. (I'm being optimistic, but still...)

  • Mac OS X Labs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ummon ( 15714 ) <ummon@where.net> on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:31PM (#5994311)
    http://www.macosxlabs.org/ [macosxlabs.org]

    From their site:

    Welcome to the web site for the Higher Education Mac OS X Lab Deployment Initiative. Our goal is to simplify the task of installing and maintaining Mac OS X in a computer lab. We will find and document solutions to a host of challenges that commonly arise when deploying labs in a higher education environment. The result will be a roadmap for others to use as they plan to roll out Mac OS X at their institutions.
    I personally use ASR to deploy systems. Setup a base image and roll 'em. More info at http://www.bombich.com/mactips/index.html [bombich.com]

  • Definately contact Apple. (Score:5, Informative)

    by kageryu255 ( 674465 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @05:44PM (#5994412)
    Apple has K-12 account reps who would LOVE to get in on helping a school update that many machines.

    Try calling the Educational Support # at 1-800-800-2775 (APPL). Usually there are individual K-12 reps for each area or school. See if the folks at Educational Support can get you in contact with that person. Honestly, with this kind of volume, they could probably make it much easier for you, both logistically and financially, if you get what I mean.

    Also, might I suggest as a resource:
    http://www.apple.com/education/k12/

  • It is soooo Easy (Score:5, Informative)

    by Illusionmi ( 536916 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @06:30PM (#5994739)
    1) make sure netboot is working properly on your server (you can use the default OS 9 image that gets installed with netboot to test) 2)build your image on your most recent machine 3) Use Mike Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner to make an ASR image (it's in the preferences) and save it to another drive. Then load it onto a sharepoint on your server. 4) Install Mike Bombich's NetRestore onto the server. Use netrestore helper to make an Netboot image that boots to ASR. (configure the settings to use your asr image) 5) Netboot the machines to your netboot image 6) Run ASR (you can automate this) Easy as pie (Although I can't bake :))
  • This article is about the Menlo School [menloschool.org], and was posted by a friend of mine. Menlo has more like 100 or 200 computers, so the task isn't really quite as gigantic as it seems by the article. Still...

  • Apple Remote Desktop (Score:2, Informative)

    by useruser ( 638080 )
    Have you looked at Apple Remote Desktop [apple.com]? It supposedly supports remote software updates and installs.

  • Ask Apple directly on Tuesday (Score:5, Informative)

    by sribe ( 304414 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @07:42PM (#5995144)
    Here's hoping you see this message in time, the morning of Tuesday May 20th Apple is hosting an interactive webcast [macosxlabs.org] on using Apple Software Restore.

  • It's a terrible idea, but.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 19, 2003 @07:50PM (#5995173)
    You could have the kids do it as part of a class - great learning experience!

    Of course, there are soooo many things that could go wrong....

    =)

  • Mother of all upgrades? (Score:3, Funny)

    by joel8x ( 324102 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @08:34PM (#5995410) Homepage
    We would like to upgrade to Ma OS X 10.2 and we have a net install server with disk images ready to install.

    Man, I wish I could've upgraded my Ma. She was stuck in the 60's.

  • Are you sure you want to do this? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Unregistered ( 584479 ) on Monday May 19, 2003 @08:53PM (#5995510)
    As much as i loathe OS 9, i've found that most boxes form the OS9 day run kinda slow w/ OSX installed. And more so, they take forever to boot. it's my opinion that it's more than woth the trade off to work woth OSX(mmm...), but make sure that everyone who will be using these agrees. if they're alwaysd on, though i'd say go for it.
    • I think the most important thing is to make sure that all the machines have as much RAM as possible. Mac OS X is great but it eats RAM like nothing else. I find that with plenty of RAM, most of the older machines are still usable.
    • I use a blue and white G3 at work. I was bored so i installed OSX. Everything was a lot quicker than with 9 (not to mention there are much better games for OSX). Of course I got caught and had to take OSX off my machine. My only complaint is that it took up most of my hard drive space. Then again this computer is a blue and white G3. I think it's great that the kids will get a chance to use OSX. I work for the biggest educational pulishing company and we don't get to use it.
    • I was given a Firewire/Pismo back in December. It is a 400MHz w/6 or 8GB harddrive. Had no O/S or optical drive, just the basic laptop. I have since bought a DVD drive and 1GB RAM for this machine (as well as the software...it is all legit). It runs OS X 10.2 just as fast, if not faster than my 1.6 GHz P4 with 98SE. If I didn't work in an all MS shop, I'd consider a G4 tower for my next machine. The wife got the Pismo, and now she swears that Mac and OS X are superior to Windows and x86 hardware...it has ye

  • Command line asr(1) and FireWire drives work good (Score:4, Informative)

    by trattei ( 627010 ) on Tuesday May 20, 2003 @02:23AM (#5996886) Homepage
    You should be use a few FireWire hard drives, with 10.2.6 installed on them. Boot the machine, and either use a program like NetRestore to erase/restore a disk image of a Master 10.2 install onto the drive or roll your own shell script to do the same. The advantage to FireWire is that it is really fast, copying about 1 GB per minute from a 4200 rpm drive. Also, when you are doing 10 or 15 machines at the same time, you don't have to worry about the network bogging down (or your server!). The man page has some excellent information on this, simply "man asr" in the terminal.

    Also, if you are putting OS X 10.2 on older machines you probably have to upgrade the firmware first. Someone already has to walk to the location to reboot the machine and probably make sure that a teacher didn't copy their grades to the Hard Drive (that you will be erasing in a minute). Also, once you get the image restored onto the machine, there are a few preferences that are set on a "ByHost" basis - tied to the MAC address of the machine. Things like energy saver settings, and Remore Desktop being enabled. The latter is important if you want to be able to manage your machines later on without walking across the campus.

    You should contact Apple and connect with a System Engineer who can work with you to make your deployment a whole lot smoother. Moving over several hundred machines to a new OS is no small task, but a little automation can go a long ways toward making it a manageable process.
  • This is pretty simple to do by modifying a bootable Linux rescue CD. The rescue CD will have all the tools; all you need to do is create a startup script that goes through the half dozen or so steps to do this.

    If you want to keep it really simple, set up a machine with Mac OS with a single partition of size smaller than any of your disks (say, 5G) and do an install on that. The startup script would do something like:

    ssh source-machine dd bs=1024 count=6M if=/dev/hda of=- | cat > /dev/hda

    This copies

    • You're going to have to do the latter if you want to succeed. Of course, you won't succeed because the Linux Kernel [kernel.org] doesn't grok HFS+ yet.

      If you use the

      dd if=image of=/dev/hdX

      approach, the partition tables and C/H/S settings will be baked for all drives that aren't identical to your master drive.

      I've had no end of grief cloning systems at work when building embedded devices. In the end, building the filesystem on a new device is about the only way that reliably works.

  • Use NetRestore [bombich.com] and NetBoot on your OS X server for rollout, then maintain them with Radmind [radmind.org]. NetRestore is much like Apple Software Restore, but better, and Radmind is a replacement for RevRDist or Assimilator, but again, much improved. I've used them all and managing OS X this way is so easy is ridiculous.

  • Casper (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    http://www.jamfsoftware.com works natively in 9 or X. easy, automated package creation & a modular install process where you can select/deselect packages.

  • Apple Software Restore & Carbon Copy Cloner (Score:3, Insightful)

    by luciuskwok ( 573122 ) on Thursday May 22, 2003 @12:47AM (#6013250) Homepage Journal
    This is all really clearly detailed at Apple Software Restore [bombich.com]. The idea is to create a bootable disk image with all the software (apps, fonts, etc.) you want to deploy, put it on a file server, and then boot into the target machine with a FireWire disk or CD with Mac OS X on it. This is so you can go into Terminal and use the command-line tool to run 'asr' to install the disk image.

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