Gaming Does anyone here have some experience with deploying Mac images throug

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Today in one of my classes we have to deploy an image of one of our Mac Minis to the rest of the Mac Mini's in the classroom.

Despite being a huge Apple junkie (Albiet Linux is still becoming more and more of my thing), I have never done deployment of an image in a lab environment before. This is where I hope someone can help me.

The Mac Mini we are using for imaging has been split into two partitions. One for the startup, the other is for our image to deploy. This way we don't require two seperate external bootable drives, because we can unmount the second partition. We only will need one for the machine thats going have the image restored to it, because the target machine needs to have it's startup volume unmounted before the restore process can take place. I have a bootable clone of my Macbook on my external drive for this reason (The image will be restored to the actual Mac Mini, not my external drive)

I already know how to make an image, however I do not know how to deploy one fully.

This wouldn't be an issue except we have to use the Apple Software Restore (ASR) utility from the command line. I keep asking my professor if there is a GUI frontend or utility built into OSX that can do this, and he says there isn't. I'm pretty sure there is one though.

My question is what do I need to do in order for the two Mac Mini's to see eachother over a direct ethernet connection (Crossover cable), and be able to restore the image from the first machine to the second using the command line? Do I need to merely assign each of them an IP address that falls within one network and then they'll see eachother, or is it more complicated than that.

After the image is deployed to the rest of the machines we will be using Apple Remote Desktop to deploy the rest of the stuff such as applications which are going to be administered from a remote server.

Any help on this issue is greatly appreciated
 

dark42

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Snow Leopard Server has something called NetRestore that you might be able to use if you have access to it.

Another option is to connect the two Macs with a Firewire cable, and put the target Mac Mini in Target Disk Mode. Then use Disk Utility on the other Mac to restore the image.
 

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    Veho @ Veho: Many such cases.