Hands on: The fine art of imaging to deploy Apple software

Computerworld - In my career, I have managed the deployment of Macintosh labs and offices in colleges and elementary schools and at companies with a few workstations and at major corporations. In handling most large-scale deployments or software upgrades, the most efficient solution is to use imaging, which places the contents of a master disk image on the hard drive of each workstation or computer. Creating and deploying a master image -- whether you're installing new computers, restoring computers to a default state or providing a massive system upgrade -- can be a major task for any IT department.

In the PC world, Symantec Corp. offers an excellent product called Ghost. It's a simple, server-based product that allows administrators to create disk images from a model PC, boot workstations from a floppy and replace the workstation hard drives with the image on the Ghost server. It requires very little user interaction, and dozens of machines can be imaged at a time with little intervention. Although there is no Mac version of Ghost, there are a number of Mac OS X options that provide similar results.

Apple Software Restore

Before Mac OS X, Apple provided a graphical tool called Apple Software Restore (ASR) that could be used to image a hard drive. To use ASR, a master image is created with Apple's Disk Copy utility and then two special scripts are run on it from within Disk Copy to prepare it for use. The image is then placed in a folder called Configurations in the same folder as ASR. The parent ASR folder can be stored on a file server or placed on an external hard drive or removable disk (including a CD or DVD). Workstations being imaged must be booted from an alternate disk from the hard drive receiving the image. Generally, this requires technicians or administrators to create a custom-bootable CD with the needed version of Mac OS 9 and drivers to boot the computer and access the ASR folder.

Although the graphical user interface (GUI) version of Apple Software Restore can be used to deploy a Mac OS X image, the computer receiving the image needs to be booted in Mac OS 9 to run Apple Software Restore. Since almost all Macs introduced after December 2002 no longer boot into Mac OS 9 (recent iBooks being the exception), this tool's effectiveness is limited. Although a Unix command-line version of ASR is included with recent Mac OS X updates, it can be cumbersome and may require more time at each workstation than older versions of ASR. The only available documentation on the command-line version of ASR can be found in the Unix manual pages by typing "man asr" in Mac OS X Terminal application.