System Image over a network

Question

System Image over a network

OS X Leopard Server 10.5.6

has anyone been able to create an image of a mac over a network. My process is this:

netboot the source mac
share the hard drive of the source mac with the xserver. (not the netboot drive)
open the system image utility, it recognizes the mounted source drive.
kick it off system image, everything works fine. However, very slow
i kicked it off yesterday, and noticed it failed sometime lastnight.
if it fails again, i'll post up the log.

eventually our xserver will be in a network rack away from our office and i won't have the benefit of firewire to make an image. Is this the correct way of creating an image remotely?

thanks,
patrick

Posted on Mar 19, 2009 8:27 AM

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Answer 1

Mar 19, 2009 8:31 AM in response to lifeisgood416

You can download and install the 'System Admin Tools' to any compatible Mac client (not server). Therefore you can use another Mac to create the image on and not the server. Especially if you have a production server that provides services other than NetBoot, this will reduce it's available resources. Create the image from another Mac (with Firewire or other) using System Image Utility.

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Answer 2

Mar 19, 2009 9:14 AM in response to lifeisgood416

Patrick,
You can't create an image from a shared volume like that. It's basically a permissions issue. Some of the tools that run require privileged access to the files on the source volume. While this may theoretically be possible (sorry, I'm not a networking guru) it's certainly not the default behavior for file sharing.

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Answer 3

Andbrowny

Level 4

1,614 points

Mar 19, 2009 12:31 PM in response to lifeisgood416

Hi Patrick, check out deploystudio it should do what you want.

DeployStudio and the wiki

Cheers

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