I've been using ARD to manage a growing number of macs on a single network. I'm up to 40 now and I'm looking to upgrade the existing Yosemite installation to El Capitan. I've googled high and low and can't seem to find an answer - the question is -
Using the ARD tools (install, unix command line, etc) is there a efficient or recommended way to upgrade all 40 machines without having to touch each one?
OS X Server
ARD is really for updating the OS as possibly other related Apple components - including Apps. There's a major difference between upgrade and update and if you tried to use ARD to do the upgrade you would effectively disable the ARD client thereby stopping the upgrade.
There are a number of ways to 'upgrade' all of your mac estate without needing to touch each one and most will involve having a NetInstall/NetBoot Server on your network. TheNetBoot Service comes with the Server.App which you purchase from the App Store. All of the methods will require you to download the El Capitan installer first. It's up to you how you want to go about this but using the network as well as OS X Server to deploy the upgrade as well as the wealth of other services and tools available once you move to Server may be a step too far - no insult intended - for your skill set? If this is the case for you then perhaps simply downloading the installer once, cloning it to an external drive (or a number of external drives) and doing the upgrade that way would be best for your situation?
Apple give terminal commands for creating a bootable El Capitan installer in this KB article:
Create a bootable installer for OS X - Apple Support
Tony
I appreciate the reply and I think you pretty well summed up right where i am. I'm running 2 OSX Servers in separate geographical locations with a VPN connecting them. The VPN is slow enough that I would need the image on each server and set each as a netboot. I've built a custom image before and deployed via netinstall - which worked fairly well. The primary issue is each person has custom settings, programs on each computer that are not a big deal for me to restore, but I would spend a good while restoring/helping folks get things "back to normal" if I deployed an image.
With that, in the past, I have also just copied the image to each workstation with ARD copy and then used ARD to issue a command to login and kickoff the installer as admin. I could then use ARD to bounce around to each machine and click "next" and do the one time login where the machine asks the basic post upgrade questions. I just figured there was a shell script that would copy the upgrade file, kickoff the install and do it silently in the background. No such luck?
You're welcome and sorry I could not help you further. It seems from what you've written you've got a good solution that works for your environment and that you're comfortable with. FWIW I think you may as well continue with it.
You could create a shell script that would mount the disk image, open the installer package and begin the install, but that's the point where it will end and effectively stop the script from completing. I've done similar but not with OS upgrades.
I may be in danger of labouring the point but upgrading to a new OS means the host system (with the older OS) must be inactive otherwise it will never install.
Upgrade to El Capitan ARD Command Line
