Mac – How to deploy 10 new iMac and configure it programatically

configurationdeploymentmacmac-osx

What is the best and quicker way to deploy and customize a number of newly arrived iMacs
(say 10 or more) using an already configured iMac, a DHCP/DNS server, a LAN and Remote Desktop installed on the configured machine ?

The main tasks to be performed are accounts creation (1 account per machine of course), system settings customization, security, filevault, firewall and other minor tasks.

If needed I can think about a PXE/bootp netboot, serving an install image via tftp or similar (sorry, i'm new to MAC, but I'm pretty expert on linux/unix and I'm used to configure RHEL5 servers via cobbler+puppet… so please don't hesitate to be geek 😉

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

If you have a Mac Server License, you can use Deploy Studio, a free program that has decent documentation.

To create images, a great tool our Mac specialist uses is Insta DMG. It creates images well, and allows you install packages you create within your image. Good Luck, hope that helps.

Related Solutions

How do companies like Google and ebay deploy new versions of their sites without downtime

Google handles it in a few different manners. If you study their data center model, and the fact that they run 'clusters' of machines in each data center, they are able to shut down a data center so that it doesn't take requests, roll out the changes, turn on the data center, and do rolling upgrades. They can also do this with the clusters within a data center. Recently they upgraded the filesystems on their machines from ext3 to ext4 in-place by rolling things out on a per data center basis.

Google also does staged rollouts where clusters of people get different user experiences than other users. Facebook does this as well.

Ebay decommissions a large portion of their data center through load balancer changes, upgrades and migrates over decommissioning the other half. It has been said that they have enough redundancy to run their site on 1/3 of their available hardware. They may have more sophisticated methods now, this was a paper I read about 4 years ago.

Windows – How to deploy new CA certificate to Firefox installs

With certutil from NSS Tools [1] you can administer the certificate databases used by softwares like Firefox and Thunderbird [2]:

certutil.exe -A -n <cert name> -t <trust> -i <cert filepath> -d <firefox/thunderbird profile dirpath)

Example that adds "mycompany.pem" certificate file as "mycompany" into Firefox profile and set to trusts it as a CA that can issue client certificates for SSL, e-mail and signing (_C,C,C) as well as server certificates for SSL (T_,_,_). Should be done when software is not running.

certutil.exe -A -n "mycompany" -t "CT,C,C" -i "mycompany.pem" -d "C:\Users\johndoe\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\someprofile.abcdef"

# Remote profile accessed via administrative share
certutil.exe -A -n "mycompany" -t "CT,C,C" -i "mycompany.pem" -d "\\computer\c$\Users\johndoe\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\someprofile.abcdef"

You could also run the first command via PsTools's PsExec.

NSS Tools sources can be grabbed from https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/security/nss/releases/ (some Windows binaries can be found on the Internet but given the security nature: it's better to compile it yourself)

[1]: Network Security Services: https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/NSS/tools/NSS_Tools_certutil

[2]: They are using a Netscape Communicator database with files cert8.db and key3.db.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

How do companies like Google and ebay deploy new versions of their sites without downtime

Windows – How to deploy new CA certificate to Firefox installs

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