[K12OSN] Kinda OT - Imaging Macs

[Shawn R. Austin]

On Wed, 2004-09-15 at 17:52, k12osn at collinsoft.com wrote:
> On Tue, 7 Sep 2004, Santiago, Nicholas wrote:
> > This is kinda off topic, but I thought I'd ask anyway.
> >  
> > Does anyone know of a successful way to clone Mac OS X boxes? I tried using
> > Carbon Copy Cloner with a Firewire/1394 cable connecting two Macs, and
> > nothing. Does anyone have any ideas or know of links to a good walkthough?

I am currently administering 45 OS X boxes using Radmind from
www.radmind.org

The server portion is running on a linux box, but will as easily run on
an OS X machine.

The way it works is a client is run locally on the OS X box that gets
the MD5 or SSHA sums of all the files on the machine.  It will then
connect to the server and check against a list of checksums that was
generated when the image was first created.  If anything does not match
up, it will download it to the client, replacing the file that has been
changed.

I currently have my client machines running a daily cron job that syncs
with the server.  Students can abuse the machines all day, and
everything will be working the next morning.  Its also a great way to
push out critical updates.