We are in the process of imaging the Macs at the University of Toledo’s two open labs, comprising a total of 30 Apple (Quicksilver) G4’s.
The absence of a sufficient network requires us to visit each machine individually and boot from a Firewire hard drive (or iPod) containing a basic install of Mac OS X, NetRestore, and our image. After the machine is imaged, NetRestore is setup to rename the machine, set the Open Firmware password, and finally reboot the machine from the freshly-imaged drive.
We then have to perform some configuration manually. The machine must be bound to the Active Directory and printers must be installed before it is ready to be used. In total, each machine takes about 6-10 minutes.
While this isn’t much of a chore for the small amount of machines the University has, it would be nice to further automate the process to make deployment even easier: my goal is to use some shell-scripts, both home-brewed and from excellent resources like macosxlabs.org.
