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.
Wow, I haven’t been blogging very frequently. I’ve been quite busy at work and at home and really don’t have anything cool to talk about.
However, I have done a couple geeky things of note lately:
- Burned a Knoppix ISO image from my Linux box directly onto my iBook G4 wirelessly (aka directly to Toast, through 802.11b, without copying the ISO to the hard drive first) after I started downloading the ISO remotely earlier in the day
- Without any broadband to speak of, I connected to the Internet using my T616 phone via GPRS using Bluetooth. I then preceded to SSH into my Linux box. SSH over Bluetooth through GPRS—nuthin’ but ‘net.
That’s about it. Oh, I’m learning Ruby, too.
I feel SongMeanings has quite possibly been one of my greatest achievements technically. It was a great idea at the right time, mixed with technology and design combined with a real following: it was successful and I learned a lot from it.
But the sad thing is, in its current state I am almost ashamed of it. I feel so frustrated that I can’t tell people, “Yeah, I’m capable and can do a lot, just check out SongMeanings.net!”
Well, I suppose I could tell people that. But they will think I am only skilled at writing “We’ll-be-back-real-soon-we-promise” pages.
