Cloning school Macs

[Anne_B]

I'm the computer teacher at an elementary school, and I want to make my life easier. To begin with, I want to set up a master hard drive and clone it to about 15 classroom CRT iMacs. I will use an iMac to set up the master, and I have a PowerBook with two partitions that I plan to use to deploy the disk image. I need advice on the best way to do this using SuperDuper! or another program.

The machines to be cloned are currently running OS 9 and will be upgraded to 10.3.8 in the process. I want the cloned machines to maintain their individual "identities" (serial numbers, etc.)

Any help and advice would be greatly appreciated!

[dnanian]

When you say "individual identities (serial numbers, etc)", Anne, what exactly do you mean? The "etc" is the big thing here -- the systems will end up identical after this type of thing, except for the serial number (and other stuff that's in ROM, rather than on disk). That includes the machine names, which you'd have to customize individually...

[Anne_B]

Originally Posted by dnanian

When you say "individual identities (serial numbers, etc)", Anne, what exactly do you mean? The "etc" is the big thing here -- the systems will end up identical after this type of thing, except for the serial number (and other stuff that's in ROM, rather than on disk). That includes the machine names, which you'd have to customize individually...

Thanks, Dave,
I really want to start from scratch on these machines (in use in classrooms for 4 years), so if I were setting each one up individually I'd probably start with erasing the hard drives. I want to preserve serial numbers, MAC addresses, and anything else that's machine-specific and not user-defined. The network uses dynamic IP addresses. I know that I'll need to go through and rename the machines and do a little tweaking of accounts, but I'd like to automate as much as is feasible. I'm afraid that I know just enough to be dangerous about this, and I don't want to mess things up or make more work for myself!

[dnanian]

OK, Anne. The "machine specific" stuff is part of the machine, and replacing the software with a common image isn't going to change that.

So, here's what I'd suggest: set up your "standard" disk as you want it -- base accounts, applications, etc. Make sure it's as desired.

Then, use SuperDuper! to make a DMG of that image. Normally, I wouldn't suggest a DMG, but because you're going to be restoring to a large number of machines, the time you're spending up front will be made up by the number of restorations. Note: if you're running Panther 10.3.9, this won't work, but it will with 10.3.8, which you indicated you're using.

Once the DMG is created, you'll take each lab computer and:

- Put it into FireWire target disk mode (power on with T held down)
- Connect it to the powerbook that has the image
- Use SuperDuper! to restore the image to the computer
- Eject the computer
- Shut it down, then Option-boot to select (and test/customize) the restoration
- Head to the next one and repeat

It shouldn't be too bad, and because the image can be "block copied", each individual restore will go quite quickly.

Let me know if that works, and how well!

[Anne_B]

Thanks, Dave. Sounds easy enough. Will this work with one copy of SuperDuper! on the PowerBook, or do I need one on the master (which I'm in the process of setting up today)? Can I make the .dmg of the master by putting it in Target disk mode connected to the PowerBook, or do I need to boot from the master? Once I get this process down, it will make my life lots easier!
Thanks again,
Anne

[dnanian]

Yes, you can make the DMG of the master by putting it in Target disk mode, as long as you have a space that's sufficiently large to store the image. Note that, as explained on p21 of the User's Guide, you'll need to have approximately 2x the size of the data being backed up free to create a DMG.

(Note, also, that I wouldn't use any compression on the DMG.)