Hi Steven, I am managing my macs (~150 Laptops and ~50 fixed macs) until now with deploystudio (setup of machines) with a maintained image that contains our commonly used software. Additionally I install manually software since packaging (as you mentioned) is a quite time consuming work and only worth it when hitting a "crittical amass" of installations. However - you mentioned rumors regarding ID's approach - I am surprised that apparently the OSX Software Deployment initiative using AbsolutManage which is about to go productive (some departments inlcuding ours use it already in an early phase) didn't come to your attention. Irene, me and some others I were involved in the initial testing phase of AbsolutManage but I thought it would have been announced somehow) Max Schlapfer and Kathi Zehnder already created 81 software packages with a total of planned 143 as of today. They include mostly common used software at the departments including more special requests made by the early testers in the planing phase. We are right now testing those packages in order to get them into the productive state. Regarding your other quesstions answered quickly: * we have tested roaming profiles but decided not to go on with them due to slow login and bad experience with the NAS here in basel. * we use AdmitMac to bind the machines to the Ad and some minimal managing and also to make use of DFS. Not sure though if we continue with admitmac since theyr support is quite poor and DFS is oficcially supported and seems to work with Lion. * If I have to, I migrate simply using superduper since we have (until now - crossing my fingers there) a machine pool concept where all machines are interchangeable and are simply swappable. Otherwise I just resetup the machine (just a few clicks and 20mins of time) and have the user copy his data back from our fileservers. If you have any questions just go ahead and ask or contact directly the ID guys. Cheers, Nico On 7/29/11 11:04 AM, "Steven Armstrong" <steven.armstrong@inf.ethz.ch> wrote:

Hi

So I have a new task on my table: Deploy and bootstrap Macs

So far we have installed and configured munki [1] to deploy software. Is working nice so far.

+ simple to install/use + server is just a webserver - maintaining the software packages and catalog will probably be time intensive (not specific to munki, general problem)

For imaging and unattended installations DeployStudio [2] seems the way to go. But haven't used it yet.

A bunch of questions for ya all:

How are you guys managing your macs?

Anybody here know what ID are up to? There once where rumors that they will have a fancy 'manage the mac tool' sometime real soon now ...

Anybody implemented something like roaming profiles for mobile users?

Quick and painless migration from machine to machine, e.g. when a laptop died?

Anybody interested in sharing resources, e.g. maintain a munki repo together? Packaging software is stupid and boring. We could save a lot of time.

Other thoughts, ideas?

Please forward to your mac guy if he is not you or not on this list ;-)

[1] http://code.google.com/p/munki/ [2] http://www.deploystudio.com/

Cheers, Steven -- Steven Armstrong Institute of Computational Science, ETH Zurich IT Management & Support Universitaetsstrasse 6, CAB/H/88 8092 Zurich, Switzerland Phone: +41 44 632 25 24