why not OS X?

[Timothy A. Seufert]

At 5:26 PM -0400 6/4/02, Konstantin Riabitsev wrote:

>Now, imagine an OS X workstation dying. Oh, the horror. I would have to
>go there, install Mac OS X 10.1, configure it, run software updater,
>install the packages... total admin time about 3-4 hours. Notice the
>difference? As far as I know there are currently no imaging tools to
>create a "ghost"-like image and burn it directly onto the Mac OS X box
>directly from a CD.

See http://software.bombich.com/ccc.html .  Free tool.  It's nothing 
more than an AppleScript which copies files around using command line 
tools included with the system, but it makes creating images or 
cloning drives quite easy.

>In fact, I'm not certain that's possible since from
>what I know, OS X sets the system ID during the installation time to
>prevent piracy (correct me if I'm wrong, someone).

Since you're talking about workstation use, AFAIK there is no such 
ID.  There might be for OS X Server, but not for the normal "client" 
version.  I can certainly report that I've had no problem moving my 
OS X install between HDs when I upgraded to a larger disk, or even 
transplanting an OS X HD from one computer to another.

>Even if it is
>possible and such tools exist, we would have to have about 10 different
>CD's for each of our installation classes, plus we would still have to
>run the software updater after the installation is complete.

Not at all, as per above you can use CCC to clone OS X installs.  You 
just get one source machine into a config that you like, and clone it 
to distribution media, for which there are several options.  (You 
could even use FireWire hard drives for this purpose -- many newer 
Macs can boot from them, and restoration off of one should be much 
faster than restore off of CD media.)
-- 
Tim Seufert