why not OS X?

[Bill Fink]

On Tue Jun 4 2002, Timothy A. Seufert wrote:

> 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.

This sounded really interesting until I checked it out and discovered
that it didn't seem to support cloning to a network volume.  MacOS 9
is easy to clone across the network by just dragging all the top level
folders to the target system, remembering to copy a copy of the system
folder, and then tweaking a few network configuration parameters on the
new system, at which point you have a nice standard installation on the
new system.  But you can't do the same thing with MacOS X because they
decided to make all the unix underpinnings be invisible files, arggggg.
If ccc could do this it would be a big help.  Maybe one could make a
local clone of the MacOS X installation, and then make a network clone
of the local clone, assuming that the problem with doing a direct network
clone is the same as that for the MacOS 9 system folder, namely that some
of the system files are active and can't be network copied when active
(although they can be locally copied without problem).  As it is, I have
to do a software restore from the 5 CDs and then throw away the MacOS 9
bits, since they are already on another volume, the better to tripple
boot.

The other main problem I see is that AFAIK there is no package manager
for MacOS X, i.e. it's basically one monolithic system (please correct
me if I'm mistaken).  This would make it a nightmare to manage, as opposed
to rpm which lets you do such things as check what packages specific files
belong to, easily remove or update packages, or be able to verify the
integrity of installed packages (in case of disk corruption or suspicion
of possibly being hacked).  I'm not aware of such capabilities with
MacOS X, but since I'm not that conversant with it at the moment, it's
possibly just my ignorance.

On the positive side of MacOS X are some of the great apps such as
iTunes, iMovie, and iDVD, and such commercial apps as PhotoShop.  I
like having the best of both worlds using MOL, especially once Samuel
supports booting MacOS X in Linux, although I suspect that for the
foreseeable future for some of the apps such as iMovie and iDVD I
will have to boot into native MacOS X.

						-Bill