Daily Imaging Macs

[laugbr80]

We have 6 iMacs which have no way of being cabled, and would like to wipe them at the end of each day in an automated process. We use Casper to manage our Macs, which we can get a nice thin image out of, but is there a way to partition Macs and point them to the localhost to act as their own NetBoot server?

 

Thanks in advance for any advice!

[furby]

I wonder if a simpler solution would be just to get the machines to auto login to the guest account?

[seawolf]

Why would you want to re-image the iMacs daily?

[laugbr80]

This was me misunderstanding the IT Manager - he was talking about hotels that return their macs to ground zero each time a guest checks out. So I'm looking at about once a month. But @seawolf, can I just point out that this is a community forum, so is there really any point commenting when someone wants help with "What's the point?". Maybe someone would want to reimage their Macs daily for a week while they have a course where they're training people and need a blank machine each time they come to use it. Comments like this really make me quite angry, are completely pointless and very unhelpful.

[seawolf]

This was me misunderstanding the IT Manager - he was talking about hotels that return their macs to ground zero each time a guest checks out. So I'm looking at about once a month. But @seawolf, can I just point out that this is a community forum, so is there really any point commenting when someone wants help with "What's the point?". Maybe someone would want to reimage their Macs daily for a week while they have a course where they're training people and need a blank machine each time they come to use it. Comments like this really make me quite angry, are completely pointless and very unhelpful.

 

So, @laugbr80 do you normally get "quite angry" whenever someone asks a simple and non-leading question?

 

There was no judgement in the question as there could be situations where someone might want to re-image computers on a regular basis, and there might also be cases where regular re-imaging is a hammer looking for a nail. You provided no information other than that you had 6 iMacs on wireless and no reason given for wanting/needing to re-image them. I was asking for clarification because we have used Casper Suite for a long time and might be able to help if I understood the use case. It might also be a circumstance where something like Deep Freeze or another less brute force solution might be more suitable.

 

My bad for attempting to help you. I'll make sure I don't offer again...

Edited July 16, 2014 by seawolf

[laugbr80]

I'm not going any further with this @seawolf, looking back on your previous posts!! Anyway, thanks for clarifying what you meant, I think maybe in future you might receive more favourable responses with a more constructive question. Just a thought!

[unixman_again]

Rather than re-imaging, perhaps consider DeepFreeze which returns the Mac to a known state when the user logs off. Basically it wipes any changes the user has made. We looked at using it, but it doesn't handle the situation where the users home dir is on a remote server, so it was no use to us, but it certainly works. DeployStudio can be made to run at specified times, so you could use that to re-image.

[agarabaghi]

deepfreeze!

[Arthur]

Why not just do what @furby suggested (set the guest account to automatically login)?

[laugbr80]

Thanks for all the advice guys, I can't use guest as I do want them to be using a class account, but I'll look into DeepFreeze!