Teacher with Mac lab in a PC environment: How to deploying updates and drivers

[bmcfrazier]

I'm a newbie here and know just enough to be dangerous. So forgive me if I don't know the correct terms.

 

I have a brand new iMac lab and have Apple Remote Desktop on the teacher machine. Here is what I'm trying to figure out:

 

1. How do I tell all the computers to update software from Apple Remote Desktop? I heard there is a siimple UNIX script that can tell it to and then be sent out to the student machines; but alas...I don't know UNIX.

 

2. How do I deploy drivers to be installed on various machines from Apple Remote Desktop? I have a Wacom tablet driver I want to install. I downloaded Iceberg and that allowed me to figure out how to install Chrome on the machines, but I don't know how to install the Wacom's tablet driver.

 

Any help for a teacher with no tech support?

 

Thank you guys so much!

-Brenda

[Carter]

I've never done this before but here is an Apple document that shows you how to find out what updates are available and what to push out.

 

If you are doing an OS update I would look for the latest combo update that you can download and send that package out via ARD. This would be the same for drivers and such. If there is a package file ARD can just send out the install for you.

 

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT200113

Edited September 10, 2015 by Carter

[bmcfrazier]

Okay. Can you resend the link? I'll give it a try! Thanks!

[Carter]

Okay. Can you resend the link? I'll give it a try! Thanks!

Sorry about that, forgot to paste the link

 

I've added it to my comment above.

[bmcfrazier]

That was useful...but I don't know enough about Terminal to push it out to all 24 of my machines.  Thanks though!

[furby]

1 and 2 there are 'easy' with remote desktop.

 

1. Select the computer(s) -> Click on Unix -> Templates -> Miscellaneous -> Install All Software Updates

There are some other update commands there you can try out.

 

2. Select computer(s) -> Click Install and then drag drop your package (.pkg) file and click Install.

This does require the install/update to be in packages form but I have yet to have an app/driver I couldn't get a package for.

 

This is of course making the big assumption that Remote Desktop is setup to allow you to interact with the client computers

[Carter]

If you plan to push out to all machines I would download the OS Combo update and push that via ARD. Sending out the command will have all 24 computers downloading the update when you can instead just download it once and push out the installer.