Ghost for OS X?

[jbsegal]

Has anyone done any work building an installed system+apps image on OS X, to then be Ghosted (or whatever package there is that does the same) on to other systems?

If so, any statements on how long the set-up takes, and how long each subsequent build takes? Also, what package do you like for this?

Thanks!

Comments

[marmota.livejournal.com]

I've found the G4l livecd to be useful for linux and windows, offhand I can't think of why it wouldn't work with OSX. If it's a straight bits-to-bits image, OS shouldn't matter and build time is just a function of disk size.

[ivorjawa.livejournal.com]

I believe Carbon Copy Cloner is how such things are done around these parts.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

This depends on if you want local hard drive to hard drive clones, or if you want a network solution.

For hard drive to hard drive, Bombich's Carbon Copy Cloner is great. His older, and yet no longer developed software, NetRestore is also quite nice.

For dealing with a Windows partition, WinClone can be handy, especially if you are working with Windows partitions of varying sizes, as it allows shrinking a source partition and expanding a destination partition as needed.

The current open source network solution is DeployStudio. The nice thing about this is it will do both local and network restores of both a Mac OS X and a Windows or Linux partition. Network boot restores require either an OS X Server 10.4 or 10.5 available for netbooting.

Then there are several commercial applications available, which I don't have experience with:
FileWave.
LanDesk offers one, but I can't find their imaging product easily at the moment.
LANrev.
JAMF.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

Oh, completely blanked on the remainder of your query. Let me see here...

Doing a Carbon Copy Cloner copy is pretty quick, depending on image size. It's basically a really advanced rsynch. NetRestore can take a while to make the image file, but it can be compressed and used with the multicast asr facility to spit out the image to multiple machines at once using the built-in Apple Software Restore facility of OS X Server. The re-imaging process is fairly quick.

DeployStudio is finicky on getting it set up properly, and it seems to me that it takes a while to do an actual image with it, but the re-imaging is reasonably quick. It can also do a multicast image stream, again allowing multiple clients to access the same data stream.

The commercial products I have no information on, sadly. We're starting to investigate all of this at work and it's slow going.

[xlii.livejournal.com]

You could definitely dupe the installed image then migrate from it using migration assistant.