[Casper] Netboot newbie

[Thomas Larkin]

Jim, 

I have used Zen Works from Novell, DRBL from source forge, Ghost, Bombich's Netrestore, The built in apple stuff, Acronis, amongst a few others.  Granted, not all of those products supports Macs, but I have used them all.  At my old job I had an old HP business class desktop running open SuSe Linux and DRBL and would netboot and image Windows clients off of it.   

Out of all the suites I have used in the past I can safely say that with the Apple platform there really isn't anything out there that can compete with Casper imaging.  I would say Netrestore is the closest product out there.  One huge pro that Netrestore has over Casper is the price tag, it is absolutely free.  I still use netrestore even after having the Casper Suite.  I use it to image firewire booted machines on a one to one basis and think it is a great application.   

Over the summer we had to reimage 6,000 macbooks with a dual boot image of OS X 10.5.3 and Windows XP Pro.  I automated it all through Casper and we got it done in about 5 weeks working 12 hour days for those full 5 weeks.  There are some issues with AFP and multiple connections and of course I have yet to try out Casper's multi-casting abilities and see they just released in their first resource kit.   

The mass imaging once you set it up is very automated and efficient.  The problems you run into mostly at that point are Apple technology problems, and things like AFP throughput, but there are methods of making that run smoothly.

>>> "Jim Oring, Jr." <Jim.OringJr at schawk.com> 11/02/08 7:14 PM >>>
I'm in the process of experimemting with netbooting and am very 
interested in what others are doing to make this a seemless process.

Thanks to all,

JIM ORING, JR.
IT DEPARTMENT

SCHAWK!
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