Adding Utilites to NetBoot Sets?

dstranathan
Valued Contributor II

Is anyone out there running utilites or 3rd-party tools from their AutoCasper .nbi images?

My Desktop guys are interested in bundling Disk Utilty.app, Terminal.app, TechTool Pro, DiskWarrior, etc.

Just curious if it works well, or if you have seen issues running tools over a NetBoot session, or expereinced licensing issues, etc.

We use Apple's AST (the clunky GSX NetBoot tools), but its certainly not a bad ideas to include some basic 3rd-party tools on my .nbi if it can help out my team triage in the field. Beats lugging along a physical USB/Thunderbolt drive in most situations.

7 REPLIES 7

davidacland
Honored Contributor II
Honored Contributor II

We include DiskWarrior on a diagnostic NetBoot image. It's very useful.

bmarks
Contributor II

You can do just about anything with AutoCasperNBI by adding packages to your workflow. Our provisioning team uses Disk Utility without issue. Our security polices require secure wipes before Macs can be re-deployed and that's how they do it. We customized our image to include a small AppleScipt-based app for nuking encrypted volumes and auto-launching Casper Imaging. We customize our Dock too. I'm not too familiar with the licensing policies of Disk Warrior or TechTool Pro anymore, but if they do requires licenses and those licenses are stored in files, you could just package the license files along with those apps.

bentoms
Release Candidate Programs Tester

We're adding some 3rd Party Utilities to our NBI's soon.

One thing to advise, don't reduce the NBI. Or reduce it & thoroughly test the apps.

ACNBI deletes stuff when reducing the NBI that might stop some 3rd party apps from running.

dstranathan
Valued Contributor II

What's the best way to inject an ACNBI image with apps? I assume that I need create .pkgs for each app and feed said package(s) into ACNBI > Options > Install additional Packages?

bpavlov
Honored Contributor

@dstranathan Correct.

bentoms
Release Candidate Programs Tester

@dstranathan that & customising the root user is why that feature is there. :)

Lotusshaney
Contributor II

Be careful with licensing and adding extra software to an NBI. Some tools like ipartition will lock out if you use it on to many Macs.

You may have to purchase a site or engineer licence for others.