In-house IOS apps & Casper 9.12

[nigelmarrion]

We are a High School and have about 1900 iPads deployed as a 1:1 program.

We are running JSS 8.72 & all our iPads are running iOS7.0.2

We deploy all apps to students through the JSS In-House apps mechanism.

Is anyone running 9.12 successfully in a similar environment? It is not that easy for us to spin up a test environment at the moment.

Thanks for any feedback!

[cdenesha]

I'm in final testing with 9.12 and iOS 7.02 for 900 iPads at a high school - take home 1:1. I am allowing the App Store but preloading 16 apps with the In-House method. I did my Jump Start just before Casper 9 dropped so I immediately upgraded. I've not been sorry, it seems to be working ok.

I'm using the JSS and Tomcat to host the apps and it is taking a bit of time to prep the iPads. On Monday I need to see if the bottleneck is the 2 access points in my prep room or Tomcat, as each app install slows to a crawl and there are failures when I install to more than 25 iPads at once, 2400 MB each. The JSS is on gig ethernet and seems to be using RAM for the apps as I can see 10-16 MB/sec network traffic but little HD access. Java was up to 1 GB but Tomcat is configured for a max of 2..

I did not need to upgrade MySQL.

You can request a 'Development License Key' to put on a test server. I don't think Support will mind if I paste their recommendation here:

"As for creating a test environment, I do not recommend cloning your drive. There are too many factors, including the APNS cert and tomcat instance that will create communication errors. I recommend building a blank database and enrolling the devices you plan to test with.

If you plan on keep that test laptop off the network and not doing any management of iOS, just looking through the information, you can always set up a fresh JSS and then restore a database backup to your test environment that was made from your production database"

I have not had the time nor need to try it yet, but do have a macbook set aside for when I do. I don't expect to load up a test environment.

Hope this helps,

chris

[nigelmarrion]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for sharing your detailed situation and advice.

We find that even with a wickedly fast internal network and mass storage environment that we see slow app installations when 10's of students attempt to download a new app or update at the same time. But it works.

Early reports on JAMF Nation showed some users were having problems with 9.0 with In House apps. I see in the release notes for 9.12 that an issue has been fixed when In House apps are hosted on a web server and have spaces in the file names has been fixed. Maybe that was the only problem. I don't know.

I separately was advised by JAMF support to hold off upgrading from 8.72 until Casper 9.2 was available, which I assume will be pretty soon. No clue as to why.

Nigel