Now it’s time to talk about basic configuration tasks.

Obviously the whole point of imaging is to automate the process as much as possible. With InstaDMG, you get the ability to add/remove/update software very easily when creating the image, and luckily you also get the ability to customize a lot of other things like system settings, user accounts, etc.

Every configuration change is done by adding packages to the instadmg/InstallerFiles/InstaUp2DatePackages/ directory. Any third-party software you want to install? Throw the package in there. My recommendation is to install only the bare minimum this way and then complete the software installations using a tool like Munki. Having said that, I’m going to show you how to add the Munkitools package to your image. First, download munkitools. This package contains the tools for both the server and the client. Add that .mpkg to your...

[EDIT] - InstaDMG has been deprecated in favor of AutoDMG, which I also write about.

And that is documentation.

Let me start off by linking you to InstaDMG, and telling you that it works great. After that I’ll have to let you know that the documentation was last updated at the end of 2010, so it isn’t very helpful when attempting to create an image for Lion or Mountain Lion. Well, never fear, because I am about to walk you through the process. This is going to be a four part series.

This first section is going to be about creating a clean, never booted image.

The second section will focus on basic system configuration/adding packages to that image

And finally the third and final section will talk about creating a recovery partition if you need one.

So, on to the materials…

BASE IMAGE FUN

The first thing to do would be to run:

svn checkout http://instadmg.googlecode.com/svn/trunk...

Today at work I developed a script to migrate users to a new home folder. This was done with automation in mind – every user will now have the same home folder name (but individual RealNames) so that scripts can be deployed without individual customization.

The script looks like this at time of posting:

!/bin/sh
 Creator: Taylor Price
 Contact: tayworm@gmail.com
 Website: drpebcak.svbtle.com
      github.com/drpebcak


 Please run as root.
 This script is meant to migrate an existing user to a new home folder as painlessly as possible.

 Set Current shortname variable
E=""

set Target shortname variable
F=""

 Copies current home folder to new location
ditto /Users/"$E" /Users/"$F"

 Reads UniqueID and saves value to $A
A=$(dscl . -read /Users/"$E" UniqueID)
 Takes $A and shaves off everything but the 3 digit UniqueID and saves to $B
B=$(echo $A | tail -c 5)
 Reads RealName and saves