From: kanefsky@halcyon.com (Steve Kanefsky)
Subject: Re: Use of external HD to setup multiple new Mac's/PC's ?
Organization: The 23:00 News and Mail Service
Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 17:58:20 GMT

In article <87026@netnews.upenn.edu> jensen@ben.dev.upenn.edu (Christopher Jensen) writes:
>Hi,
>
>For many of our new installations of Mac's and PC's, we install
>the same core system software (System 7.x, Dos 5, Windows 3.1, etc)
>and the same fonts, and the same network card drivers for the respective
>machines.

>Be it mac or pc, we end up installing multiple megabytes of the same
>software from floppies, answer the same install questions, and then
>juggle floppies until the basic installation is complete.
>
>We then do some minor "tweaking" of config.sys, autoexec.bat, and System7
>control panel settings.
>
>This process seems grossly inefficient - especially when setting up
>labs with multiple identical machines. As an example lets say you have
>a lab to set up with 10 Quadra's and/or 10 PC 486's.
>
>It would be ideal if we could custom configure an external hard drive
>and then use that hard drive to set up the other internal hard drives
>of the individual machines (no floppy aerobics, no installer questions, etc)
>
>Questions:
>
>Can any one suggest some techniques to improve the efficiency
>of setting up multiple machines ?


Since you mention network cards, your machines must be on a network.
That makes your job a lot easier.

Back when I ran some Mac labs, I used a shareware utility called
VolumeImage, which would take a "slave" hard drive and make it look
just like a "master" hard drive of your choosing.  Furthermore, it did
this intelligently -- only adding files to the slave drive which were
missing, deleting extra files which were on the slave drive but not the
master drive, moving misplaced files back to the folder they belonged
in, closing open windows, etc.  Thus, it was not only a great way to
configure the hard drives in the first place, but it was a great way to
keep them looking identical.  I just created some startup floppies with
the VolumeImage program on them and set VolumeImage as the startup
application.  This way, all I needed to do to bring a machine back in
line with the master was restart with one of these floppies.  The
master hard disk was mounted as an AppleShare volume and the local hard
disk was brought in line with it (I imagine you could use System 7 file
sharing instead of an AppleShare file server, but this was before
System 7).  If I wanted to install new software on every machine, all I
had to do was install it on the master disk and then reboot all the
other machines with the VolumeImage floppy.

The one problem with VolumeImage was when very large changes had to be
made to a large number of machines on a LocalTalk network.  The network
got so bogged down that it took forever to bring all the machines up to
date.  This is because each machine was requesting the same information
from the master disk, so the same information was being sent over and
over again unnecessarily.  I don't run Mac labs anymore, but I remember
seeing a utility recently (also shareware) that claimed it could
broadcast the data to all machines simultaneously and thus update any
number of machines in the same time it would take to do a single
machine with VolumeImage.  I don't know if it has the intelligence of
VolumeImage when it comes to incrementally updating a hard disk, but
there's no reason you couldn't use them both.  It might even be faster
to completely replace the contents of all the hard disks on a network
rather than incrementally update each one, because of the parallelism.
The incremental approach will still be faster if you need to quickly
update one machine, however.  Whenever one of the lab users had a
problem with a Mac, I would just reboot with a VolumeImage disk, let it
do the update, and chances are the problem would be fixed.  It only
took a couple of minutes and was usually faster than trying to track
down the particular problem.


On the PC side, there may be similar utilities, but I wasn't aware of
any and our PCs weren't networked most of the time anyway.  What I
would is make a backup of the master disk (using FastBack or whatever
was available) onto HD floppies, then restore from those floppies onto
the other machines.  The trick I used to speed things up was to form a
pipeline.  I would start a restore on all the machines, then insert the
first disk into the first machine.  When the first machine was done
with the first disk, I'd put the second disk into the first machine and
the first disk into the second machine.  When that was done, the third
disk would go into the first machine, the second disk into the second
machine, and the first disk into the third machine.  And so on.  This 
involved lots of running around and swapping floppies, but because of the 
pipeline it was very efficient.  I even used this method on the Macs sometimes 
when I needed to do a complete replacement of the hard drive (because of the
aforementioned problem with massive updates on LocalTalk networks).
Depending on the number of machines and their physical locations, you
can make two or three sets of backup floppies and have multiple
pipelines going if you wish.



Hope this helps,

--
Steve Kanefsky

Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.hardware