reliable management of dual-boot labs using radmind
In a dual-boot (Mac OS/Windows) lab environment, management of system and application software for the non-preferred operating system (OS) can be a real pain. Our Mac OS was maintained nightly, but our Windows system often went unbooted for weeks at a time. The goal was to make both OSes easily maintainable, providing a consistent user experience from machine to machine. Utilizing an NTFS driver to allow read/write access to the Windows partition, I've developed a strategy for pushing out changes to the Windows environment via Mac OS Radmind tools. Additional machine-specific changes are applied to Windows upon first boot. This paper will illustrate the generalities of how we are now managing our dual-boot computers at Reed College, as well as identify some specific challenges we are currently facing.
dual-boot boot mac os windows