At the recent MacTech conference in Los Angeles I got a chance to sit in a workshop led by Graham Gilbert walking us through his open source imaging tool, Imagr.
This was a perfect follow-up to last year’s awesome demo by Pepijn Bruienne at last year’s MacTech where he demoed his BSDPy netboot replacement running in a Docker container net booting and imaging a new VM in VMWare. Amazing live netboot demo with bonus points for writing your own netboot replacement in Python, stuffing it into a Docker container!
This year, Graham Gilbert led us through setting up BSDPy Docker container, getting the link to VMware working and using his Imagr tool to image a new VM instance of OS X. Fun stuff.
Here are some screenshots:
- VMWare booting up looking for NetBoot services
2. The lovely NetBoot globe spinning
3. Progress!
4. Image NetBoot image booted
Netboot image booted, but there’s an issue with the plist I built by hand. Some of the keys and strings got mixed up when copying from the whiteboard. Thanks to Rich Trouton who was sitting next to me who helped me diff his plist with mine to find how I’d messed it up. Easy to fix, slightly tricky to find. Luckily you only have to edit this plist to do initial set up.
5. Imagr start up
6. Imagr starting, password first
7. Imagr restoring OS X image
8. Imgr completed workflow
9. Shutting docker down
Reference:
Graham Gilbert’s blog post with slides of the workshop.
http://grahamgilbert.com/blog/2015/11/12/mactech-2015-hands-on-with-imagr/
Pepijn Bruienne’s blog, Enterprise Mac
http://enterprisemac.bruienne.com