Hintonblogger

Yes, I'm still alive. Though after a 2am work session for the San Tan Incorporation Committee website I am wondering. Today while setting up Greenfield Junior High for the upcoming school year, we ran into a problem of how to update thirty wireless laptops with the latest OS X updates (almost 235mb worth of stuff). There were 12 different updates with 5 or 6 separate updates that required restarts.

A colleague of mine and myself found a program called, Iceberg, that allows the user to create a metapackage - a collection of packages. Iceberg allowed us to group sets of updates together, minimizing the restart time and baby-sitting of the update process. While it took a little while to learn the program and then troubleshoot the correct sequence of updates, I think it was well worth the time spent. Once we got the twelve updates narrowed down to two metapackages, we were able to quickly distribute those packages via firewire hard drives and the update process was completed an hour and a half later.

Now that I understand the process I can quickly group pre-built packages into a metapackage to ease distribution and speed up the install process. Of course, creating a package from scratch (i.e. from application and support files) would be nice too. I guess that will have to wait though, as for now, I recommend checking out Iceberg if you administer any Macs....