With the release of VAS 3.5 last year, there’s been a marked increase in Mac interest and activity for me. One thing I had to do whilst on-site with an Italian client was give them a way to deploy VAS to 300+ Macs without visiting each machine. Basically, they needed a scripted way to install an mpkg or dmg file onto the Mac. In the unix and linux world, this is pretty common. All of the major vendors have clear documentation on how to do this.
However, Apple’s approach is always through the GUI. And finding an example on how to do this from the command line took quite some time. So to save someone the trouble in the future, here is the script I sent over to the client. Since writing it in March, I’ve had at least a half dozen requests for it inside of Quest, so it made sense to put this out there publicly. And while this one is specific to VAS (extra bonus if you’re running VAS on Mac), it should work for most Mac packages, and should only require a minor tweaking.
Note: the only requirement is that some sort of remote login option be available – there’s simply no point to using this script if you’re going to sit in front of a Mac inside the terminal window. The way to do this is to enable ‘Remote Login,’ which is off by default, and that will enable ssh on the mac so you can connect to it with something like Putty.
As an added bonus, here’s a 6 minute video showing this being done: http://www.idmwizard.com/quest/vas35_mac_install_manual/index.html
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# install the mac client using the command line
# first, mount the dmg file
hdiutil attach /<somelocation>/VAS-3.5.0.33.dmg
# that should create a new volume which we can cd to cd /Volumes/VAS-Installer
# this is the actual install of VAS onto the machine sudo /usr/sbin/installer -pkg VAS.mpkg/ -target /
# install is done, so we can now unmount the dmg - change directories first, though! cd /opt/quest/bin hdiutil detach /Volumes/VAS-Installer
# join the machine to the AD domain # sudo /opt/quest/bin/vastool -u <aduser> join -c "ou=apple,ou=xxx,ou=yyyy,dc=root,dc=dom" root.dom
# better yet, join the machine with a pre-created account
# HOST=`hostname | awk -F. '{print $1}'`; /opt/quest/bin/vastool -u host/ -w $HOST join -f -n ${HOST}.root.dom root.dom
# update DNS record in AD (DDNS is in the VAS package install) # but if your mac is not using dhcp, I don't think this is run sudo /opt/quest/sbin/dnsupdate <IP>
# since macs are 'personal' # there's usually 1 user on the machine - and you probably already have # 1 AD user ready to use # so copy the default user to the new AD user # (this may take some time depending on the folder size) sudo cp -R /Users/<localuser> /Users/<ADUser>
# reown all the files to the AD users (<ADGroup> can also be a local group) sudo chown -R <ADUser>:<ADGroup> /Users/<ADUser>
# later, when everyone is happy, and it is all working, run this to get rid of the local user profile sudo rm -rf /Users/<localuser>
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