Hey folks, I've built several disk images using the OS9 version of ASR (both for OSX and OS9), and, while it works real nicely, it's really slow.
So, I am now using to command-line asr tool that shipped with OSX 10.2.2, and the speed is oh so much better. Not only is the creation faster (because I can make multiple images at the same time), but the deployment speed over a 100BaseT network is under ten minutes (beautiful, in my book).
However, I've had a number of problems with this approach, and I don't really know how to solve them.
1) The biggest one right now is that the internet browsers [Camino, Netscape, IE], excluding Safari, won't render web pages well. I believe that they would render a simple HTML page fine, but when it comes to things such as hotmail, it'll render the outlining objects, but it won't fill in the content.
Using Hotmail as my example, the web page has a blue background with a lighter blue "tabbed folder" interface. It'll draw interface, but not the content. It's a consistant problem shared with IE, Netscape, and Camino, and Safari seems to be immune to it.
2) MS Word has become oddly unstable, but only for particular documents. I had a professor trying to print out his syllabi for his classes, and Word kept crashing on him. I tried a number of other word documents, but couldn't recreate the same effect. I've seen a number such error messages on other machines (MS Word has unexpectedly quit), so I'm thinking it's a bit more common than just that computer or just that prof's documents.
3) Custom icons and aliases in one account of my two-user setup always seem to break. Aliases turn into blank text documents, and folders revert back to standard folder icons, with an empty "Icon" file within said folder.
I actually have a work around to this one. Instead of aliases, I've taken to creating symbolic links to apps or documents on the machine, and an afp://servername/share finder document to access network drives. And I've remedied my icon problem by moving the icon'ed folders (as well as the afp:// docs) out of the user's home directory and into the Shared directory. No idea why this last step works, but it does.
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All in all, I was just curious as to how many people out there are doing the asr thing, and what problems you might be encountering in your endeavors, and what fixes you may have come up with.
**********Update**********
None of these problems effect the Admin user, just the normal lab user. Even the web broswers work fine when run as the Admin. Upon noticing this, I hopped back into the Lab user, and checked out the preferences folder. Remember what I said about the aliases turning into blank text files? It's happening to the preferences as well. It seems this is happening to pretty much all files of any type from /Users/LabUser/*. Any clue why this is happening not on the source computer, but on a deployed image made from the source computer?
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