[Brass]

It appears that one of the main advantages (to Apple) of BootCamp, is that it may (eventually) provide Apple with not only the option of selling to Windows-only businesses, but to sell to mixed Mac/Windows businesses more efficiently and profitably.

One outcome of this, for educational institutions, could be the potential to have computer labs full of dual-boot Macs, and the students can sit at ANY computer in ANY lab, and use which ever operating system they choose, just by rebooting and holding the OPTION key down.

This seems like a fantastic possibility to me. However, it does raise one serious issue that I can think of: OS Maintentance.

All operating systems require regular maintenace, either for security updates, or for institution-specific reconfiguration. These are usually done overnight, and broadcast to all the machines in the lab while they are not in use. How can this be done effectively, when half (or at least some) of the machines are not currently running in the OS that needs to be updated?

In particular, if one of the OS's only gets used occasionally, it may not often get a chance to be kept up to date. If such a Mac then gets rebooted into the rarely used OS, it may be very much out of date in terms of security updates, or other updates, and is therefore somewhat dangerous to have on the network, or perhaps incompatible with other current services.

What are the options for maintenance for OS's in such labs?

I can imagine that a startup utility could be run (in each OS) to check for updates at boot time, but that could mean some ridiculously long boot times for students who simply want to reboot into a different operating system, if they happen to be the unlucky person who's the first to use that OS on that Mac since the most recent update(s) became available.

Any other ideas?

[f1000]

How about rebooting and updating the software in the AM hours when everyone is asleep?

[icruise]

I've never actually worked in a lab or anything, so I'm not sure if this is accurate or not, but as I understand it a lot of places (and even the Apple store) copy a fresh disk image to their machines every night. If that's the case, I wouldn't think this would be an issue, since the master image would have all the updates applied to it.

[shiff]

There are tons of options avaliable for this. The only slight problem will be that the machines dual boot and I do not think, currently, there is a way to script it or make it boot to a particular OS programatically. I know you can set the "startup disk" but not in a script.

Idealy you would have Apple remote desktop on the macs and you can use sms or sus to update the windows boxes.

Also depending on how technical you wanna get you can even setup the network to not even allow incoming and outgoing network traffic on the machine if it doesnt meet a certain patch level so that if you miss one; there is no harm. I could go on and on as there are tons of options.

[Brass]

Originally Posted by f1000

How about rebooting and updating the software in the AM hours when everyone is asleep?

I guess this is the crux of the problem. Firstly, you've got to reboot all of those machines into one fo the OS's (eg, Windows). Then wait some "best guess" time for that to have completed on all machines. Then install all the Windows updates. Then reboot into the other OS (eg, Mac OS X), and then wait some "best guess" time, and then apply all the Mac OS X updates.

I'm sure there will be some way to do it eventually, but currently, how do you remotely, and automatically force an Intel-based Mac to boot into a particular OS, irrespective of which OS it is/was currently running?

[CharlesS]

If the Windows partition is FAT, you have write access to it, so you could probably push updates there with Radmind while booted in OS X. Granted, that's non-ideal, but it could work, I think.

[Brass]

hmmm... some interesting responses. It seems that there will be some options, in any case.

I think there is no doubt that such labs will be more complicated and more difficult to maintain (more difficult and complex than two labs, each with a different OS). But the advantages in giving the users (and the business) more choice, are tremendous. Such labs, if well maintained, would be a great benefit to the institution that implements them.

I hope they put them in place where I work one of these days, but the management here are very anti-apple in most cases.