SCVi's New Mac Book Air Cart

Due to some wonderful parent donations, SCVi was able to purchase a shiny new Mac Book Air cart. This was a very exciting purchase and something we had wanted for a long time.  The Mac Book Air is a great computer for student use with its small size, light weight, long lasting battery, and durable aluminum case. The Bretford Mobility Cart holds them all securely and charges them when not in use.

Each machine has its own slot in the cart and can charge while connected. We labeled each one to match its home slot.

We needed to get these machines set up for student use. After some discussions with other mac administrators we came up with the following strategy. It is documented here in the hopes that it can help others.

Step #1 Set up the first machine.
The first step was to set up a "Master" machine that would be used to create an image. This image could then be used to clone the rest of the machines.

A) Applications
We have a passion for free and open source software at our school. There are a wide array of open source programs that run on Windows, Linux, and the Mac and we make heavy use of them. We want these apps to be installed on all the machines so we set up. Here is a list of apps we usually install. Not all of them are open source, but they are all free to download and install.

1. Firefox Web Browser
2. Google Chrome Browser
3. Gimp Photo Editor
4. Inkscape Photo Editor
5. Open Office (Spreadsheets, Text Documents, Drawings)
6. Adobe Flash Player

 Once installed, we add them to the start bar.

B) Accounts
We use local accounts on our machines.  The student account automatically logs on when you start the machine and is shared by all users.  Our Tech Support folks and the teachers have admin logins so they can change things. 

 

C) Updates And Tests
We make sure the machine is updated and test all the applications that are installed. We also verify different web sites used by the school and make sure Flash and Java are working properly.

Step #2  Making An Image
Once we had the first machine set up, we needed to create an image of it. Unfortunately,. the Mac Books we purchased did not have Fire Wire or Thunderbolt, so all of this had to be done over the USB interface.  Another side effect that was not expected was that we were NOT able to boot these machines in Target Disk Mode. (hold down "T" when starting up your Mac).  We had hoped to boot them in target disk mode (which basically makes them act like a portable hard drive) and image/overwrite them in this mode. Though, since it was not available on these machines,  we had to use 3rd party portable hard drives to  create the image.

Another lesson we learned was that we were not able to image or write to a partition that was in use. This means we had to involve 3 drives to create the image.

1. A drive to Boot From.  - We used the bootable USB stick that came with the Mac Book Air.
2. A drive to image - This is the internal hard drive on the Mac Book Air that has been configured as a "master' image. It is set up how you want all the machines to be so you can clone it on to all the others
3. A place to write the image. We used a portable hard drive. 

This image shows the configuration. The small white thumb drive is the restore disk that comes with the Mac Book Air.

Once we had booted off the bootable USB stick, we opened up disk utility. We also plugged in the portable hard drive which made three drives visible.  Using the "restore" option in disk utility, we wrote over the portable hard drive with the root drive of our "master" mac book air.  This can be done by dropping the icon of the root hard drive to the "Source" line and dragging the icon for the portable hard drive to the "Destination" drive.  This screen capture shows the typical scenario.

Step #3 Clone Machines
With an image available on our portable hard drive, we were ready to clone it onto our new machines. We again booted off the USB stick that came with our Mac Mini and ran disk utility. We then wrote the image from our portable hard drive onto the root drive of the mac book air. The procedure was basically the opposite of step #2.  You boot off the USB stick and run disk utility again. You drop the icon of the portable hard drive to the "Source" line and drag the icon for the Mac Air root  hard drive to the "Destination" drive.

 With this process, we were able to set up the whole cart in a few hours.