Radmind - 1.13

I've been using radmind for a while now and it's made my life so much easier. I can manage any number of clients without a second thought. Best part is, this great product is free, has good documentation and a helpful mailing list.

very nicely where Assimilator leaves off in the OS9 world. There is a bit of a learning curve, however it has some similarities with Assimilator and a number of other enterprise-class software deployment solutions I've worked with. The GUI tool, Radmind Assistant is coming along well. You can practically do the whole thing on the client end from the GUI (for those who are CLI-phobic or just have difficulty remembering some of Radmind's specific command-line options). The important thing to remember is that it is a layering approach - base loadset + a loadset for each application, etc. The merging capability is great; being able to merge applications and their successive updates into a single loadset saves a lot of hassle and a lot of mucking around packaging the whole thing again. One thing: a loadset doesn't seem to be able to include removal of items, eg: installing StuffIt Lite 6.5.1 results in the removal of StuffIt Expander from /Applications/Utilities, which Radmind seems to be able to work out, but not able to apply on the server (I think it's necessary to hack StuffIt Expander out of the base loadset). The trickiest part so far is that OSX isn't really portable across different hardware, so a base loadset doesn't necessarily boot different machines (eg: iMac vs PowerMac). This isn't Radmind's fault, but it would be nice if it was accommodated in the original Negative loadset (probably just need to check what imageJaguar is doing when it offers to make an image "portable"). Anyway, pair Radmind up with iHook and a few shell scripts and you're half-way there to lab management for OSX.