Filed under: Enterprise, Software, Education
Farewell to a friend: NetRestore goes EOL
Go on, I dare you -- name an individual who has done more to improve the lot of Mac OS X system administrators than Mr. Mike Bombich. Over the course of the past six years, while working both at educational institutions and as an Apple SE, Mike has given of his time and energy in an effort to deliver some deeply useful tools: Carbon Copy Cloner, BootPicker, NetRestore and more. CCC was one of the first effective & free drive cloning tools for Mac OS X; NetRestore set the standard for deployment frameworks and led the way in Boot Camp compatibility for restoring Windows partitions on the Mac.CCC continues on, but we have to say goodbye to the other half of the dynamic duo: Mike announced that he has end-of-life'd the NetRestore utility, citing a lack of time for the necessary work to bring it forward to current standards and future functionality. It's true that the basic capabilities of NetRestore have been replicated elsewhere (particularly Winclone for Boot Camp partitions, and Apple's NetBoot services in Leopard Server for machine imaging over the LAN), but many have built very capable and complex deployment strategies on top of NetRestore's PHP and database support. It's a shame to see it go.
If you're shedding a tear at the departure of NetRestore, you might take Mike's advice and give DeployStudio a look -- many of the deployment approaches he had planned for "NetRestore 4" can be found in that free and actively-developed system. DeployStudio will allow you to image machines from a local boot drive or from a NetBoot repository; you can even create an image server for your Windows machines and wipe them remotely. Another option, and one that permits very rapid customization of your image config, is the InstaDMG project.
For the latest help and tips on deployment strategies, be sure to visit afp548.com and macenterprise.org.
Thanks to Josh Z for the tip.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Luigi193 said 3:41PM on 11-17-2008
It should go open source!
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Tony said 4:13PM on 11-17-2008
I use NetRestore all the time. All of our images were created with NetRestore Helper, and whenever we use NetRestore to re-image machines all the time. Mike was always very helpful, too, if we had any questions when first using the software. Sad to see such a great tool go EOL.
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Dustin said 4:27PM on 11-17-2008
It's sad to see this very useful tool going away. Though at least at my work we have moved to packaged based imaging vs. monolithic imaging via JAMF's Casper Suite but for small deployments with similar images there was no beating Netboot for ease of use and simplicity.
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Jay said 4:42PM on 11-17-2008
This is very sad news.
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rekkart said 8:05PM on 11-17-2008
Mike has done an outstanding job developing and maintaining this application. I am sad to see it go. I tried DeployStudio today to drop an image on 10 MacBooks and banged my head against the wall for two hours trying to get it to work without success. I went back to NetRestore and was imaging away in a few minutes.
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Todd said 9:18AM on 11-18-2008
When my boss dumped about 30 MacBooks in my lap on a Friday, and said we needed to have BootCamped installs of Windows on them for a training session she was doing on Monday, NetRestore (which didn't officially support imaging Windows partitions, but managed to do it anyway) saved the day. And possibly her job.
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Jack said 9:41AM on 11-18-2008
Is Open Source an option?
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Phunkidude said 12:02PM on 11-18-2008
Terrible news. I use this app all the time.
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