Done. Or nearly.

I am waiting for the last of the intel macs to finish being imaged. I would have been here much, much longer, if not for some creative thinking.

I grabbed my master machine from the G5 lab, stuck it on a cart, and rolled it into the MacPro lab. I connected a machine to it using target firewire disk mode, and applied the image to it's boot drive with NetRestore. I also copied the disk image itself to the machine's data partition. I used my firewire drive to apply the image to another machine, and copied the disk image to that machine's data drive as well.

This gave me three computers to use to apply the image to other computers, using target firewire mode, as well as my single firewire drive. I turned off the verify target option, to speed things up as well (after seeing that applying via target fw mode is less than half as fast as the firewire drive).

Even though using target firewire drive mode was much slower, it is still faster than using only a single firewire drive on 14 machines. I would have been done even faster, but it took awhile to get things set up. A 36 GB disk image takes time to copy, and even more time if you are using NetRestore at the same time. The first two machines took over an hour to build, with one taking an hour and 40 minutes.

In any case, if a couple of minutes the last machine will be done, and I can go to dinner with my son, then shopping for clothes, as I have nothing nice to wear anymore, and groceries, since we have nothing fast and healthy to cook left in the house.

In 14 hours, I'll be back at work, ready for the new semester. I intend to sleep at least ten of those hours... ;)