[NPMUG] NetRestore by Mike Bombich End of Life Today

[Rob Lines]

http://www.bombich.com/software/netrestore.html

"...Today, however, I stand at a precipice. NetRestore resides upon an
extremely old base of code that has become increasingly more fragile
and difficult to maintain. The strategy within NetRestore has also
seen its day pass. Several years ago I scoped out dramatic changes for
"NetRestore 4," but in the years since it became clear that I simply
didn't have time to completely rewrite NetRestore from the ground up.
I also feel relieved of this responsibility as the market for
deployment tools has matured. In particular, I am impressed with
Deploy Studio, a suite of tools that very closely resembles where I
wanted to take NetRestore 4. So, today I am announcing the retirement
of NetRestore.

I will continue to provide a link to NetRestore for the next couple
months, but I strongly encourage anyone that is building a deployment
strategy to consider Deploy Studio instead. I would also like to
clarify that this decision has no bearing on my development efforts
towards Carbon Copy Cloner -- I am fully committed to continued
development and support of that product for the forseeable future.

Finally, I want to thank everyone that has given me positive feedback
and encouragement over the last six years. In the technology world,
nothing can compare to the philanthropy of the Macintosh community and
I am so proud to be a part of it. While I won't be writing deployment
software, I do look forward to ongoing contributions to this community
as I am able in the form of articles and best practices."


As someone that managed a very large environment of Macs as well as
PCs I would have never been able to do it without Netrestore.  When I
started at my school district I was imaging each machine by hand from
an external drive and having to rename each machine and make all the
comfiguration changes.  While maintaining a few machines like that is
okay the 900+ that I had was just unwieldy.  Then came imaging from
the network but still having to name the machine and connect them to
the two directories.  Nirvana came when I found the auto naming
scripts and a few other scripting solutions.  Today, three years after
I developed the solution, the school district is still using it to
image their machines.  Now a technician doesn't even have to go out to
deal with a software issue they can just have someone in the building
reboot it and boot off the network and 30 minutes later the machine is
fresh and ready for the user to log in.  The Windows PCs are no where
even close to that even still.

Rob