Tag Archives: Bench

Changes to Build Bench Build Procedures

Due to reports of build inconsistencies on mac computers. The Build Bench Process has been changed. So what is changing?

  • Macs are moving back to being imaged by Deploy Studio. The process is now essentially a two step process for the basic build.  1: Image. 2: Install casper. I made it as easy and foolproof as I could. With the move to deploy studio, all of the enrollment policies in Casper have been changed so they do not install software automatically. This will make the execution of the quick add package a lot quicker.
  • The builds will no longer include department specific user templates as certain updates have changed the process and now require a complete overhaul to continue it. Which is too much maintenance for something so small.
  • I spoke to Angela, Lucas, Sam and Patrick and Office 2016 for mac is now on the image. Through our testing it has been good, and we feel it is important to get the online archive functionality to our mac users.
  • For macs to be joined to domain: As a reminder, they should only be joined in special circumstances where there are a lot of users using the machine. The machine should only be joined to the ONID domain. You can use the casper policy “CN – Onid – Domain Bind”
  • For Field Techs building macs in their free time. We ask that it be done at the build bench using deploy studio for consistency sake. Using our process completely. Once the rest of CS moves to Milne we can have a couple of ports available for the field techs that can access deploy studio. But as for now all mac computers should be built using the deploy studio process in the Milne 120 build bench.

Also as a reminder: iWork is to be only installed on machines after Late 2013. There is a smart group in casper that indicates whether or not they are eligible for free iWork. If their machine is not in that smart group, the customer must purchase the software from the app store. Under no circumstances should we be installing the software on machines that are not eligible.

As always, if you have any questions, feel free to let me know!

BIOS Updates removed from the Build Process

The Build Bench will cease performing BIOS updates on every machine. This decision has been made after a series of bad BIOS updates that have cause delays and, at times, irresolvable hardware failure.

We will still perform BIOS updates for brand new models and firmware updates for tablets.

We recommend that BIOS updates be reserved for the later steps of the troubleshooting process.

New MDT Service for the Bench

The Bench will be moving over to our new MDT server this Monday, April 12, 2015. While we at the Bench are very excited, there might be short periods where we will be unable to perform builds as we work out the kinks. Jim Galloway will be camping down here to help us with getting the bugs worked out.

Since we may experience outages and delays, please do not take on any RUSH jobs. If a job is a rush, please be very clear that we will do our best, but cannot make any guarantees as to the turn-around time.

This Friday we will be building many loaners to have on hand if the need arises and we are down.