Lesson 5. Testing and Troubleshooting

Time	This lesson takes about 1 hour to complete.
Goals	Isolate and resolve issues with Apple Software Restore, NetBoot, Network Install, and Custom Install images
	Isolate and resolve issues with custom installation packages
	Use a click matrix to better manage images
	Check Installer application log files for errors when installing custom packages

Consider the following scenario: You build an ASR image containing Mac OS X and some standard applications used in your department. The image also contains a package to install a specialty application from a remote server. You place the image on a file server and use NetRestore to restore the image on the computers in four of your sites. The restoration goes well, and you are able to run a couple of the applications on one computer at each of the four sites. You also test the package installation at one of the sites. The next morning, you get paged to come into each of the sites. The users are able to start up their computers and run their applications, but they are unable to save any work to their network home folders. Furthermore, the application installed from the server using the custom package is unable to access its own template files, making the applications virtually unusable.

Before you distribute images or packages, you must first put them through a series of hardware and software tests for compatibility and usability. This lesson will show you how to develop a plan or checklist that takes into account the variety of systems you support, the network dependencies you work within, and the user accounts that you support.