Ellipsis

Yesterday I rescued a co-worker’s computer from a bad 10.4.9 update. My salvation was this post, to which I added my own comments.

At least I learned a few general principles, namely that mucked up Macs can be saved by the general principle that I carried in from Linux – boot from Knoppix and repair the damage. In this case, we boot from an Install disk (one which explicitly says “Hold down C to to boot to Install” and the Installer will give you a Terminal and a command line. From their it’s a matter of running hdutil and open to mount disk images and launch applications.

I’m having to come up to speed on managing fleet of Macs, and fast, or else their going to eat up all my time. I’d like a week to play with OS X server and Puppet, thank you very much.