Fusion drive formatting DS

Patrick van NerumLeave a comment

On our educational Macs we use a 2 partitions setup to keep the students data separate from the system partition. In Deploystudio we can’t use the Fusiondrive setup workflow to accomplish this setup. Therefore I wrote a shell script to accomplish this. You can find the script on my Github repository where it will also be updated if needed in the future.

#!/bin/sh
# Created by Patrick van Nerum, Willem de Kooning academy
# Create a Fusion drive and split it up in 2 partitions. We use this second partition where students store their data.
# Still needs some finishing touches
# It works for a 1 TB Fusion drive

# unmount disk

diskutil unmountDisk disk2

# Format the ssd and hdd
diskutil eraseDisk jhfs+ ssd disk0
diskutil eraseDisk jhfs+ hdd disk1

# Create the fusion drive
diskutil cs create Fusion disk0 disk1

sleep 5

VolumeGroupNew=`diskutil cs list | grep Logical\ Volume\ Group | sed -e "s/^.* //"`
diskutil cs createVolume $VolumeGroupNew jhfs+ Macintosh 100%

sleep 5

# Create the second partition

VolumeShrink=`diskutil cs list | grep Logical\ Volume | tail -1 |sed -e "s/^.* //"`
diskutil cs resizeStack $VolumeShrink 250g jhfs+ DataStorage 750g

exit 0

 

Vectorworks 2015 benelux version package

Patrick van NerumLeave a comment

If you received an installation dvd for Vectorworks 2015 educational Benelux version then you’re in for a (little) treat. The original US version contains a silent installer. But someone decided to build a custom installer using Applescript and Java….When you start the installer it needs the deprecated Apple Java 6. Java 6 is also needed for the Vectorworks application. For our Munki environment I need to create a custom installer to deploy the application on our fleet.

There are a couple of issues I found we need to fix or to make it work for our environment.

  • Fix the permissions and group on “/Applications/Vectorworks 2015 US”
  • Fix the setup to connect to the license server for the user
  • Fix the pop-up message asking for admin credentials to fix some permissions when the application is started up for the first time

I created 2 different packages to keep things a bit more flexible. One for the application and one for the license. We have a VW license server running with a USB dongle that the client needs to connect to.

I use Munkipkg to create this installer. You can use every tool that suits your need. The steps below general steps

Application installer.

  1. Install the application, plugins and updates.
  2. Run the application as admin and as a normal user.
  3. These 2 folders need to be packaged in one installer: “/Applications/Vectorworks\ 2015 US” and “/Library/QuickLook/VectorWorksQL.qlgenerator”. If the “/Library/QuickLook/VectorWorksQL.qlgenerator” isn’t available on the harddrive a process is started from “~/Library/Application Support/Vectorworks” called VectorWorksHelperTool asking for admin credentials
  4. Fix the permissions from 775 admin:admin to root:wheel 755 for both folders!
  5. Create the package.

License installer.

  1. During the initial installation and startup of Vectorworks it ask to put in the new serial number and the old one. Therefore we need to package 2 plist files:
    1. /Library/Preferences/net.nemetschek.vectorworks.2015.plist and net.nemetschek.vectorworks.plist (Check permissions!)
    2. There needs to be an xml file in the current user’s home to tell Vectorworks to connect to which license server and use what kind of modules. In our environment we use a standard home called “student”. If you don’t know the user home directory during installation you need to create a mechanism to install this file: “~/Library/Application Support/Vectorworks/2015/Settings/SeriesG/LoginDialog.xml”
    3. Create the package