PSU Blast Image Config
Revision History

Updated 03/09/2008

Revision History of PSU Blast Image Config ("BIC"):

Version 2.x:

2.8.0b4	Release Date: 03/09/2008. FIXED: Fixed an issue when specifying the restored disk volume should have DHCP configured for the on board ethernet port, and the 'DNS Server' list on the restored disk would still have the previously stattically listed DNS servers. Now a totally new location is correctly created on the restored disk which erases all settings and then the IP mode is set to DHCP. Before this fix, the network settings were merged on to the previous settings. This was a bug fix directly in BIC 2.8.0b4 and not ncutil. FIXED: Fixed the known issue of volumes with the same or very similiar names being listed with the wrong titles in the 'Disk To Restore' popup menu in the main Restore dialog. Much more robust code to detect and match up volumes with their shell paths, Macintosh reference numbers, and lost more stuff, too exciting (or boring!) to list here. FIXED: Now detecting if a specified local disk image file to restore isn't found before starting the restore process, and asking to re-select it at its new path. FIXED: Fixed error checking for disabling the spotlight indexing on the restore volume selected. Spotlight indexing was actually successfully disabled, but the PSU BIC run log reported that it wasn't. FIXED: Removed all code using REALbasic's "app.DoEvents" method in favor of a much better method ("App.SleepCurrentThread") to pause the code in BIC which then allows external processes (ie, "asr") that need the most priority to run as fast as possible. This change won't affect most people, but you may notice that some progress bars don't update as often, but BIC is still running. This is also preparing for the rewrite for BIC version 3.0 in the future. NEW: Now logging the total elapsed image restore time. I've wanted to see this information in the run log for ... too long, and now it's finally there. How exciting! In Progress: When either autorunning or not, if the 'Quit' button is clicked at the end of the restore process, I'm now putting up dialog telling user to select quit from the PSU BIC menu. Most people will use the restart or shutdown methods and won't be affected by this issue. I'm still looking into why it will not quit, but I suspect there's a timing issue of clearing up references to objects which is preventing the quit event to be carried out fully. This is a frustrating bug to track down and not easy to debug.
2.8.0b3	Internal PSU release. Fixing network settings, testing new sleep thread tricks. Not publicly released.
2.8.0b2	Release Date: 02/27/2008. NEW: Fully supports Leopard! (Mac OS X 10.5). Tested on Mac OS X 10.5.2 on both Intel and PowerPC (G4/G5) Macs. Tested on Mac OS X 10.4.11 on Intel and PowerPC G4/G5. NEW: Leopard (10.5) now refers to the ethernet port only as "Ethernet" versus "Built-in Ethernet", which was on Tiger and previous versions of OS X. This means that the image you are restoring should be at the same major (10.4, 10.5, etc.) version number as the OS X version that PSU BIC is running under - which has been true of any system restore util (BIC, etc.) since OS X first shipped. In the case where there are 2 or more ethernet ports, the first Ethernet port under Leopard is named "Ethernet 1" and the second one is named "Ethernet 2." Added code to support all of these naming conventions based on the version of OS X running and the number of Ethernet ports that are available when BIC is running. NEW: Added more robust image detection for 10.5 and error checking for http and asr (network) restored images. NEW: 10.5 required totally new code for detecting the block size and total blocks used in the restore image. This actually took a lot of work, but it's now done! NEW: Now includes ncutil 3.3.17b with the download. When new versions of ncutil are available they can be added to the 'ncutil' folder in the 'Resources' folder, as long as the same folder paths are the same. NEW: Updated code to now just look for ncutil in the PSU BIC 'Resources' folder. Ncutil is now included with the BIC 2.8.0b2 disk image download per Dr. Jeffrey T. Frey, developer of ncutil. FIXED: Fixed a bug where the Bluetooth interface was sometimes not disabled when all networking interfaces were being disabled. If you need to be able to configure the network settings on the restored disk but you want to leave Bluetooth enabled, send me an email and request it as I should be able to easily add it to a list of interfaces not to disable. Note that I've still see a few times where Bluetooth was still enabled after the system image was restored, and I'm looking into this. FIXED: Date and Time Bugs: Many changes to hopefully fix the problem with the hour being off by 1 when setting the date and time. Ie, "10:00 am" was entered and applied, and the time gets set to either "9:00 am" or "11:00 am." Depending on the time of the year (Daylight Savings Time), the time could be set one hour off from what was entered. Made attempt to set the clock twice to hopefully prevent the hour from being off by 1. Confirming that the date and time are correctly set, and if it isn't, notifying the user. More logging for the date and time entered for debugging purposes if this bug continues, it will be easier to diagnose a possible fix. FIXED: Used to be able to enter in a zero for one of the fields in the Date and Time dialog. NEW: Logging the available data blocks on the disk to restore for when calculating if the image to restore will fit or not. NEW: Removed need to use external psuGetCPUtype code, functionality now included within PSU BIC 2.8.0b2 and all future versions. NEW: Using more accurate system calls for obtaining the active running version of Mac OS X (using sys1, sys2, sys3 gestalt values) and logging it to the run log file for debugging purposes. Ie, "10.4.11" might have shown up as "10.4.9" in the run log files of the previous versions of PSU BIC. KNOWN ISSUE: Clicking the 'Quit' button at the end of setting the boot disk to the restored disk may not quite PSU BIC. You can safely select 'Quit' From the PSU Blast Image Config menu bar item for now. I'm working on tracking down this issue. Clicking the 'Restart' and 'Shutdown' buttons work as expected. KNOWN ISSUE:If there is more than one volume with the same or very similiar name (as it appears in the Finder) it's possible that one disk will show up as the wrong name in the 'Disk To Restore' popup menu, even thought BIC knows that it's a different disk. Be careful here, and open Disk Utility to determine which disk you want to erase and then look for the 'disk' id - ie, 'disk0s3' and then match that up in the 'Disk To Restore' text, below the pop up menu. I'm looking into this issue, but it might have only been a fluke and happened once. This probably won't affect most people, but if it does, please send me an email bug report.
2.8.0b1	Internal PSU release. Testing of Leopard compatibility, disk image and restore disk space calculations. Not publicly released.
2.7.0b1	Release Date: 05/29/2007. NEW: Now Universal! The BIC executable is now 100% universal and runs natively on Intel and PowerPC Macs. Note that since BIC has always been a GUI wrapper for many command line tools, which have been universal in Mac OS X since the Intel Macs first shipped, you probably will only notice a speed up in the launch speed and drawing of the user interface. The 'asr' command line tool that restores the selected disk image to the selected disk has been universal for quite some time, so, again, the only real speed ups you'll see are in the initial launching of PSU BIC and the drawing of the UI. But running natively is still a good thing! NEW: Via a setting in the autorun preferences, you can now exclude other partitions that are on the same physical disk as the booted volume from showing up in the 'Disk To Restore' popup menu. Why would you want to do this? This is useful for when you have an external firewire build disk that has two or more partitions. In order to build both PowerPC and Intel based Macs, we have installed the PowerPC version of Mac OS X 10.4 on one partition, and the Intel version of Mac OS X on the other partition. When a PowerPC (G3, G4, G5) Mac is booted with the firewire disk, the other partition that has the Intel build of Mac OS X would show up as a writable disk and could be selected in the BIC "Disk To Restore" menu. I needed to prevent our staff from accidentally selecting this other volume, as well as preventing BIC from accidentally erasing it when autorunning. Yes, users can still erase the partition if they use Disk Utility, but I'm only concerned about the control within BIC. Add the "EXCLUDE_BOOT_DISK_VOLUMES" key to the auto-run preferences and set it to "YES" to enable this feature. Note that you can partition the firewire disk as "Apple Partition Map" and the Intel Mac CAN boot from it just fine, even though Disk Utility implies that you must use the "GUI" partition scheme for booting Intel Macs. NEW: The output of the pre and post restore scripts can now be logged to the run log file. To enable this feature for the pre restore script, add the "LOG_PRE_RESTORE_SCRIPT_OUTPUT" key to the auto-run preferences with the value set to "YES". To enable this feature for the post restore script, add the "LOG_POST_RESTORE_SCRIPT_OUTPUT" key to the auto-run preferences with the value set to "YES". NEW: The network preferences file on the restored disk can now be erased before a new one is created, if desired. BIC normally only modifies the existing network preferences file on the restored disk. Sometimes the networking will work better though if the network preferences are first deleted and then recreated with all new fresh entries for the available network interfaces. To enable this feature, add the "CREATE_NEW_NETWORK_PREFS_FILE" key to the auto-run preferences with the value set to "YES". NEW: More robust network preferences configuration. When modifying the network settings, I'm now doing more checking if there's already a network location named "Automatic" and if so, deleting it so that the new location that gets created can have the same name and be properly populated with the network interfaces. NEW: Updated error checking for command line tool exit values for REALbasic 2007. The updated REALbasic frameworks started returning the true exit value of shell commands versus multiply it by 8, so I had to update all of the checks for the exit values of shell commands, which there are many. I also changed my code to 'mod' the exit value with 256 versus dividing it. FIXED: A crash when autorunning. When autorunning, there was a rare case where there was a reference to an object on the Firmware Security dialog window after it had already been closed which caused BIC to crash. This has been fixed. KNOWN ISSUE: BIC might crash 1 launch out of 10 on Intel Macs when autorunning. I'm not yet able to replicate this problem 100% of the time, but I'm looking into it. If you run into this problem, please contact me and send along the run log file. I'm back to using beta numbers for now. I expect to make many more changes for this 2.7 release and, rather waiting longer to get this universal version out, I decided to release it. I'm working on updating a lot of BIC for version 3.0 with a new user interface and other enhancements for a later date.
2.6.6	Internal PSU release. Testing of network preferences, and universal building.
2.6.5	Release Date: 09/22/2006. FIXED: Now correctly supports Macs with dual on-board ethernet ports. NOTE: Only configures the network for the "Built-in Ethernet 1", port 1 on the case, and all other network interfaces are disabled (unless you enable the AirPort interface in the auto-run prefs - see below for more info on this new feature). Macs that have dual on-board ethernet includes the most recent Power Mac G5s with Dual 2.3 Ghz processors and the Mac Pro desktop. I've only tested this on the dual 2.3 Ghz G5, so please let me know if you see failures when BIC 2.6.5 and ncutil 3.1.1. Do not use ncutil 3.1.2 due to previously mentioned issues on the main BIC home page. Thanks to Y. Flammer for reporting this issue. NEW: Under Mac OS X 10.4.7 or higher*, can now enable the AirPort network interface enabled by adding "ENABLE_AIRPORT=YES" to the auto-run preferences. *NOTE: This will ONLY work reliably when PSU BIC is running under Mac OS X 10.4.7, with ncutil version 3.1.1 installed, and the restored volume is ALSO at Mac OS X 10.4.7 or higher. There was a bug in Apple's 10.4.6 networking code that ncutil relies on for the network interface names, so ncutil inherited the bug, and thus PSU BIC as well, when running under 10.4.6. Use Mac OS X 10.4.7 and it should work for you - if not, please send me a bug report with the run log file. As time permits, I'll add a dialog too that prompts for enabling the AirPort card or not, but until then, just specify it in the auto run preferences. FIXED: Using new asr syntax of "restore" verb with 10.4.4 at later. Previously, when running PSU BIC 2.6b3 under Mac OS X 10.4 to 10.4.3 there would be an error during the restore process. Thanks to R. Booz for sending in the run log with this issue, and the Apple asr system engineer J. Kateley for reporting which version of Mac OS X 10.4 (10.4.4 and later!) started to include the 'restore' verb for asr. FIXED: More robust blessing of the restored disk as a bootable device for Intel/EFI based Macs. NEW: Logging the version of Mac OS X that is installed on the restored drive. This can be useful for debugging issues with ncutil 3 configuring network preferences on a volume that is at a different version than the version of Mac OS X that PSU BIC and ncutil 3 ran under. FIXED: Updated some method names to prepare PSU BIC to be ready for compilation under REALbasic 2006 to create a Universal (PPC and Intel Native!) version of PSU BIC, which will be available very soon. This change should not affect anything for this version of BIC.
2.6.4	Release Date: Internal PSU build only. Changed version numbering system. The "b" in the version used to imply beta versions, but I test each version pretty extensively, bugs can always exist in all software.
2.6b3	NEW: When using ncutil 3 or newer, now only enabling the "Built-in Ethernet" interface on the disk that was restored. Updated a lot of my code that calls ncutil 3 to support enabling other network interfaces (ie, 802.11 wireless cards). Before, all of the other available network interfaces were also enabled, which wasn't ideal. Disabling all network interfaces and then only enabling the 'Built-in Ethernet' network interface for now. Planning on supporting wireless network interface soon! FIXED: More robust path existence checking for the items required to run in the Resources folder. NEW: Updated syntax for asr command call under Mac OS X 10.4. FIXED: Some annoying misspellings. NOTE: I've received many feature requests and a few bug reports that I'm planning on either fixing or adding that make sense for PSU's and others requirements for deployments. NOTE: Finished up on 6/24/2006, preparing for web distribution on Monday, June 26, 2006.
2.6b2	NEW: Added Intel Mac support. Now supports EFI firmware security. Note: PSU BIC will continue to run in Rosetta for now but all of the important things (ie, asr) that need to run as fast as possible are ALREADY UNIVERSAL and run very quick in testing. Once REALbasic is updated to build universal applications, I'll get started on updating BIC to also be universal. "Intel Mac support" means that BIC supports restoring an HFS+ disk image created from an Intel Mac to an Intel Mac, and it does not support restoring NTFS (Windows) partitions at this time. We (the PSU lab Mac admins) have not discussed if we will support dual booting or virtualization of Windows (like with Parallels) in the labs or not. But since we're all die hard Mac fans, and we have plenty of other computers that can run windows in the labs, why support windows on our Macs? :-) (Please don't email us telling us why we should, we're very aware of the pros and cons). NEW: If running under 10.4, and the volume to restore to is mounted (appears on the desktop), now disabling Spotlight indexing on that volume before restoring to it. Had some reports that it seemed like spotlight was indexing the restore volume when it was being unmounted before performing the asr restore, and caused a crash. I was never able to recreate this error, but turning off spotlight indexing on the restore volume was easy to do. FIXED: When BIC is set to autorun, and the OFPW mode is set to "NONE" in the auto run preferences, it now correctly selects the NONE radio button and continues on as it should. Thanks to C. Thacker for reporting this bug. FIXED: Any mounted disk volume with the SAME name as the booted volume would NOT appear in the list of disks to restore to. Now all local, writable, non-networked disks will appear in the 'Disk To Restore' dialog. This was an annoying problem when my boot disk was named 'System' and one of my other disk partitions were also named 'System', which would never show up in the the 'Disks To Restore' dialog. A work around was to simply change the name of the disk to restore to or erase it and change the name there. FIXED: Was using the csumbuffers switch with asr under 10.4 which was causing asr to totally lockup when the restore image was being verified (if verification was enabled). Apple's "man" page for asr states all that csumbuffers are not recommended, but no reason as to why. Now I know why! NOTE: Announced to a few people for beta testing on 6/22/2006, delayed on public web pages until could get to updating the web pages with important information.
2.6b1	Internal PSU build only. NEW: Added a lot of support for ncutil version 3, cleaned up code, detecting the version of ncutil installed, and more.
2.5b3	Internal PSU build only. NEW: Per popular request, no longer disabling the OK button at the login window to allow support for empty passwords. NEW: If running as root OR empty password and autorun prefs are set to use the admin password, will prompt for a password which is required if OFPW security is required.
2.5b2	Released only to V. Spiars for beta testing for his feature request, below: NEW: Can now specify a full path to an image on any volume (ie, mounted server, another partition, etc.) in the DEFAULT_DISK_IMAGE autorun preferences. If the path begins with "/" then the path is assumed to be a full absolute path and NOT an image in the RestoreImages folder. The easiest way to get this path is to drag and drop the image file from the Finder into the a terminal.app window and then copy the path that was generated there and paste it into the DEFAULT_DISK_IMAGE key value field.
2.5b1	Publically released on 05/31/2005. Versions 2.1b1 and 2.1b2 were internal builds only. A lot was added between 2.1b2 and 2.5b1. New: Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4) Ready! New: Supports Tiger's asr:// multicast client disk image URL in auto run preferences, networkImagesList file, and manual entry in Other Images Source dialog. New: Includes a new Tiger compatible version of the Open Firmware Security Tool (ofpw) command line tool. Be sure to copy this version as well, and not just replace earlier versions of the Blast Image Config application only. Fixed: Supports Date and Time for Tiger's updated date functions (date formatting and return error codes). New: Now can just Skip the date and time dialog. (Request of D. Willen) New: Planning for future logging features: Run log filename modified, new format is: /tmp/PSUBlastImageConfig.RUN.YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS.log. Fixed: If the Computer name or localhost (rendezvous/bonjour) name is empty, will not be modified on the restored disk's networking preferences. New: Open Firmware dialog: Added ability to Skip setting the Open Firmware. Still defaulting to Apply for the settings, but the auto run prefs can be set to skip it automatically. New: Added Cancel buttons to nearly all interactive dialogs. Improved: HTTP image verification and checcking is VASTLY improved. Now able to detect if the network URL is bad, if the server responds but the image path isn't correct, or if the image file size is too large to transfer via HTTP and should then be segmented into smaller files. (hdiutil hfsanalyze is a fantastic tool). Fixed: Now no longer downloading entire image when doing a "Verify URL" in the Other Images Source dialog (Thanks to R. Shaw for discovering this issue). Fixed: If autorunning and the default image was an http URL based image, no longer reporting it as an invalid HFS image. Was incorrectly searching local RestoreImages folder for the image as a file, not checking that it was a URL. (Thanks to R. Shaw reporting this bug). Fixed: No longer displaying the Network Names dialog if clicked the "Don't Modify" button for the "How do you want the network settings configured on the restored disk?" dialog. New: Autorun prompt dialog. Change: If autorunning and the auto run prefs ENDING_TASK is set to "QUIT", you must manually click the Quit button at the very end. The Restart and Shutdown buttons will still be automatically clicked when autorunning, though. New: Expiring the sudo rights when quitting. Possible Future items: Log the output of pre/post scripts to the run log file. Copy the run log file to a directory on the restored disk after the restore process has completed. Allow asr to merge restore versus full erase of restored volume. Set default subnet mask and router IPs. Pass MAC (Ethernet) address into Pre/Post restore scripts as input argument.
2.0b17	Publically released on 08/19/2004. Versions 2.0b15 and 2.0b16 were internal builds only. Fixed bug where in certain configurations a valid HFS(+) restore image would be reported as NOT a valid image. When autorunning as the 'root' user, can't set autorun prefs to "USEADMIN" for the password. Now properly displaying dialog to this fact. (Must either specify and confirm the password in the Open Firmware dialog OR have the Open Firmware encrypted password in the auto run prefs "OF_PASSWD" key and set the "OF_PASSWD_MODE" key to the value of "USE_ENCRYPTED".) On autorun, now automatically clicking the "Continue" button if manually clicked the "Apply" button to speed things up. One less click! LOTS of Pre/Post Restore Scripts changes: Now allowing any file to be listed in the Pre/Post Restore Dialog, regardless if the type of the file is "TEXT" or not. The only items that are excluded are directories and the ".DS_Store" file. Now getting the REAL exit value of scripts. Waiting a full 2 minutes for the scripts to complete. On autorun, if the script exits with a non-zero value (error occured!), halting the autorun and displaying an error dialog. Added "PAUSE_ON_RESTORE" key to stop on the restore dialog during an autorun. Useful for the case where you have multiple images and/or drives to select and you need to decide on which ones to use, but you want the other steps to be as quick as possible. For slow disk I/O (restoring from a DVD, for example), increased the timeout to wait for a response from ASR from 5 minutes to 20 minutes. We had to do this at PSU for our DVD restores, in fact. KNOWN BUG: If autorunning and you QUIT for the ending task, a "Runtime Failure: Failed Assertion" error will occur. This is a bug in RealBasic, and I'm working with the vendor to fix this issue. In most cases admins will be automatically restarting or shutting down.
2.0b14	Publically released on 08/04/2004 New Feature: Calculating the amount of space (block size and blocks used) a restore image will require and checking that the selected disk is large enough to hold that data; If the disk is too small, then a warning is displayed and the restore disk is NOT modified or erased. The previous behavior was to allow asr to do what it normally does - erase the disk first and THEN check to see if the image would fit. This wasn't good for when you'd only want to upgrade the Mac if the image data would fit, otherwise, leave the Mac still possibly usable with an older system. Fixed bug where dialog reporting that there weren't any available disks to restore too would not be the top most dialog displayed. Added code to detect if disks were already being scanned for when the main "Restore" dialog becomes frontmost.
2.0b13	Not publically released. 13 isn't a good number anyway! :-) Test changes to scanning for disks when the main restore dialog gets the frontmost focus. In the main Restore Image/Disk Dialog, updating the status field if there's a disk to restore to but not a valid image Fixed bug where the "Restore" button would get enabled even if there wasn't a valid disk to restore to Lots of testing with scanning of disks when frontmost focus is regained at the main "Restore" window
2.0b12	Updated 7/19/2004 Network location configured on restored disk is now named "Automatic" (was named "Default" in 2.0b11 and earlier) Deleting all other network locations so that non-admin users cannot accidentally select other network settings More robust checking that all necessary ncutil components are installed (/Library/Frameworks/NCUtilFoundation.framework) Minor code updates for robustness (exit values of shell commands verification)
2.0b11	Better support for non-alpha characters for the Open Firmware Password Open Firmware Security Settings: After applying the settings, pressing return then "presses" the continue button Admin passwords are now properly escaped (ie, allows a dollar sign "$" in the password) Scanning for images in the RestoreImages folder is much faster now. Removed code to detect if a disk image has been scanned or not (checksums data added). Not currently possible to detect this before running asr. If a restored disk is verified and needs to be repaired, now unmounting the disk before repairing it Removed extra dialog when shutting down to remove the firewire disk, etc.
2.0b10	Public release of 2.0 beta on 05/24/2004 Added full support for Mac OS X 10.3.x Support for International Date and Time Formats Restore images over http Pre and post restore scripts Completely configurable Open Fimware settings Much faster restore times Ability to completely autorun with default setting preferences No more network template settings file (Thanks to Jeff Frey for ncutil !)

Version 1.x:

1.0.5	Public release on 08/08/2003 Added checkbox on restore dialog to "Enable Verification" which is what version 1.0.2 had ON as a default (and there wasn't an option to turn it off, either). This version turns off verification by default to make restores quicker (but it's strongly suggested that you turn it on to verify that the data was written to the disk correctly). Now restoring to the device entry for the volume (ie, /dev/disk1s9) versus the disk's Volume Name (ie, /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD). This allows for hard disk names to contain pretty much any characters; Version 1.0.2 didn't handle apostrophies in volume names very well, for example. (Thanks for this bug report, Tom!) Most fixes are for restoring to disks that were previously used as Mac OS 9 boot HD's. Moved code to check for locally mounted volumes after checking if the restore was successful or not. Before this was fixed, it was possible that if a restore failed that it would not get correctly reported unless there was at least 1 other locally mounted volume after a restore failed. Removed a debugging message when checking for mounted drives after restoring. At launch time, making sure not running in Classic or under Mac OS 9. Now dumping the version number to the log file in /tmp. Much more robust unmounting and remounting of the restore drive to clear open files before running asr.
1.0.4	Internal build. Not Publicly distributed. Added a checkbox to turn asr's verification on or off. Updating the UI elements sooner after clicking the Restore button More work on the unmount and remounting of the disk to restore it
1.0.3	Internal build. Not Publicly distributed. Forcing the restore volume to be umounted to clear any open files on the disk, otherwise, asr would fail because it couldn't unmount the disk with open files. If the restore disk was booted with under OS 9, the desktop DB files would be opened by Mac OS X. Turned verification off to speed up the restore process. (asr's -nocheck flag).
1.0.2	First public release. If no network settings template file found continue onto blessing the boot HD volume instead of quitting. This adds support to sites using DHCP IP addresses (who don't need to change the IP settings on the restored drive).
1.0.1	Now checking that /usr/sbin/asr is really installed.
1.0	Initial internal PSU release.

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