Over the coming days and weeks we will be making some changes and additions to elements of Casper ahead of incorporating staff Macs into the system. This will be in extension of the work the School of Science IT staff already do for their staff Macs.

 This won’t directly affect how the Mac labs work or are structured within Casper. You will however notice that the labs Sites now all have ‘Labs’ on the end of their names to distinguish them from their staff counterparts, and some policies may have their scopes and/or names altered to prevent unwanted cross-‘contamination’ of the staff and labs services. Each School will have its own staff site, which we will provide the appropriate IT staff access to as has been done with the labs.

 There may also be changes to the OU structure under the Desktops/Mac OU in the AD. If this affects labs we will change the AD binding policies etc. to reflect this.

 There will be further communication regarding the staff Mac ‘service’ closer to rolling out; this message is just an FYI for any changes you notice. If you think anything has been changed incorrectly, please submit a case to the Service Desk as usual.

In order to test and implement an improved backup process for casper-dbase-pro, we will need to reboot the server a few times. We plan to do this on Friday (4^th November) between 9AM and 10AM. The Casper Suite should be considered at risk between these times as a result, and we recommend not re-imaging any Macs at that time.

The service will be as normal from 10AM.

If this time is an issue for any of you, please let us know.

The updates to the Casper Suite and the host server have now been completed successfully. You may now use the system again.

It is worth noting that we encountered an issue during testing with AD binding when re-imaging. We believe this has been resolved by re-entering the jdomain password into the JSS for each OU we have a directory binding for. However, should you encounter any issues with AD binding please submit a case in the usual manner.

We need to update the Casper Suite to the latest version (v9.96) to add support for OS X Sierra and to remain in line with our Casper support model. We will also upgrade the casper-dbase-pro server to Sierra and install outstanding security updates.

 To allow time for this and the testing that will be required, Casper will be unavailable from 9AM on Tuesday 25^th October. We hope to resume service by 4PM that day at the latest.

During this time you will not be able to netboot or image any Macs. Access to the JSS and Self Service will be sporadic so you are advised not to use them, and other Casper Suite utilities may no longer work. General usage of the Mac OS on Casper managed machines will not be affected.

Once the work is complete we will e-mail you and provide a link to download the latest Casper Suite utilities (i.e. Composer, Casper Remote etc.).

If there are any issues with doing this work on this date, please let us know ASAP.