Monolithic imaging for faculty, staff, and students access computer deployments is less than ideal. Image sizes are massive and are difficult and time consuming to build. Furthermore, images are often outdated immediately after building what other packages, such as the flash player, receive updates. Package based deployments solve many of these issues. Individual packages within the deployment are updated one of the time, even automatically, while software repositories dictate which packages are required for each set up. Furthermore, solutions to handle these issues are often free and open source such as Munki, AutoPKG, and reposado. We will discuss how to create your own packaged based deployments using these tools.
