I think it’s safe to say the macadmin community has been hearing rumblings about the future of macOS administration. Whether it was Michael Lynn’s excellent blog post, m(DM)acOS, APFS or even Sal Saghoian’s position being axed, many macadmins (myself included) are worried about the future of macOS administration being a MDM only world.
What if the new TBP Macs were the first piece to this future?
An interesting technical look at what happens when one of the Touch Bar-equipped MacBook Pros can’t find the embedded operating system running the Touch Bar, and what conclusions we can draw from that.
When you’re dealing with an EFI-based system, you should never try and target the entire drive anyway. This includes Mac, Windows, Linux, etc. This is common sense, as that EFI system partition is there for a reason and you risk deleting the recovery partition on top of that. Target the proper volume in the first place and you won’t get bit by this.
Maybe I’m just more careful than most, but I never like to leave anything like this to chance. Always target exactly what you want. The system has no DWIM function, thank goodness.
That’s crap. You should be able to target the EFI partition if you’re doing sane block level backups of the entire system. The only time this is an issue is if you’re doing file level imaging.
Actually, you should not do so. The reason? Because one model of Mac’s EFI partition may contain different content than another’s, as indeed would happen with touch bar vs non touch bar machines. It does not make sense to target the EFI partition, ever, unless you are always going to be imaging the precise model and generation of the same system. Excluding the EFI partition makes the image adaptable, and means you don’t risk screwing up system-level drivers or firmware just because you wanted to save a couple seconds creating the image. So yes, you can target the EFI partition. However, it’s stupid to do so unless you have a very specific reason.
In the case of Macs, the same rules apply for the recovery partition. Don’t image it, because it’s different on different models of machines. You can erase it if you know you’ll never need it, however, as indeed may very well be the case in an imaging scenario.
This is true with two huge caveats.
One, almost no sysadmins I know use block-level copies (ie, dd) since it’s much slower than using something like Ghost.
Two, you should only copy the EFI partition if you plan on using the image on an identical machine with an identical OS.
Also, they’re a pain to restore if the drive has a different capacity. While you can easily resize partitions in EFI once restored, using file-based imaging eliminates the need to even worry about it in the first place.
I think there’s a typo in the summary. You wrote “conclusions”, but the correct spelling is “wild, unfounded speculation”
When I noticed it is a logo.
There’s a hidden meaning here, buddies.
I, admittedly, skimmed both articles.
But, what does MDM mean?
Mobile device management.