Deploying Power Manager

Welcome to Power Manager. In this article I will show you how to deploy Power Manager on a small to medium sized network.

This article is written with administrators managing networks of five Macs to few hundred Macs in mind.

Small Mac network diagram

Larger networks of Macs

Larger networks are better served by dedicated distribution tools such as NetInstall, Apple Remote Access, or Radmind.

If you do not have access to these tools, or are just curious about installing Power Manager on a subset of your network, read on as this method needs only the tools included in Mac OS X 10.3 and later.

Before you begin

This article assumes you have the following:

Compress Power Manager for local distribution

You are going to transfer a copy of Power Manager to each Mac on your network via secure copy. This process is much easier if you only need to transfer a single file.

The bundle of files you want to copy is called 'DssW Power Manager.mpkg'. This bundle is found in the Power Manager download.

Create an archive of the 'DssW Power Manager.mpkg' bundle using the Context Menu (Control-click the package icon).

Archive DssW Power Manager.mpkg for distribution

You now have a compressed archive containing everything you need to deploy Power Manager across your network.

You are ready to begin deployment!

The deployment cycle

The deployment process can be reduced to the following series of Terminal commands.

scp ~/Desktop/DssW\ Power\ Manager.mpkg.zip admin@192.168.1.3:/tmp/.
ssh admin@192.168.1.3
cd /tmp
unzip DssW\ Power\ Manager.mpkg.zip
sudo installer -pkg DssW\ Power\ Manager.mpkg -target /
sudo shutdown -r now
exit

If you are not familiar with the command line, these commands can be intimidating. Don't panic.

Let's step through each command so you understand what it is doing and what options you need to change for your network.

Deployment steps in detail

The following steps work through the seven commands above. These steps install Power Manager on a single remote Mac.

Network diagram for a single Mac

The diagram above highlights the Macs you are working with and associated IP addresses. You need to know the client's hostname or IP address.

Copy the archive to the client

scp ~/Desktop/DssW\ Power\ Manager.mpkg.zip admin@192.168.1.3:/tmp/.

The first step copies the compressed archive to the client Mac. You need to change three components of this command.

If all goes well, the archive is now sitting on the client ready for installation.

Connect securely to the client

ssh admin@192.168.1.3

The decompression and installation process takes place on the client Mac. This ssh command starts a secure session with the client. All commands until exit are now sent over the network to the client.

You need to change two components of this command.

Decompress the Power Manager archive

cd /tmp
unzip DssW\ Power\ Manager.mpkg.zip

These two commands move into the directory you copied the archive to, and unzip the archive.

If all goes well, you will see a list of decompressed files after issuing the unzip command.

Install Power Manager

sudo installer -pkg DssW\ Power\ Manager.mpkg -target /

This command does the work of installing Power Manager on the current system drive (/). It is the work horse of the graphical Installer utility.

Restarting after installation

You must restart after installing or removing Power Manager. The next command restarts the client Mac.

sudo shutdown -r now
exit

Finally, the exit command closes the secure session with the client.

Repeat as appropriate

You have now installed Power Manager on the remote client. Next you need to repeat these steps for each Mac on your network.

Congratulations

Congratulations! You have learnt how to install Power Manager on a remote client without anything more than the standard tools provided in Mac OS X.

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