cfengine Mac packages, universal binaries, and mass deployment

[Jason Edgecombe]

Hi,

I've been running cfengine on about 50 Mac's running OS 10.3 (Panther) 
for at least 6 months now. We also have lots of mixed distro linux boxen.

Various forces have aligned as to push the cfengine Mac deployment to 
the top of my todo list. BTW, I work at a university. I would guestimate 
that we have 200-400 Mac's to deploy to.

I'd like to hear the experience of others who have done mass-deployment 
of cfengine on Mac's before.

These are unmanaged Mac's. Most were installed from an image, but no 
management hooks are in place now. apple Remote Desktop/remote login is 
not an option because it isn't enabled on most.

The Plan:
The plan is for myself and an handful of co-workers and student workers 
to touch each machine and install cfengine. Installing by hand on the 
command-line isn't really an option because of the skill-levels 
involved. I plan to create a Mac-installable pkg file that can be 
double-clicked and will perform the install.

I'm looking for any advice that anyone may have, from creating the 
package to deployment. We have a working set of cfengine inputs, so that 
isn't a big problem. I also have a working cfengine rev .14 binary. I 
figure that is well tested and I can upgrade later.

I don't currently have any Intel Mac's, but has anyone played with 
cfengine on any of the new Intel Mac's? Has anyone create cfengine as a 
universal binary? Any advice on these things would be appreciated.

Thanks,
Jason Edgecombe