Imaging CS6-Attack of the Clones

Invoking any of the Star Wars Prequels is surely starting this blog entry off on the wrong foot. I can practically hear the booing. Come on, Star Wars II- Attack of the Clones had some good parts in it. The whole part on Coruscant with the assassin, Zam Wessell, trying to kill Padmé? And I love the whole part of the film when they are on Kamino where the Kaminoans are making the clones. Admittedly, the movie falls apart once they go to Geonosis.


But back to the clones! Not the clones based off of Jango Fett, but rather the process of cloning a computer for a lab, classroom, event, new system, etc. Also known as imaging and for better or worse ghosting. I honestly don’t know if Ghost (presently a Symantec  product) was named after the process or people have made the application’s name a verb. Whereas “I ghosted that Mac with Disk Utility” is a wrong as “I Shopped that dog’s head onto my cousin’s body.” Little known fact, Ghost is an acronym for General Hardware-Oriented System Transfer. Time to tally up your Nerd Points™ and declare victory if you already knew that acronym AND you knew that Zam Wessell was a Clawdite from Zolan.
In CS6 we introduced a licene-to-machine relationship that breaks many traditional imagining methods whereas a master image is serialized and then cloned. Now the booing is a little more warranted. In fact, imagine the first line of this paragraph read by Jar-Jar Binks to really make your blood boil. Obviously you will want to add “Meesa thinks” at the front. And expect this decision to create this licene-to-machine relationship will be as popular as Jar-Jar. It was actually more of a bi-product of our activation changes and not really a planned assault on IT admins who have to imagine systems. But whatever Adobe Man, the damage is done! Well true, but we do have a workaround of sorts. Is this workaround lame? On a scale from 1-10 with 10 being the worst workaround ever, I’d give it a 6. Maybe a 5 if you are not familiar with AAMEE. Maybe a 4 if you ran into trouble with imaging CS6 on your own and Googled “Adobe broke imaging in CS6″ (but with some curse words sprinkled in the search words) and then you had to read through 3 paragraphs before I got onto the workaround steps.


Actually, before I give you workaround steps, for those who want a walkthrough of the process our Systems Engineer, Karl Gibson, has created a video on Adobe TV called “Client Imaging for CS6” which is quite helpful.


Steps for Client Imaging for CS6
1) Use AAMEE 3.0 to create an unserialized CS6 Trial Package
2) Use AAMEE 3.0 to create a Serialization file [Yes, you'll need to be online and use an Adobe ID for your organization]
3) Install/deploy the AAMEE produced CS6 Trial Package to the master image
4) The installed CS6 software will be in Trial Mode but you could make any changes you wanted including defining preferences [Don't serialize]
5) Take the master image and clone the image to the systems using your normal method
6) Copy the AAMEE 3.0 produced Serialization files (the executable and the prov.xml file) to the newly cloned systems [Manually, through a deployment method, first run script, etc.]
7) Execute the following command:
AdobeSerialization –tool=VolumeSerialize –provfile=Absolute_Path_of_prov.xml


Obviously you would want to verify that the CS6 software is serialized and opens fine without giving notice of the software being in trial mode. So that is theoretically Step 8 except depending on the scale of your imaging you may not want to do that on all the systems once you are comfortable the process is working. And you might also, depending on where you placed the files, remove them. So that could be theoretically Step 9, but obviously I was keen on having just 7 steps.
If you have issues with any of these steps, please use the Enterprise Deployment Forum to let us know. I realize that having to go through these extra steps are a pain but hopefully the Force will be with you. Seemed appropriate, right?


Jody Rodgers | Sr. Product Manager | Enterprise + Volume | Digital Media | Adobe


Note: The bulk of this post makes reference to Star Wars which is clearly TM & © 2012 Lucasfilm Ltd. and if Lucasfilm, LucasArts, or Skywalker Sound have ANY issues with imaging CS6 I will personally volunteer to head over there and help you out. After I get my photo taken with Yoda.