Mirroring or cloning many computers on a network?

Question

Good morning,
I am running a little internet café consisting of four eMacs. Internet billing and authentication is handled by Sputnik (www.sputnik.com) using prepaid cards. It is not totally ideal for shared public computers as it is designed for people using their own computers on a Wi-Fi hotspot but it works.
Anyway, my major issue is keeping the computers clean and up to date.
At present, my main iMac is connected to both our in-house network (wireless) as well as the public hotspot (ethernet) so I'm effectively on both networks at once.
I don't like this as my iMac is a "bridge" between the public network and our office network which could cause some issues.
The reason I need to do this is that the public network and our office network are on different subnets and I am using Remote Desktop to reset the four eMacs each night (by overwriting the user folder with the original files from the "clean" setup).
This is not also perfect and this is the reason for my query here is that I really need a better solution because I also need to be able to upgrade the system software on these computers from time-to-time as well as sometimes change settings globally across all four computers.
Until now I have setup one computer then cloned it using CarbonCopy Cloner and copied it to each of the other three. This does not work brilliantly and takes a long time. Plus I need to be in the café to do it with a Firewire drive.
Is there a better way to synchronise multiple computers on a network so they're all the same?
I hope I'm making sense here.
Many thanks,
Galen

Answer 1

Hi, Galen,
There are a number of possible options, depending on how much automation you wish to achieve and how much you're willing to spend to get it.
The expensive way (relatively speaking) would be to set up a Mac OS X server system and remote boot the eMacs from the server. You could then set up a single master image that the systems would boot from, guaranteeing that they'd be identical and allowing you to have to update only one system. It also guarantees that your clients can't mess up the systems, since the master image is locked and can't be changed by the user, so you just reboot the system to get back to a clean boot. Clearly that's more costly than other solutions might be, since you'd have to come up with a server system (pretty much anything with a 100BaseT Ethernet port, 1GB of RAM and a reasonable hard drive would probably be fine) and a 10-user copy of Mac OS X Server ($499.00 US).
A second option might be to use Mike Bombich's NetRestore to create and automate the distribution of a master disk image. Rsync is also a possibility. Both solutions would require that the systems be booted from another volume to allow the main volume to be reimaged.
A third option might be to use a utility such as Faronics' Deep Freeze to lock down the systems to a given configuration, restoring them to the master config on a restart, then use ARD to unlock the systems, install the updates, and relock them, something which can be scheduled if you wish.
Hope this helps.