Looking for Mac deployment advice now that our old methods don't work/are not recommended.

Mac devices made in the past few years do not support traditional netboot and imaging tools anymore. The modern workflow is to use internet recovery (or something like Mac Deploy Stick) to restore the OS directly from Apple, then enroll the device in an MDM service either manually or automatically with DEP. From there software and configuration is applied.

You should pick an MDM provider first, there are many but Fleetsmith provides a comprehensive option and is free for the first few devices.

Your free options are going to be limited. Munki is great at managing software, but there are no free MDM options that don't require serious time investment.

Most of the useful features have been striped out of Server.app, it's almost useless at this point and should be avoided.

/r/sysadmin Thread