With the end of the year growing close, the nights growing long, and a foot of snow paralyzing a completely unprepared Seattle, our thoughts here at Make Mac Work turn to all the gifts we’ve received this year to make our jobs easier.

If you’ve tried to upgrade Tiger server to Leopard, you’ve probably already learned that it’s a bumpy road. The process is so fraught with bugs that Apple themselves recommend against it in their Server Essentials manual, stating it should never be preformed on “production” machines. Unfortunately, not every organization has a spare XServe to experiment on, and those sharing files off internal disks may not want the hours of data shuffling that installing from scratch would entail.

One of the best features of OS X is the built-in ability to clone a customized installation to other machines. By creating a .dmg image of an existing installation in Disk Utility, then using the “Restore” feature to copy it to another disk, you can install a pre-configured OS onto any number of Macintosh workstations.