The XCode 2.1 developer tools is a very large package (pushing well over .5GB), and now you have one CD and want to install it on a fleet of machines. Note: this can help with installing almost anything...

I was just about to use one of my favorite tools, Apple Remote Desktop, to install the package on six machines when I realized that there was no way to do this under its rubric without copying the files 6 times across the network. Now, the approach I'm going to outline will likely do the exact same thing, but at least it doesn't read the files twice on each machine.

So, to avoid this, instead I used ARD to execute a script on each machine that:

• Created a mount point
• Mount the DVD via AFP
• run the installer
• Unmount the mount point

Basically, it looks like this:

mkdir /Volumes/DevTools
mount_afp afp://_name:password_@_host_/Xcode Tools /Volumes/DevTools
installer -pkg /Volumes/DevTools/XcodeTools.mpkg/ -target /umount /Volumes/DevTools

All things considered, it worked great!