Around December of 2002 I was at Johnson County Community College with a coworker. We were manning an information booth at the student union; educating people about Macs. A pair of students approached us and I gave my pitch for Macs. After just a moment, one of them said (in a fairly snotty tone), "We like Dells". A little taken aback, I regrouped and tried a different pitch. After just a moment, the student clarified her stance, "Well, the Macs in the labs suck". At this point, I was nearly speechless. Not about the Macs "sucking", rather that these students would essentially spit in the face of a vendor. I replied "Well, the Macs in the labs are probably mismanaged."

I thought to myself for a moment. The Macs in the labs probably did suck. Mac OS X was a fairly new platform (10.1 was the current version). Many people were still deploying Mac OS 9 and there really weren't *any* good mass management tools for Mac OS X. There was Carbon Copy Cloner for cloning Mac to Mac, but there were no mass deployment toolsets. I suspected that the Mac lab managers, who were probably dedicated Mac fanboys (had to be at that time for Mac labs to really exist at all), had spent every working hour simply getting the Macs deployed, that they had no time left to polish the end-user experience. They probably spent most of their time running around to individual machines in break-fix mode, struggling to keep things working. As a result, the user experience probably wasn't far off from using a Windows machine.

The student patted me on the shoulder and condescendingly commented "Well, good luck today." You can imagine how red I turned and make a guess about how the rest of my day went. As it turns out, though, this was one of the most important days in my career. I remember that day so well because that is the day and moment that ignited my passion for developing the best Mac OS X mass deployment toolset within my capabilities. On that day I became a Mac OS X Deployment Technologies Evangelist. Since then I have developed a commendable suite of tools -- NetRestore, NetRestore Helper, NetRestore PHP Services, NetBoot Across Subnets, Loginwindow Manager, DeLocalizer, ShadowClassic, NetBoot Machines Manager, SessionLimiter, ADAM, and numerous others that were never publicly released. In addition to software, I have published several articles relating to mass deployment and fielded thousands of related emails from around the world. I am extremely proud of what I have accomplished. Based on the tremendous positive feedback that I have received over the last six years, I know that I have positively influenced the Macintosh community, and hopefully I have equally enhanced the education that institutions across the globe have provided to their students.

Today, however, I stand at a precipice. NetRestore resides upon an extremely old base of code that has become increasingly more fragile and difficult to maintain. The strategy within NetRestore has also seen its day pass. Several years ago I scoped out dramatic changes for "NetRestore 4," but in the years since it became clear that I simply didn't have time to completely rewrite NetRestore from the ground up. I also feel relieved of this responsibility as the market for deployment tools has matured. In particular, I am impressed with Deploy Studio, a suite of tools that very closely resembles where I wanted to take NetRestore 4. So, today I am announcing the retirement of NetRestore.

The NetRestore distribution is no longer available, in binary or source form. I strongly encourage anyone that is building a deployment strategy to consider Deploy Studio instead. I would also like to clarify that this decision has no bearing on my development efforts towards Carbon Copy Cloner -- I am fully committed to continued development and support of that product for the forseeable future.

Finally, I want to thank everyone that has given me positive feedback and encouragement over the last six years. In the technology world, nothing can compare to the philanthropy of the Macintosh community and I am so proud to be a part of it. While I won't be writing deployment software, I do look forward to ongoing contributions to this community as I am able in the form of articles and best practices.