Articles by: Samuel Keeley

Another day in Göteborg brought many more fascinating talks, including the first public talk on autopkg. For those using JAMF Casper, Marko Jung from the University of Oxford showed how by adding many modules to Self Service, users have been empowered to do many tasks with the click of a button […]

Hello from Göteborg! The first day of MacSysAdmin 2013 is over, and there have been great presentations from many members of the Apple community. Ed Marczak kicked things off with a look at the future from the past and present, showing how predictions of the future are bound to deviate […]

Location Services is an important part of OS X, but it is not obvious on how to enable it without going through the System Preferences GUI.  The preference that controls it is not in /Library/Preferences, and due to cfprefsd it is hard to find. Thanks to Tim Sutton for help […]

MacTech Conference 2013 has been announced, and will be taking place from November 6-8 in Los Angeles, California.  Last year’s conference was packed day and night with great content and activities, and this year looks to be even better. So far, quite a few sessions have been announced, including some […]

Apple has now publicly announced some of the new enterprise and education targeted features of iOS 7, and while all of the newly announced features are exciting, the most important one is the addition of App Store license management.  This will solve many headaches that organizations have encountered when having […]

One of the biggest announcements from Apple with OS X Mavericks was not part of the WWDC 2013 keynote.  Instead, it is buried deep in a technical document on Apple’s site.  This is the announcement that the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is being deprecated in favor of Server Message Block […]

Apple has posted a document highlighting the core technologies of OS X Mavericks, which includes some changes from Mountain Lion. Among the new features is a change to the default file sharing protocol from AFP to SMB2.  OS X has long supported SMB, but AFP has remained the default.  AFP […]

These are some resources from my Security session at PSU MacAdmins 2013: Slides – PSU MacAdmins 2013 Security Web resources: Managing OS X – Payload Free Package template Matt’s Mac Blog – Making use of the /etc/authorization file in Lion / 10.7.x Scripts: https://gist.github.com/keeleysam/1060089beca35ae77bc7 https://gist.github.com/keeleysam/fab1280165ba9c51d017 https://gist.github.com/keeleysam/9de97f29698725675afd Samuel KeeleySamuel Keeley can frequently be […]

This is part one of a series on dealing with the issues software can cause in enterprise environments, and how to combat these issues. One of the most important skills in a Mac Admin’s toolbox is being able to identify and work around issues with vendor software.  Many vendors release […]

The Premise: Nick McSpadden and I were both working on a similar goal this week: getting Macs to connect to Wi-Fi at the loginwindow. By default, adding preferred wireless networks will only connect once a user is logged in, either via the networksetup command or Profiles. By using a modified […]