Archive for category: Management

Installing printers via lpadmin on OS X can be a pain, especially if you do not know the names of the specific options you need for the printer (Duplex, Finisher, etc).  You can dig through the .ppd if you’d like, but this is not as helpful as you might hope. [...]

Casper Suite 8.7 has been released.  It contains some bugfixes as well as some new features.  The biggest change in Casper Suite 8.7 is the addition of a new app called Casper Focus.  Casper Focus allows a Teacher or other staff to lock an iOS device into using a specific [...]

Jeremy Reichman has a post outlining how to add an installable_condition to a given piece of software in Munki.  This key allows you to specify requirements for a package based upon a NSPredicate and information that Munki knows about the machine.  Check out the details over on Jeremy’s Blog.

Safari has a new feature that lets you whitelist specific websites for use with Java.  This feature is extremely helpful to ensure that internal company websites that need Java can still run while possibly malicious external websites are not permitted to run by default.  Check out the details about this [...]

If you have ever wondered about hosting your Casper server in the cloud, check out this post on Justin Rummel’s blog.  He has some notes he made during a recent JSS setup on Amazon EC2 hosting.  This is a very compelling setup if you have a fair amount of machines [...]

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 [...]

DeployStudio 1.5.16 (I guess we’re finally done with the RC status?) was released yesterday. Check the change log and download it here.

A new FileVault 2 escrow app has been released recently and offers a good alternative to Califlower Vest.  The app is called Crypt and it is Graham Gilbert’s baby.  Crypt has both a client and a web app (which is django-based).  Crypt seems like a great solution if you do [...]

Adding printers on multiple machines can be tedious if you have to manually setup all the duplexer and paper tray options that the printer supports. Thankfully there is a command line tool called lpadmn which allows you to configure the printer and all its options in one command. You can [...]

DeployStudio RC135 was released yesterday.  It fixes some annoying bugs with flow control (packages and scripts installing out of order).  Check out the change log and download it here.