Archive for category: Management

AFP548 has always been about community: like-minded folks found their way to the Apple platform, and some of us even made a career out of supporting “Enterprise at your own risk”(copyright Nate Walck.) After Jody Rodgers got wind of a skunkworks project operating under the pseudonym ‘The Cylinder of Destiny,’ […]

Apple Configurator was updated to version 1.3 on June 18, 2013. With the new update, some new features were added, some old features returned, and some things have changed. UPDATE: back ups are NOT encrypted… Sorry folks! I had erroneously said that back ups were now encrypted. They are not. […]

One of the issues Mac admins have with OS X’s Configuration Profiles system is that using OS X Server to build a Profile allows only subset of the management “scope” that is provided using MCX / Managed Preferences. Specifically, any configuration profiles made with Profile Manager are the equivalent of […]

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. Nate […]

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. Mike BoylanMike Boylan is a recent graduate of Robert Morris University in Pittsburgh, PA where he received his Master’s of Science in Competitive Intelligence Systems. Mike is a […]