After some undocumented options were found in the asr tool, Greg Neagle started digging around some other commands to see if he could find any other hidden options. The result of this interest has lead to some methods for finding hidden options in any command, although his specific example involves softwareupdate. [...]

Let’s face it, OS X makes a great stable client platform but the server components do not scale well. That is probably why most big companies rely on some other component to have the infrastructure and then us, the Mac admins, spend a lot of time on the integration. For [...]

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. [...]

Apple Software Restore (ASR) has some hidden documentation that reveals a few command line options which were previously unknown to most. A post on jamfnation led to some discussion on ##osx-server about an undocumented ASR command.  Rich Trouton blogged about how to view these commands using a very interesting method.  If [...]

As usual with all things FileVault related, Rich Trouton has the details on a new .app for setting up FileVault 2.  FileVault Setup.app is a standalone app that provides a pretty interface for end users to configure File Vault 2 with during first login.  This is a interesting way to [...]

Noel Alonso has a post outlining one way you could easily delete a machine out of Active Directory using ldapsearch and ldapdelete. This script could easily be modified and changed to do various other things, such as passing the hostname in as an argument or doing a different action upon [...]

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 [...]

Kyle Crawford has an interesting post that covers reloading LaunchAgents while a user is logged in without requiring them to take action (Log out/in, reboot, etc). While somewhat hacky, it is a novel way to ensure that a given LaunchAgent is reloaded without burdening the End User to take action.

Charles Edge and TJ Houston have a new book out on using Apple Configurator.  Charles’ technical documentation is top notch and TJ’s articles on Configurator are fantastic as well. This book is a must have if you currently deploy iOS devices or are planning to deploy and manage iOS devices [...]

The PSU MacAdmins Conference tweeted that the schedule is now available.  You can check out the schedule here.  This year is full of great sessions and has something for everyone.  Both Sam Keeley and I have sessions at the conference, which we look forward to seeing you at!