Advanced Munki
Greg Neagle Senior Systems Engineer, Walt Disney Animation Studios
Certainly anyone who is familiar with mass deployment knows who Greg Neagle is (pronounced Neigle as per request) and what he has done in terms of open source. It is likely that a lot of you around the world are using his tools. Starting from what had been presented last year about Munki, the session goes through the advanced use of the tool, ensuring for instance the deployment of critical updates before a defined date, the installation of different applications or configurations to specific hardware by using conditional installs as well as other worthwhile settings that will simplify the system administrators life . The main topic was the introduction of the concept of “Thin Images” and “Munki bootstrapping,” which allows you to avoid including applications in the image by leaving their management (installations and update) to be applied in a second step in order to reduce efforts of creating and maintaining images. This will most likely cause system administrators to the review of the idea of “flexible” deployment. Amazing.
More Management for Lion and Mountain Lion
Greg Neagle Senior Systems Engineer, Walt Disney Animation Studios
A hard day for Greg who is again on the stage showing to an interested audience how another creation, Reposado, manages Apple software updates without using OS X Server. Hosted on a webserver, Reposado is able to manage updates catalogs, replicate the online updates from Apple directly to your server as well as generate what can easily be called a “testing process” where updates are moving from a state of “unstable” to a state of “release” once ready for mass deployment. The session quickly moves from “createOSXinstallpkg,” a tool to package Lion or Mountain Lion for automated installation, to the last discussion concerning how to grant access for standard users to services such as Energy Saver, Date and Time or TimeMachine that by default are available to admin users only. This is done without giving them admin rights and in simple terms, you can elevate them to the state of “Power Users”. Greg’s blog must be bookmarked.
Dino Libertino
Consultant for over 15 years supporting most of the largest Italian publishers and advertising agencies, now senior mac systems engineer for a large entertainment company. Based in Milan (Italy), he is specialized in desktop management, imaging and software deployment across regions. When he is not behind a Mac he shares the time between his two passions: family and soccer!
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