pkgbuild is a tool that showed up in Xcode 3.2 and is now included in default Lion installs. It allows you to make an Apple Package from the command line with a minimum amount of effort. One good use for this tool is creating payload-free packages.
Various Mac Admins have noticed that if you install Flash Player 11.3 using the .pkg file that can be found inside the .app which Adobe provides, System Preferences will crash if you try to use Check Now in the Flash Player PreferencePane.
With the release of OS X 10.8 Server came an updated version of Profile Manager. If you did not dive into Profile Manager on 10.7 Server, then now is the time to get going with some form of MDM. Having a MDM solution will be necessary going forward.
Filewave has released a new image creation tool called 'Filewave Lightning.' This GUI-based tool is specifically for generating 10.7 and 10.8 images along with baking in additional packages if desired.
With the released of Casper Suite 8.6, OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is now fully supported. For OTA enrollments to go smoothly on OS X 10.8, the QuickAdd package must be digitally signed with a valid Apple Developer Certificate.
Yesterday, Oracle announced that they would be expanding support for OS X with the release of Java 7 update 6. Oracle is now responsible for Java updates for the OS X platform. In the past, Apple had handled distribution of Java updates via Apple Software Updates.
With the release of Mountain Lion I needed a way of creating an updated Recovery HD partition when imaging our machines. In the past I used a combination of solutions by Clay Caviness and Joel Bruner.
If you didn't catch this PSA from Greg Neagle earlier this month, it is worth a look. Mountain Lion now uses a https url to pull updates from Apple rather than simple a http url.
Charles Edge has been doing a series of post on OS X Mountain Lion Server and one of today's topics was of interest for those of us that do image deployments. The NetBoot service has been around for quite a while and hadn't changed a whole lot in appearance.
As discovered by @tvsutton and reported on ##osx-server IRC, the Mac App Store version of Garageband's assets (which are downloaded on first-launch, all 1.57GBs...) can be fetched in advance: This makes it easier to deploy, since it is a standard package for content found outside of the .app bundle itself.
