The first day of MacIT 2013 was packed full of valuable sessions. From Chip Pearson’s moving talk regarding the future of the Mac Administrator community to the various sessions covering security topics, iOS and BYOD environments.
The Mountain Lion Security session by Steve Leebove and Justin Rummel was an overview of the various new security features in OS X. They covered XProtect, Gatekeeper, FileVault2, Both Firewalls (Application and Port based) as well as the Privacy settings. Also covered was a step by step guide on how to get a proper SSL certificate including generating a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) and having a CA sign it for you. This session did a great job of highlighting the various security features and giving you some helpful command line tools for manipulating the various security services.
Nick McSpadden did a talk on Browser Management and covered how to manage Safari, Firefox and Chrome. He went over managing Safari via MCX, Firefox using the CCK addon and Chrome using MCX via a preference manifest as well as a settings file that is specific to Chrome. If you have ever wondered how you might manage any of these browsers, then Nick’s session is the one you will want to check out.
Another session that stuck out was the Managing Adobe Software session with Jody Rodgers and crew. The session opened with an airing of grievances, of which the lack of native Apple Packages received the most applause. We were told that Adobe is “on the path to change it.” What this means exactly is not clear, but hopefully the Creative Suite teams will start migrating to proper Apple Packages. Everyone who aired a grievance got a gift card for various services, but it was less of a payoff and more of a consolation prize. Jody covered what the Creative Cloud meant for IT organizations and the team unveiled the Creative Cloud Packager. This new utility allows you to download the various products directly from within the app (No need to log on to the website to grab the software manually). After downloading the software, it will allow you to package it into an AAMEE-style package.
Overall, MacIT has gotten off to a great start. There are many great sessions to come, so stay tuned for more information.
Nate Walck
Nate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and is one of the founding members of the ##osx-server IRC channel on freenode.net. He loves being involved in the Mac Admin community and using Open Source projects whenever possible, especially Munki, The Luggage and Puppet.
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