MacSysAdmin September 18, 2013 at 3:42 am

MacSysAdmin 2013 (Day 1)

Hello from Göteborg!

The first day of MacSysAdmin 2013 is over, and there have been great presentations from many members of the Apple community.

Ed Marczak kicked things off with a look at the future from the past and present, showing how predictions of the future are bound to deviate far from reality.  Ed’s presentations are always great, and he truly played the part for each decade.

Rick Wylie from Key Options showed off the latest version of his Air Patrol product, which does detection of cellular and Wi-Fi devices.   Aside from its applications in MDM, its potential to be used for detection and tracking of unauthorized devices in places such as board rooms, schools, or even prisons looks pretty amazing.

Departing from a strictly Apple topic, Nurani Nimpuno of Netnod gave a very interesting talk on the Internet from the perspective of a governing body.  As part of her talk, she went into fascinating detail about the threats to the Internet, such as a full shutdown and DNS poisoning, Due to BGP and external links, she showed how countries with few external links such as Egypt or Cuba are at huge risk, while those with hundreds are at very little risk, such as the United States or Sweden.

Wrapping up the day, Anders Meinert and Sebastian Bredsdorff from Atea showed how they manage a large fleet of Macs using Microsoft SCCM 2012 SP1.  While most Mac admins have little interest in managing their fleet using SCCM, it is very good to see that Microsoft does seem to be taking Mac support seriously, giving another option for organizations.

So far, the conference has been great, and many thanks to Tycho for keeping the conference going.  Every seat in the room is filled, and it is no surprise that the conference sells out every year.

Samuel Keeley

Samuel Keeley can frequently be found in ##osx-server on Freenode, or on Twitter @keeleysam.

More Posts - Website

Follow Me:
Twitter

Leave a reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.