Tim Sutton has a post that talks about how Java 7 uses LaunchDaemons in a very poor fashion. The amount of poor scripting and LaunchDaemon usage is quite sad. It makes one wonder how Java 7 works at all on OS X.
This is part one of a series on dealing with the issues software can cause in enterprise environments, and how to combat these issues. One of the most important skills in a Mac Admin's toolbox is being able to identify and work around issues with vendor software.
If you have ever wondered about hosting your Casper server in the cloud, check out this post on Justin Rummel's blog. He has some notes he made during a recent JSS setup on Amazon EC2 hosting. This is a very compelling setup if you have a fair amount of machines that are never on your network and can easily access the internet.
The Premise: Nick McSpadden and I were both working on a similar goal this week: getting Macs to connect to Wi-Fi at the loginwindow. By default, adding preferred wireless networks will only connect once a user is logged in, either via the networksetup command or Profiles.
Rich has a tip posted for opening Finder windows while you are in Terminal. This is handy if you are cruising around the command line and decide that you would like to use the GUI to do something instead.
The Context My OS X deployment workflow is a very hands-off approach.
Paul Suh did a session at MacIT 2013 on Certificates, specifically in regards to Open Directory serving as a PKI. The session was only 45 minutes long, so he could not go into great detail. Thankfully, Paul has written a three part article that covers using an Open Directory-based PKI so that the details can be thoroughly covered.
Between OS X 10.7 and 10.8, some changes were made with how directory services functioned. This caused Puppet 2.7.x to not be fully functional on 10.8. Thankfully, these changes have been adjusted for in the latest version of Puppet (3.x).
If you wanted to know everything there is to know about disabling Java 7 updates, then head over to Tim Sutton's blog to check out his latest post.
Several different methods for managing XProtect settings have surfaced since rapid fire Java and Flash updates were released over the past few weeks. Some methods disable the auto update feature of XProtect and require that you manually update the XProtect settings.
