Articles by: Allister Banks

It is commonly said that python tends to be at least the second-best tool to reach for when approaching a task, whereas some of us get by just fine with shell. The lack of a compilation step for scripting languages tends to help us iterate and ship good-enough solutions quickly, […]

Part Two, Git Recommendations Revisited. (Part One is Here) Since we’re talking code, we should come to grips with the ungainly topic of version control itself before going much further, which in 2020 still means git. On this site (~6 years ago! with not the most generous title) we went […]

Welcome to a series about wranglin’ cats code. Some of us are inclined to care about titles, and while I’m fine being a MacAdmin, Client Platform ‘Engineer‘ is a more recent term recruiters want to plug into LinkedIn. That engineer part is meant to differentiate us from the apes sysadmins, […]

On the Twitters not too long ago the question was posed: what topic could you give a 20 minute talk about without any prep? macOS Computer Naming is a thing I can’t find a great canonical resource for on the internets, so here’s an attempt to fill that gap, since […]

If the recent kerfluffle among autopkg folks (over GitHub shutting off TLS less-than 1.2) is any indication, a lot of people are still on 10.12.6. If I may editorialize for a second, this is probably contributed to by Apple’s less-than-ideal planning, execution, and communication around the High Sierra release. What […]

Let’s discuss the basic input/output system for IBM PC compatible computing devices, aka BIOS. Wait, that’s not a good start, P.eople C.an’t reM.ember C.omputer and I.nternet A.cronyms. Ok, EFI – that’s a thing that’s like BIOS, right? You can lock it, it makes sure all your most vital hardware components […]

Friends don’t let friends commit puppet code with obvious errors. Especially when you’re working with a team, having a consistent style enforced by something like puppet-lint means less messy diffs as you send changes to each other to review. And if you’re leveraging stuff like r10k, you definitely don’t want […]

Socially, Slack and Twitter are the two poles I gravitate between: Slack for when I’m hoping to be a burden on or distracted by our always-up-to-something community, and Twitter when I’m more in the mood to consume the echo chamber than reverberate sound out in to it. And then there’s […]

If you are familiar with Jamf Pro’s (formerly the JSS/Casper Suite’s) model of smart groups and extension attributes (or EA’s), they provide a way to run code that can (among other things) inventory the state of a computer. Every recon run, they run the provided scripts configured server-side, and through […]

For the next stop in our journey, we’ll review that jolly ol’ soul, Santa. It’s a system for either monitoring what apps are launched and blacklisting the ones you decide are bad, or locking down a macOS computer to only run the ones you’ve whitelisted. Despite what The Register seems […]