Articles by: Allister Banks

Challenges My Organization Faces Upgrading to OS X 10.11, El Capitan

Challenges My Organization Faces Upgrading to OS X 10.11, El Capitan

As if you haven’t heard, there’s something new this month to cause drama on the Apple upgrade treadmill (just as nefarious as Slack dragging everyone’s communication watering hole into the future). This time it’s the coming System Integrity Protection and other tightening restrictions we’re all dealing with. I wanted to […]

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(Design of, and) How to Generate ‘Memorable’ Passwords

As part of a security initiative to make distinct firmware passwords per machine and escrow them to Crypt’s newly distinct ‘secrets’ database table, I came up with the idea to make an analogue to the Password Assistant you see in Keychain Access or the Accounts pane of System Preferences. And […]

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Congratulations to JAMF Software!

We at AFP548 would like to congratulate JAMF Software and IBM for their announced collaboration to provide management services to Apple customers all around the world. In one fell swoop, one of the oldest technology companies showed it was serious about supporting Apple’s products, and here’s to the notion that […]

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Thunderstruck Update via Shea Craig

Just a quick link to (your friend and mine) Shea ‘G’ Craig’s blog for an update about the new Thunderstrike patches that came down with 10.10.4, head over there for the skinny. Two notes, if you don’t have a local Reposado server downloading pkgs, here’s the link on Apple’s WAN […]

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Things that were awesome at PSU MacAdmins Conference 2015

Things that were awesome at PSU MacAdmins Conference 2015

This year many attendees of the Penn State Mac Admins Conference likened the experience to summer camp. I described it as the feeling of gluttony, and as I’m a bit of an enthusiast, I’m still recovering from intellectual overload. It felt different than previous years – personally that may be […]

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One way to be autopkging the Jenkins

One way to be autopkging the Jenkins

Picking up where we left off with Jenkins, let’s look at one possible workflow to get autopkg projects working. Specifically when paired with Munki, this requires a bit more thought, but the Jenkins ‘workspace’ model and sane use of variables allows us to make one all-purpose script for most contingencies […]

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Why to Jenkins

Why to Jenkins

Confession time: back when I was a consultant, I didn’t always use best practices. I know – that’s a loaded phrase anyway, but this wasn’t good. My name is Allister Banks, and I set up autopkg to run as root with a launchdaemon. In my defense, it was on an […]

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Quick Tip – Changing ComputerName Before DeployStudio Finalize

If you are in anĀ AD environment and computer names come from somewhere else in your organization, it may be inconvenient when trying to quickly prepare a new machine. DeployStudio has a form workflow step to set some information you’d like customized for the computer, including the local name(for Bonjour) and […]

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Finally with the Docker, Pepijn Bruienne with Charles Edge, Part Two

What you’ve all been waiting for, the exciting conclusion to Charles interviewing Pepijn, where they finally let loose the dogs of Docker. Be sure to not listen all the way until the end, as the hand-egg talk somehow slipped in. Allister BanksAllister lives in Japan, has not read the Slack […]

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Return of the Intermittent Bricking

Return of the Intermittent Bricking

So it used to be we’d wait for machines that were bound to Active Directory running 10.10.0-10.10.2 to freeze during startup and we’d either perform CPR or apply rc.server script fixes. ‘Things can only get better,’ we said. ‘Just trust them,’ we said. ‘They’ll get it all fixed if we […]

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