Articles by: Allister Banks

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

If you are in an 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]