Articles by: Allister Banks

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 […]

It’s been a long-standing goal of mine to help people get started making their own recipes for autopkg, which was recently spurred on by revisiting my previously-discussed recipeGenerationUtils. The autopkg wiki can only be so instructive on the process besides some general guidelines, so I thought I’d expand on some points here, while […]

Once again donning the yellow jersey, Charles Edge returns to reverse-interview Pepijn Bruienne, recorded back at the turn of the year. We’re so happy to have Charles back with his new role at Bushel, mostly because we can finally drag out the ‘scrum masters’ tag again. Lovingly polished by the awesome Aaron Lippincott, […]

When we heard about the ‘bootkit’ exploit branded Thunderstrike having the potential to remove all of your security controls it was pretty disturbing. Luckily Apple controls a relatively small number of models, and released a patch for several affected CPU versions, bundling it with 10.10.2 so as to lessen the number […]

Let’s talk about orchestration. This term is different than just applying the normal set of configuration profiles you want near-permanently enforced on the workstations under your management. Too much theory isn’t necessarily helpful, but sometimes I come across something that feels right, and then experience validates it as a real, […]

UPDATE January 20, 2015 – Some are reporting an opendirectoryd-related fix, featuring the very cool-looking darwinup. Let’s hope it makes it into .2, and we’re not all chomping at the bit for 10.10.3! People are noticing a symptom, branded LoginLockout (credit @andrewrose), where Yosemite seemingly freezes during startup. The keyboard shows […]

In our last installment, we introduced a solution for syncing large or already compressed files around without strictly commit’ing them to git proper when collaborating on a munki repo. This was by leveraging the git-fat add-on/script, which only relies on python(2.7) and rsync. Let’s talk about how, if you followed […]

Do you work on munki with a team of folks (meaning more than one)? You probably wish you could use MunkiAdmin for everything, but mounting the munki repo over the network may be a poor experience as things grow very large, and as the server world is mostly *nix (if you’re […]

Interrupting the offseason, here’s a discussion we recorded between Tim Perfitt and Dave Test, live at the 2014 Penn State Mac Admins Conference. Tim gives a little background about how iBeacon and Passbook were utilized at the conference, and Dave talks about the integration between them and the impossible-to-pronounce sched.org. Hope this […]