Articles by: Allister Banks

Episode Five – Goodbye Burrito

Episode Five – Goodbye Burrito

The current stewards of AFP548 step to the mic this week. Recorded live-ish at Mac Tech Conference 2013, Nate Walck and Sam Keeley are joined by Michael Lynn(a.k.a. Frogor, a.k.a. Satan,) Joe Wollard, Allister Banks, and an unidentified gentleman hoping to find a place to rest himself and his six pack. […]

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Episode Four – Don’t Stab Yourself in the Leg, Then

When we last caught glimpse of our heroes, MacSysAdmin Conference was still around the corner and there was nothing automatic about damage. Here in episode four, Ed Marczak turns the (significantly less echo-y) microphone on Graham Gilbert for a reverse-interview, and juicy confessions emerge, like their shared, scandalous predilection for… […]

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Episode Three – 10 Seconds to Do Something Interesting

Recorded just prior to the Mavericks release, the dulcet tones of Mike Boylan host this weeks installment of the Cylinder of Destiny. He’s joined by the original triangle magician, Tim Perfitt of Twocanoes, to talk about the future viability of Server on OS X, Macintosh Manager, and iBeacon. And Volvo. […]

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Episode Two – Eco-Sphere

Pepijn Bruienne is this weeks Master of Ceremonies, with Charles Edge along for the ride. Beside hot-button, buzz-worthy subjects like LA USD’s iPad deployment and BYO(Apple)D, they find time to talk football and the perils of public speaking. Show links: enterprisemac.bruienne.com krypted.com techjournal.318.com Charles’ MacSysAdmin slides, pdf docs.macsysadmin.se/2013/pdf/TechnicalWriting.pdf Pepijn’s PSUMacAdmins […]

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Episode One – How Far Back Do You Wanna Go?

For this installment we’re joined by Ed Marczak, with Graham Gilbert hosting. Topics range from hiring to presentations, with a little bit of working in open source at scale. Show links: http://www.macadminmonthly.org Managing Macs with Puppet – Graham Gilbert Computing by the Numbers – Ed Marczak https://munki.googlecode.com/ http://puppetlabs.com http://macsysadmin.se http://www.mactech.com/conference […]

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Calling all ears! AFP548 has a podcast!

Calling all ears! AFP548 has a podcast!

AFP548 has always been about community: like-minded folks found their way to the Apple platform, and some of us even made a career out of supporting “Enterprise at your own risk”(copyright Nate Walck.) After Jody Rodgers got wind of a skunkworks project operating under the pseudonym ‘The Cylinder of Destiny,’ […]

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Garageband Deployment Quick Tip

Garageband Deployment Quick Tip

As discovered by @tvsutton and reported on ##osx-server IRC, the Mac App Store version of Garageband’s assets (which are downloaded on first-launch, all 1.57GBs…) can be fetched in advance: http://downloads.apple.com/static/gb/gb11bc/GarageBandBasicContent.pkg This makes it easier to deploy, since it is a standard package for content found outside of the .app bundle […]

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I am a humble personal assistant, with reminders about InstaDMG

Hey folks,

It's been a while since we InstaDMG-ers were at the forefront of people's minds, and it may seem like the whole IT landscape has changed.  I wanted to briefly drop you a line with a few tidbits and subtle reminders.  For one thing, did you know InstaDMG (and InstaUp2Date) is not just Lion-ready, but can now build images for (and on) Lion Server?  New catalogs, downloads and revised docs are imminent, keep checking the instadmg.googlecode.com site and follow the @OSX_adm twitterbot (trendy!)

Also, please understand that while InstaDMG was a early star in the modular image creation revolution, which helped turn the spotlight on packages and powerful image-building, it's merely a tool that fits a need.  Just because Greg Neagle developed and released a Lion upgrade package (which complements his work on Munki) doesn't mean it could be utilized with InstaDMG.  Likewise, many have hoped InstaDMG could address certain needs involving the recovery partition Lion introduces, but please remember, that's just an additional, somewhat static partition.

So when looking over tools in your chest, old (like NetRestore, hallowed be its name) and new-ish (like DeployStudio, which can extract and lay down recovery partitions with aplomb), please remember that InstaDMG is still an effective hammer. Your problem may just not be a nail, and that's A-OK. Thanks for listening!

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