Articles by: Samuel Keeley

Five years ago, it was not uncommon to see many cabinets full of Xserves fulfilling serving roles in the enterprise.  Today those servers are on their last legs and warrant replacement by modern hardware and software design. Luckily there isn’t much of a need of OS X Server by IT […]

Munki and Puppet have become very popular tools in the last few years, and make a great team for Mac management.  While Puppet is inherently secure due to its use of client-certificate based SSL for all communication, most Munki deployments still run over plaintext HTTP.  One of the best features […]

Tim Perfitt of Twocanoes Software has put together a nice video showcasing the thirty years of Macintosh models. I’ve owned eight of them, mostly portables.  How about you? Read more about the video on the Twocanoes blog. Samuel KeeleySamuel Keeley can frequently be found in ##osx-server on Freenode, or on […]

John Kitzmiller is putting together a group of Mac admins in the Chicago area. These meet ups are a great way to get to know others in our community, and I have had a great time at similar meetups like MacBrained in San Francisco. If you are in the Chicago […]

Profiles have become one of the most interesting components of the Apple ecosystem – both on OS X and on iOS. With their ability to easily control the functionality of the operating system, install certificates, and manage application preferences, along with their flexibility to use the same profile on desktop […]

Of the UNIX tools shipped with OS X, curl has become one of the most used in recent years, whether as a simple URL fetcher, or a component of much larger projects. It takes any URL as an argument, and reliably fetches it, as well as giving many additional options […]

Slides https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man1/security.1.html Samuel KeeleySamuel Keeley can frequently be found in ##osx-server on Freenode, or on Twitter @keeleysam.More Posts – Website Follow Me:

At MacSysAdmin 2013, Per Olofsson started work on InstallESDtoDMG, a replacement for InstaDMG.  The first prototype was on a piece of paper: InstallESDtoDMG prototype 0.1 pic.twitter.com/E0fiPHkOMq — Per Olofsson (@MagerValp) September 19, 2013 Per was having trouble with InstaDMG and the then-current Developer Preview of Mavericks, and decided to write […]

Versions of OS X prior to Mavericks had a file located at /etc/authorization, which controlled the rights for many different actions, such as adding a printer, changing the time, or setting up Time Machine.  These rights were based on groups, and many admins modified this file so that users who […]

Apple today announced immediate availability of OS X Mavericks, along with major upgrades to the MacBook Pro, Mac Pro, and iPad lines. With its many new features, Mac admins will be inclined to upgrade quickly, especially since Mavericks is free for all supported machines. We are putting the finishing touches […]