Articles by: Nate Walck

Package Install Conditions in Munki

Jeremy Reichman has a post outlining how to add an installable_condition to a given piece of software in Munki.  This key allows you to specify requirements for a package based upon a NSPredicate and information that Munki knows about the machine.  Check out the details over on Jeremy’s Blog. Nate […]

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Running Java 7 in a VMware Fusion 10.8.x VM

For those of you who do application testing inside of an OS X VMware VM, you may have noticed that Java does not work properly.  Rich has a good summary of the status of running Java inside a VM and even a fix that VMWare has provided which patches Java […]

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Moving a physical OS X machine to a VMware VM

Virtualization is an extremely useful tool to have at your disposal.  If you have ever wanted to transfer a physical machine’s OS X install to a virtual machine, you know that VMWare does not make a tool for doing so.  They provide one for Linux and Windows, but not for […]

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Setting the default boot drive from Boot Selector

Apparently you can set the default boot volume right from the EFI Boot Disk Selector.  Rich has the details over on his blog. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and is one of the founding […]

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Managing Safari’s Java Whitelist

Safari has a new feature that lets you whitelist specific websites for use with Java.  This feature is extremely helpful to ensure that internal company websites that need Java can still run while possibly malicious external websites are not permitted to run by default.  Check out the details about this […]

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XProtectWatch, now with more Notifications

Justin Rummel has updated his XProtectWatch tool so that it triggers a Notification whenever the XProtect plist is updated.  This is not a system to manage the XProtect settings but rather a tool to notify you when XProtect gets a new configuration.  Check it out over on Justin’s blog. Nate […]

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Logging on OS X Server

Justin Rummel has a writeup on how to enable various log files on OS X server and where to view them at.  Pretty good look at how you might go about logging for the sake of security, troubleshooting or even curiosity. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc […]

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10.8.3 is out, but which models are supported by it?

Greg has two posts that go over which models are supported by the “unified” 10.8.3 Installer.  Check out the details in his first post about 10.8.3 and a follow-up that covers newer models. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com […]

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Digging in to Java 7: Poor LaunchDaemon Usage

Tim Sutton has a post that talks about how Java 7 uses LaunchDaemons in a very poor fashion.  The amount of poor scripting and LaunchDaemon usage is quite sad.  It makes one wonder how Java 7 works at all on OS X. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at […]

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Casper in the Cloud

If you have ever wondered about hosting your Casper server in the cloud, check out this post on Justin Rummel’s blog.  He has some notes he made during a recent JSS setup on Amazon EC2 hosting.  This is a very compelling setup if you have a fair amount of machines […]

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