Articles by: Nate Walck

Many management systems now handle updates for Adobe products and as a result it is desired to disable the native update mechanism that they ship with.  One such product is Acrobat X Pro.  In the past, it has been a challenge to make sure that the Adobe updater was disabled […]

PSU MacAdmins 2013 has been announced!  This is the best east coast conference that you can go to in 2013.  Check out the details for PSU MacAdmins 2013 here and you can see 2012’s sessions here to get an idea of what to expect.  This conference has grown over the years […]

If your organization allows the use of the Mac App Store (MAS), it is good to know which users have used the MAS.  Casper Suite allows you to make Extension Attributes which can return any arbitrary information that you’d like.  The 318 Tech Journal recently went through how to gather […]

DeployStudio RC135 was released yesterday.  It fixes some annoying bugs with flow control (packages and scripts installing out of order).  Check out the change log and download it here. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and […]

Rich Trouton has a writeup on how to re-enable the Java 6 plugin after the recent Software Update.  This update disables the Web Plug-in piece while leaving the actual Java 6 framework intact.  Many apps still require Java 6 (Crashplan for instance), so for many of us it may be […]

The 2012 MacTech Conference is rapidly approaching.  It will kick off next week on Wednesday, October 17th and run through Friday, October 19th.  If you would like to go, make sure to get your registration done as soon as possible.  You can register for the conference here.  There are a […]

Rich Trouton posted a script that checks the status of Gatekeeper and returns a value based upon this status.  He has a generic version as well as an Extension Attribute for Casper Suite (which puts the information into the machine’s inventory screen).  Hop over to Der Flounder for details. Nate […]

Over at Tech Recess, Randy Saeks has a rundown of some new iOS 6 features that are useful in a managed environment.  The feature that will reduce support time the most is the ability to update installed apps without entering an AppleID and password.  This allows you to use a […]

With 10.8.2 came a useful fdesetup option for use with FileVault 2 encrypted systems.  This new option is called ‘authrestart’ and it allows you to reboot a FV2-enabled machine and skip the preboot login screen.  This provides a mechanism for doing maintenance that requires a reboot. Check out the details on Rich Trouton’s blog. […]

Over time version control has become more popular within the sysadmin realm, with one of the most popular version control systems being git. Graham goes over some of the reasons that it is a good idea to use Git in your everyday work over on his blog.  Once you get […]