Articles by: Nick McSpadden

In a previous post, I showed how to set up Sal. Sal‘s basic functionality is useful on its own, for the basic Munki reporting – what are the completed installs, pending updates, what OS versions, how many devices checked in the past 24 hours, etc. In this post, I’m going […]

In a previous post, I showed how to use Munki with Puppet SSL Client certificates in a Docker image. In that example, the Puppetmaster image is set to automatically sign all certificate requests. Good for testing, but not a good idea for production use. Instead, we should look into Puppet […]

Previously, I showed how you can run Munki in a Docker container. Then, I talked about how to build Munki to use Puppet for SSL certificates. Assuming you’ve got a running Puppetmaster image (which I talked about building here), let’s run the Munki-Puppet image we just built. Running the Container: […]

Note: this is based on the README for the Munki-SSL docker container. In a previous post, we ran a Docker container serving Munki repo content via Nginx. That works fine, but only serves insecure HTTP content. It’s generally in everyone’s best interest to use a secure connection between the Munki […]

This is based on the README I wrote for the macadmins/puppetmaster image. Puppet is an industrial-strength cross-platform configuration management engine. Though you’ll find lots of existing Puppetmaster images on the Docker registry, this one will serve as the baseline for other expanded uses of Puppet – such as using it […]

In the previous post, I built a container that serves static files at http://munki/repo using Nginx. Now that we have build the Docker image, let’s put it to use. Data Containers We’re going to hook up the Munki image to a data-only container. Data-only containers are a way of keeping […]

Munki is an incredible tool for Mac software deployment, and the setup process is fairly straightfoward – configure a web server, create your repo, run the tools to populate it with software, and configure clients. It’s the “configure a web server” aspect that may give some pause, as setting up […]

Minecraft is of course a huge thing. It’s hugely popular at our school, and has become a valuable educational tool. Minecraft allows structured but almost unrestrained creativity, giving students a change to realize the unlimited nature of their imagination and persistence when building worlds and creating narratives. Minecraft’s multiplayer options […]

JAMF Software just recently released Casper Suite 8.7 along with their new education-aimed tool Casper Focus.  I had a chance to play around with it and test it out the past two days, so you can decide if this is something worth pursuing for yourselves. What does it do? To […]

One of the rising topics of discussion that continually returns to every single Mac Admin conference, gathering, and website is the deployment of iPads.  iPads have become ubiquitous, for users, schools, and businesses now, and suddenly lots of system admins, technology coordinators, directors, and supervisors are being tasked with adopting […]