Archive for category: Odds and Ends

If the recent kerfluffle among autopkg folks (over GitHub shutting off TLS less-than 1.2) is any indication, a lot of people are still on 10.12.6. If I may editorialize for a second, this is probably contributed to by Apple’s less-than-ideal planning, execution, and communication around the High Sierra release. What […]

Picking up where we left off with Jenkins, let’s look at one possible workflow to get autopkg projects working. Specifically when paired with Munki, this requires a bit more thought, but the Jenkins ‘workspace’ model and sane use of variables allows us to make one all-purpose script for most contingencies […]

Confession time: back when I was a consultant, I didn’t always use best practices. I know – that’s a loaded phrase anyway, but this wasn’t good. My name is Allister Banks, and I set up autopkg to run as root with a launchdaemon. In my defense, it was on an […]

If you are in an AD environment and computer names come from somewhere else in your organization, it may be inconvenient when trying to quickly prepare a new machine. DeployStudio has a form workflow step to set some information you’d like customized for the computer, including the local name(for Bonjour) and […]

UPDATE January 20, 2015 – Some are reporting an opendirectoryd-related fix, featuring the very cool-looking darwinup. Let’s hope it makes it into .2, and we’re not all chomping at the bit for 10.10.3! People are noticing a symptom, branded LoginLockout (credit @andrewrose), where Yosemite seemingly freezes during startup. The keyboard shows […]

After some undocumented options were found in the asr tool, Greg Neagle started digging around some other commands to see if he could find any other hidden options. The result of this interest has lead to some methods for finding hidden options in any command, although his specific example involves softwareupdate. […]

Twocanoes Software has released some really cool utilities today as open source software.  So far, they have released an app called Salute that lets you lock your screen using Control-Command-Delete, one called Audit that lets you configure and read OpenBSM logs and Debug which lets you enable and disabled debug logging from […]

Author’s Note: When I started to write this, I thought about calling it a Beginner’s Guide to IRC, but that’s not what this is. This is a Field Guide to IRC designed for those who remember IRC from the early 90s as well as those who’ve never set foot in […]

With OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion came some new Unix commands that are very handy.  Among them is pgrep and pkill, which rolls grep into the ps command so you no longer have to pipe ps to grep in order to find a running process.  pkill does the same thing, […]

Labman will be celebrating it's 11th Year at Northampton Community College on June 7th – 9th, 2010

Labman continues to be a low-key, inexpensive, and friendly conference intended for persons who are involved in the maintenance of computing labs in higher education, K–12, or library facilities. We are looking forward to the continued enhancement of the content shared an presented each year by fellow lab managers.

Please see http://www.labmanconference.org/ for more information.  We have some great events lined up and look forward to seeing old and new faces this year.
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I will quickly note that I have attended 8 LabMan conferences over the years and hosted 1 of them.  I have found them to be both enjoyable and useful while being a fairly "cheap date" – even the one I got to stress out about while hosting 🙂 .  I encourage folks to seriously consider going, especially if you are out on the East Coast.  

Tom "Macintosh Doctor" Johnson