Blogging is as much social media as YouTube is, particularly in the fact it can be as much of a suck as it can be absorbing (:keanuwhoa:) - apropos of... not much, welcome to 2026! I come to bury a hatchet about spicy autocorrect, not (necessarily) praise it.
When we last saw our subject matter experts in 2022(!), we were discussing how to craft queries so that compliance objectives could be reached with Zentral's 'checks', which has since expanded to scripted results from any interpreter you can target when wrapping a Munki run.
It is commonly said that python tends to be at least the second-best tool to reach for when approaching a task, whereas some of us get by just fine with shell. The lack of a compilation step for scripting languages tends to help us iterate and ship good-enough solutions quickly, and I'll be touching on specific style points for both later.
Since we're talking code, we should come to grips with the ungainly topic of version control itself before going much further, which in 2020 still means git. On this site (~6 years ago!
Welcome to a series about wranglin' cats code. Some of us are inclined to care about titles, and while I'm fine being a MacAdmin, Client Platform 'Engineer' is a more recent term recruiters want to plug into LinkedIn.
Friends don't let friends commit puppet code with obvious errors. Especially when you're working with a team, having a consistent style enforced by something like puppet-lint means less messy diffs as you send changes to each other to review.
If you are familiar with Jamf Pro's (formerly the JSS/Casper Suite's) model of smart groups and extension attributes (or EA's), they provide a way to run code that can (among other things) inventory the state of a computer.
Just a quick one, to remind you that there are ways you can have a dialog with users about tightening security controls. We're beating the drum about Flash dying a death, and haven't included it in our image since the Great Analytics Fiasco of 20.0.0.235.
You've read the Mule, you've read Ars, and folks like Mactracker have gone out and moved their feed to https like good citizens. But what about those old, abandoned apps we still want to keep using? Well, this is why it's called risk management and not fire-proofing.
As part of a security initiative to make distinct firmware passwords per machine and escrow them to Crypt's newly distinct 'secrets' database table, I came up with the idea to make an analogue to the Password Assistant you see in Keychain Access or the Accounts pane of System Preferences.
