Do you work on munki with a team of folks (meaning more than one)? You probably wish you could use MunkiAdmin for everything, but mounting the munki repo over the network may be a poor experience as things grow very large, and as the server world is mostly nix (if you're lucky), running MunkiAdmin on the server itself is out of the picture.
So you've gotten ok with scripts, or at least have tasked yourself with sorting through and in some cases slinging around plain text files. You've even heard about this Github thing, maybe you've already made an account, maybe you're even digging in to it more often.
If you're like me, you love autopkg. You don't even want to perform web searches for download links anymore. I'm told there are certain things that can't be automated. But, when I first saw that many recipes could follow roughly the same format, I thought to myself 'we have to go deeper'(BUMMMMMMM!BUMBUM!
Archived copy: JSS-autopkg-addon Presentation (Vimeo)JSS-autopkg-addon Presentation by Allister Banks, uploaded June 27, 2014; archived 2026-10-21. Wayback Machine copy. JSS-autopkg-addon Presentation from Allister Banks on Vimeo.
Of the UNIX tools shipped with OS X, curl has become one of the most used in recent years, whether as a simple URL fetcher, or a component of much larger projects. It takes any URL as an argument, and reliably fetches it, as well as giving many additional options for control.
Location Services is an important part of OS X, but it is not obvious on how to enable it without going through the System Preferences GUI. The preference that controls it is not in /Library/Preferences, and due to cfprefsd it is hard to find.
Here are some notes from my recent sessions at PSU MacAdmins: More Munki Tricks Slides Examples Practical Python for Mac Admins Slides Bonus Material It was a fantastic year at PSU MacAdmins and I look forward to next…
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.
Installing printers via lpadmin on OS X can be a pain, especially if you do not know the names of the specific options you need for the printer (Duplex, Finisher, etc). You can dig through the .ppd if you'd like, but this is not as helpful as you might hope.
Noel Alonso has a post outlining one way you could easily delete a machine out of Active Directory using ldapsearch and ldapdelete. This script could easily be modified and changed to do various other things, such as passing the hostname in as an argument or doing a different action upon the machine.
