Archive for category: Tips

Stop All The Downloadin’

Stop All The Downloadin’

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. I’m not the most tolerant […]

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Return of the Intermittent Bricking

Return of the Intermittent Bricking

So it used to be we’d wait for machines that were bound to Active Directory running 10.10.0-10.10.2 to freeze during startup and we’d either perform CPR or apply rc.server script fixes. ‘Things can only get better,’ we said. ‘Just trust them,’ we said. ‘They’ll get it all fixed if we […]

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Testing Memory On Apple Computers

Charles Edge has an article posted about testing memory on Apple computers from the command line.  If you have wanted to run a quick and easy memtest without booting to diagnostic media, then this is the answer you have been looking for. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, […]

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Getting and Setting Printer Options

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. […]

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Hidden Apple Software Restore (ASR) Documentation

Apple Software Restore (ASR) has some hidden documentation that reveals a few command line options which were previously unknown to most. A post on jamfnation led to some discussion on ##osx-server about an undocumented ASR command.  Rich Trouton blogged about how to view these commands using a very interesting method.  If […]

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ldapsearch and ldapdelete Examples

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 […]

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Load or Reload a LaunchAgent without User Action

Load or Reload a LaunchAgent without User Action

Kyle Crawford has an interesting post that covers reloading LaunchAgents while a user is logged in without requiring them to take action (Log out/in, reboot, etc). While somewhat hacky, it is a novel way to ensure that a given LaunchAgent is reloaded without burdening the End User to take action. Nate […]

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Automatically Enable WiFi At Login Window

The Context My OS X deployment workflow is a very hands-off approach.  As Mike Boylan and I described in our post “How to Lose 100 Pounds in 10 Days,” my process involves crafting an OS X installer package using Greg Neagle’s CreateOSXInstallPkg to incorporate Munki, iCloud prompt / Lion registration suppression, […]

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Disabling iCloud as the Default Save Location

iCloud is a great tool for consumer use, but in most enterprises it is not desirable.  OS X defaults to saving documents on iCloud if the application supports it.  If company policy states you cannot save documents to the cloud, then this must be disabled.  Charles Edge has a post on […]

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Rolling OS X packages with FPM and Homebrew

If you have ever needed to package up and deploy python modules or ruby gems, you know that it is kind of a pain.  It is a very manual process. Enter FPM (Effing Package Management) with its newly minted osxpkg support.  Thanks to Tim Sutton’s recent contribution to fpm, you can now roll […]

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