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.
Let's face it, OS X makes a great stable client platform but the server components do not scale well. That is probably why most big companies rely on some other component to have the infrastructure and then us, the Mac admins, spend a lot of time on the integration.
Apple has included one or more versions of python with OS X since Jaguar (10.2). Their latest version, Mountain Lion (10.8), includes python versions 2.5, 2.6, and 2.7.
Office 2011 is a common application to get baked into an InstaDMG image (or any other pre-compiled, modular style image). There are a few quirks to installing Office 2011 in this way as it was made to be installed on a live system.
Jeremy Reichman has a post outlining how to add an installable_condition to a given piece of software in Munki. This key allows you to specify requirements for a package based upon a NSPredicate and information that Munki knows about the machine.
One of the rising topics of discussion that continually returns to every single Mac Admin conference, gathering, and website is the deployment of iPads.
For those of you who do application testing inside of an OS X VMware VM, you may have noticed that Java does not work properly. Rich has a good summary of the status of running Java inside a VM and even a fix that VMWare has provided which patches Java so it will run properly.
Virtualization is an extremely useful tool to have at your disposal. If you have ever wanted to transfer a physical machine's OS X install to a virtual machine, you know that VMWare does not make a tool for doing so. They provide one for Linux and Windows, but not for OS X.
Safari has a new feature that lets you whitelist specific websites for use with Java. This feature is extremely helpful to ensure that internal company websites that need Java can still run while possibly malicious external websites are not permitted to run by default.
Justin Rummel has a writeup on how to enable various log files on OS X server and where to view them at. Pretty good look at how you might go about logging for the sake of security, troubleshooting or even curiosity.
