For running commands quickly on remote machines, nothing beats SSH. It is quick and easy to open terminal and fire off the command. Rich has a post outlining how to execute a command on a remote machine without the need for an interactive SSH session.
Adding printers on multiple machines can be tedious if you have to manually setup all the duplexer and paper tray options that the printer supports. Thankfully there is a command line tool called lpadmn which allows you to configure the printer and all its options in one command.
Tim Sutton as an interesting post which outlines some interesting tricks you can do with flat Apple packages. Check out the writeup here.
With the advent of Gatekeeper, OS X now uses the quarantine extended attribute to warn you that the file or application was downloaded from the internet. This can be an annoyance for end users if you are offering files or applications to them and the quarantine attribute is present on the file.
Once you start using Terminal on a regular basis, you learn many tricks to make life easier and more efficient. Some of these tricks include setting an alias for commands as well as having bash use color when cruising around the CLI.
Sick of that error message popping up whenever an app is opened for the first time on your machine? Are your end users going crazy because of this? Fear not, there is a way to suppress these warnings. Tim Sutton has a post that explores exactly where these settings are stored and how to manipulate them.
Many management systems now handle updates for Adobe products and as a result it is desired to disable the native update mechanism that they ship with. One such product is Acrobat X Pro. In the past, it has been a challenge to make sure that the Adobe updater was disabled in Acrobat X, but as of 10.1.4, they have added functionality to disable it.
If your organization allows the use of the Mac App Store (MAS), it is good to know which users have used the MAS. Casper Suite allows you to make Extension Attributes which can return any arbitrary information that you'd like.
Rich Trouton has a writeup on how to re-enable the Java 6 plugin after the recent Software Update. This update disables the Web Plug-in piece while leaving the actual Java 6 framework intact. Many apps still require Java 6 (Crashplan for instance), so for many of us it may be a bit early to jump over to Java 7 as Apple has suggested.
Rich Trouton posted a script that checks the status of Gatekeeper and returns a value based upon this status. He has a generic version as well as an Extension Attribute for Casper Suite (which puts the information into the machine's inventory screen).
