As a Mac SysAdmin in a dominantly Microsoft leaning organisation, I’m led to test new MS offerings with a view to rolling them out to Mac users once they reach their production stage. Sometimes, as in the case of OneDrive for Business, the need to use it is so great...
Back on 19th March 2015 I gave a short informal presentation at the second London Apple Admins meeting at ThoughtWorks London, about how I’ve been using Docker to setup some Mac administration tools, with the examples of Crypt, Munki-Trello and Munki-Enroll. Here’s my segment: The excellent hosts Ben Toms, Steve...
Some Mac Admins have recently blogged about testing BSDPy using Docker: @grahamgilbert - Getting Started With BSDPy on Docker @hunty1er - Creating a NetBoot Server with CentOS 7 and BSDPy I decided to try it out in a setup that suited me. Here’s how it went. What is BSDPy? Put...
An issue with Munki, especially if using AutoPkg, is that you can quickly amass many versions of software packages, which can fill up your repository volume. There are no automated ways of clearing out old versions of software, but in many cases there is no reason to keep them. Removing...
I sometimes need to know which manifests would be affected by an update to a Munki package, or need to know which manifests another manifest is included within. There are no tools to do this, so I wrote a script to do it. I suspect that someone could write it...
Rich Trouton’s Der Flounder blog recently described how to create a pre-configured Junos Pulse VPN client on OS X. I prefer to use Unixorn’s The Luggage rather than a GUI package creator, so here I adapt Rich’s instructions for The Luggage users. Installing the Luggage If you don’t already have...
UPDATE: DeployStudio have now released version 1.6.13 which addresses the kernel cache issue that was present in 1.6.12. UPDATE 2: OS X is no longer forked as of 10.10.3 DeployStudio hasn’t been updated for a while: version 1.6.12 came out 21 October 2014. Since then we’ve had new Mac minis...
If you utilise Munki for package deployment (and you should), you have no doubt at least looked at some of the useful web-based tools for administering and reporting on your clients. MunkiReport-PHP is a well-designed client reporting tool, which includes many excellent features. MunkiWebAdmin allows you to do a lot...
A captive portal is a network that forces an HTTP client to see a special web page (usually for authentication purposes) before using the Internet normally. A captive portal turns a Web browser into an authentication device. These are commonly used on wifi networks where authentication to the private network...
Reports from my organisation’s Network Team, after consultation with Cisco, are that in some situations Yosemite 802.1x authentications can take up to 20 seconds (due to buggy behaviour in the OS) - this causes a problem when roaming between two access points of similar strength which leads to your connection...
