Earlier today the above popped up on some 10.9 Macs, iOS devices & even Android devices. Clicking “Cancel” would only stop the pop up for a few minutes & it would re-appear.
On the MacAdmins Slack a few mentioned seeing this, so the immediate thoughts of “OMG what has happened to my wireless” subsided.
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Imagr may be the new kid on the Mac imaging block, but for those of us using the Casper Suite it can offer an alternative imaging method with little extra effort.
The post expands upon the above, explaining the niche use cases for Imagr for those of us using the Casper Suite
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With the death of the Xserve & subsequent killing off of the MacMini server many Mac Admins have either sought to remove all Apple branded hardware from the server room or have been forced to.
Myself? I now look after a total of 25 Mac Servers, 21 of which are dedicated to our JSS & are installed across 8 different sites globally, some of the challenges of which are touched upon in the JNUC2014 Panel I was on, titled Thinking Big: Scaling JSS Infrastructures for the Mobile Workforce.
The focus of the post below is the Mac Mini’s which are used onsite for Casper Suite Distribution Points, NetBoot Servers & Caching Servers.
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Say hello to AutoCasperNBI’s relative AutoImagrNBI.
As the name implies, AutoImagrNBI is a variant of AutoCasperNBI but will create NetBoot images for use with Imagr.
This came about as the requirements for an NBI for Imagr are similar to that of Casper Imaging, & so hasn’t been a massive amount of work needed.
AutoImagrNBI differs from AutoNBI in that the end result is a NetBoot Image & not a NetInstall Image. A NetBoot Image is a full OS that can be made available for network booting, whereas NetInstall is a limited environment. AutoImagrNBI can also create a DMG for restoring to external media such as USB sticks.
Click here to go to AutoImagrNBI’s user guide & download link.
The below is to try explain the use of the Enabled/Disabled Identifiers arrays in the NBImageInfo.plist on OSX Server.
This is to try & better explain their use.
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AutoCasperNBI has been updated to 1.2.0 & this is a MASSIVE release with 39+ issues resolved or enhancements added!
Many thanks to those whom tested, logged issues & enhancements.
There are a number of massive changes, so the Help Guide has been updated too.
The issues are listed within the release notes alongside the AutoCasperNBI and can be found here.
For a number of years we have used Portfolio as an archive server for old projects to be archived from our various data servers.
This would free up space on those servers, & with the added benefits of using the built-in meta-tagging ability to view cataloged files via a web browser.
With the release of the most recent version, we moved from a Windows 2008r2 VM which was starting to creak under the 20+TB of data we had archived to a Mac Pro 64GB RAM, 1TB SSD & 2x24TB LaCie 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2.
However, a few months in & not all data had been cataloged & the Mac Pro was pretty much idling. So I had a hunt through Portfolio’s various files with Extensis support on the phone & came up with the below locations in which the memory allocation can be amended from the defaults to improve performance by utilising more resources.
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As mentioned in my little talk at London Apple Admins, the below are a collection of the Links is talked around:
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As posted by Tim Sutton, the installation of “Security Update 2015-002” on a 10.8.5 or 10.9.5 Mac will leave the /mach_kernel file visible. That’s fine, until someone deletes the file & then can’t boot their Mac.
As ever, Rich Trouton has blogged a method to hide the file via Casper.
However, Rich does love an EA & I’m not so inclined therefore the following is an EA free method to achieve the same end.
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On January 29th, Microsoft released Outlook for iOS and Android.
This release has caused somewhat of a stir due to some reported security issues with the app which existed before it’s rebranding from “Accompli”
I’ll be honest, I found a number of the posts on this app to be somewhat alarmist, but a post with the somewhat alarmist title: Warning – Microsofts Outlook app for iOS breaks your company security raised a point that caused me some concern.
This point was: “Shared Exchange ActiveSync ID and device type”
This post will explain why the concern, my findings & how to block “Outlook for iOS and Android” via Exchanges Allow/Block/Quarantine List.
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