At Apple’s recent event, the release date for the next release of OS X (El Capitan) was “leaked” in the above shown email.
Not only is this release going to be the most magical since the last one, it’s main focus seems to be on performance & security. The latter of which will affect us admins, especially System Integrity Protection (read: SIP).
This post will try to explain one way SIP may affect you, & possibly how to prepare.
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If your environment is based around Active Directory, chances are you may leverage Active Directory Certificate Services (ADCS) as your internal public key infrastructure (PKI). The certificates from which may be used to authenticate clients to various services within your organisation.
As MacAdmins, we may need to configure our Macs to request certificates from our ADCS, below are some hopefully helpful tips that might make that easier.
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It’s a little past 7:26 am, i’m in the office with a inane grin & holding back some tears & you’re possibly to blame.
Let me explain.
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At this years MacAdmins Conference at Penn State, I had the honour of giving a talk titled “Open (and/or Free) vs Closed Source – Steel Cage Death Match” with the outspoken Allister Banks as my opponent.
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Sophos’s Enterprise Anti-Virus 9.2.x has been blogged about a few times & in the Mac Admin space most prominently by Gilbert Palau & Rich Trouton, but here comes another tale & post on the same subject.
Our saga with Sophos Enterprise Anti-Virus 9.2.x started on Feb 27th, which incidentally was the day after they change their installed to an app bundle which Rich had blogged about & at the time Sophos did not have any deployment articles on.
So what did they change & why the pitchforks & stink eye from the Mac Admin community?
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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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