Setup OSX Server as a Time Server

Standard
Clock

Most of the Macs I support are mobile & it seems that around the with the  release of the “Unibody MacBook Pro” Apple stopped shipping Macs with a battery that would keep the Macs time even when the Macs main battery had died.

This means that if a Macs battery dies during travelling to another office, they’d not be able to login once there as the time would be more than 5 minutes out. Also, we heavily use SSL to secure things like our Wireless & many websites (JSS distribution points included).

So the solution was for me to setup my own NTP, that would both sync with my domains NTP & be externally accessible for those mobile users on the road.

I’ve posted How To: Set a Macs Time Server, How To: Sync Time With NTP via Script & How To: Check Your Active Directory Domains Time. They all came about when 1st looking at this issue, this last post in the series with use all those posts.

Continue reading

How To: Check Your Active Directory Domains Time

Standard

win98-1-1

So far I have posted 2 blog posts on How To: Set a Macs Time Server & How To: Sync Time With NTP via Script. Well, why am I posting this?

Continue reading

How To: Set a Macs Time Server

Standard
Date&Time

A recent post showed how to forcibly update a Macs time against a given NTP server, i’ve since been asked how to set the Macs NTP server.

This post will try & show you how.

Continue reading

ERROR 2006 (HY000) at line: MySQL server has gone away.

Standard

I’ve been trying to restore my JSS 8.73 to a test server in preparation to test upgrading to 9.2x, but during the restore i was getting the error “ERROR 2006 (HY000) at line 1692: MySQL server has gone away” as shown below.

Continue reading

JSS Database Utility: Change MySQL Settings greyed out

Standard

When creating test JSS instances,  I often stumble over this issue where the “Change MySQL Settings…” option is greyed out

This often leads to me having to contact JAMF Support for a refresher. Well hopefully this post will remind me!

Continue reading

Because Pentland

Standard
pentland.com

A few weeks ago I posted “Because MacMule,” but this is only part of the story. Not only have the Mac Admin community greatly assisted me over the years, but that post did a disservice to the company I work for as i neglected to mention them.

That company is Pentland Brands & you’ve probably never heard of us. But please take a moment to look at our recently re-launched site to get a real flavour of the company & it’s values.

Continue reading

Error: /var/log/jamfChangeManagement.log (Permission denied)

Standard

As mentioned in my previous post, we have a simple cluster setup for our JSS.

However, I’ve seen and intermittent issue with permissions to /var/log/jamfChangeManagement.log, below are more details as well as a break-fix solution.

Continue reading

Error: Could not connect to the JSS. Status – 503

Standard

This weekend our firewalls were replaced with us moving from one vendor to another. This took a little longer than required due to some issues with rules & inside outside definitions, but my colleague was more than up to the challenge.

This change  required our VPN config profile to be re-pushed, it seemed to work. But further testing revealed we had an issue.

We have a simple cluster for our JSS with one server “cloud” accessible in the DMZ & another on our WAN that is our master JSS, post firewall change I checked:

Continue reading

How To: Sync Time With NTP via Script

Standard

Time’s a blessing & a curse, but an absolute. When it comes to Active Directory & Kerberos, it’s very important.

The below script will try & sync the Macs time to the NTP server specified at $4 or hardcoded as a value for the NTPServer variable in the script.

Continue reading

How To: Delete The Currently Logged In Users Login.Keychain & Then Logout Or Prompt To Logout

Standard

The below will delete the currently logged in users login.keychain, if the $logoutPrompt is set to Y then it will bring up the standard OSX logout prompt, else it will kill the loginwindow process & force logout.

When the user nexts logs in they will recreate the login.keychain.

We have this a an item in Self Service.

Continue reading