A little over a month ago I attended the Jamf Nation User Conference 2013 (READ: JNUC) in Minneapolis, this was the 1st multi-day conference I’ve attended & the 1st time i’ve flown solo. This also led to somewhat of a watershed moment for me.
Continue readingVPP 2.0, Mavericks, iLife ’13 & iWork ’13
StandardOn October 22nd, Apple released Mavericks for free. As well as the iLife ’13 & iWork ’13 suites being announced as free for all newly purchased Macs that shipped with Mavericks.
This came as a shock, but a good one. Next thing was figuring out the licensing.
Below is how we overcame this shock.
Continue readingUpdating Managed Settings popup at login window
StandardHow To: Set Safari 7 to open at the Homepage
Standard
Safari 6 used to open new windows by default to the Homepage, this behaviour in Safari 7 has been changed to show the “Top Sites” window as shown above.
Continue readingHow To: Create a Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 Connection
StandardOn October 18th Microsoft released version 8 of it’s Remote Desktop app via the App Store. Which is great as the older version had been more than buggy & we’ve just started a project which requires users to RDP into VM’s.
Below are the steps taken to figure out how a connection is created and stored, as well as a way to script the connections.
Continue readingCanon imageRUNNER ADVANCE C5240i B2 Printing Duplex
StandardRecently we started rolling out some new printers, this has been done using the script i’ve detailed here.
Normally we just create the printer on the macs & point the queue to the right PPD. This doesn’t enforce any default settings, & in doing so things have been going smoothly.
However, when deploying a Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE C5240i B2 we noticed that the Mac’s were defaulting to duplex.
After checking the on board B2 Fiery, we saw this setting was enabled.. so we disabled it & hoped that would apply to the Mac clients.. sadly it didn’t.
Below is how we overcome this
Continue readingChange Screenshot Location From Self Service With GUI Prompt
StandardA part of some of our users workflows includes them taking multiple screenshots. They take said screenshots via the keyboard commands & as they do this largely in bulk on a project by project basis they asked for a way to change the folder that screenshots go to from ~/Desktop to a location of their choice.
Below is my solution to this request.
Continue readingGetting Java 6 working on a Mac that has only had Java 7 installed
StandardWe’re in the midst of rolling out a new image to our macs on 10.8.2. Historically Java has not been needed but we added the latest Java 7 update as a matter of course, but post-rollout people now require Java 6 (how often does that happen?).
This new requirement came in just after Apple disabled Java 6 on 10.7+ Macs (as detailed a little here: http://managingosx.wordpress.com/2013/01/31/disabled-java-plugins-xprotect-updater/ ).
Greg Neagle & Rich Trouton have several solutions in re-enabling the various parts needed to get Java 6 working (however they required an order which I was not following Java 6 had never been installed as part of my image.
Continue readingCorrect AD Users Home Mobile Home Folder Permissions
StandardWe image our Macs with a partition for the System data & another for the User data.
That, in turn, allows us to image the Macs preserving the user data.
Except the permissions will be incorrect on the home folders, for our solution to this, see below.
Continue readingGit-ting with the program
StandardI’m finally Git-ting with the program & have created a GitHub repo: https://github.com/macmule
For a long time i’ve been unhappy with WordPress’s code handling, & as i can’t be bothered to find a new theme that may work better, i’ve decided to re-post all my longish scripts onto the Hub.
The added bonus being that if any of you learned readers find an issue, or wish to submit an update you can!
Now Git to it!








