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

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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:

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How To: Sync Time With NTP via Script

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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.

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

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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.

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Because MacMule

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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.

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VPP 2.0, Mavericks, iLife ’13 & iWork ’13

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On 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.

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How To: Set Safari 7 to open at the Homepage

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Safari7 TopSites

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.

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How To: Create a Microsoft Remote Desktop 8 Connection

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On 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.

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Canon imageRUNNER ADVANCE C5240i B2 Printing Duplex

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Recently 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

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Change Screenshot Location From Self Service With GUI Prompt

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A 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.

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