• personal

    Krypted Turns 11 Today

    Yup. Somehow I have made it this long. 3,100 posts later, or .77 posts per day, I’m still with ya’. Not sure what the next 11 days will bring us, much less the next 11 years, but I’m honored that so many people visit the site, and I hope I give you cause to continue to do so in the future. At least the graphics are a little better these days… Thanks for stickin’ with me!

  • Articles and Books,  Business

    25 Great Business Books To Use Your Gift Cards To Buy

    I started working at JAMF a little over a year and a half ago. And one of my favorite things about the on boarding process here is the emphasis on continuing education that was handed down to me. I was given two books to read on my first day. Then, during my get-the-cool-aid on boarding (aka Zero Month), I had a couple of pretty rad JAMFs go through a list of books they felt were essential and review the books from my first day. Theeeen, I had meetings with Co-Founder and CEO at the time Chip Pearson, where he would stop meetings and order me books. It was a book nerd’s heaven I tell ya’.…

  • public speaking

    MacAdmins 2016 Conference Open For Speaker Proposals

    The world of Apple is bored with me (or at least I am) and so I think it’s about time for some new blood in the Apple speaker community. I’d be happy to help a few talented MacAdmins get some exposure in whatever way I can. If you’d like any help in preparing a presentation or a proposal, please feel free to reach out! To quote the most excellent organizers of the Penn State MacAdmins conference: The MacAdmins 2016 Call for Proposals is now open!  We’re looking for engaging, well-crafted sessions and workshops that showcase the latest tools and strategies for managing Macs and iOS devices.  From technical deep dives, case…

  • Business

    But $vendorname says…

    But Apple says… But Microsoft says… But Google says… I hear this all the time. And the very first thing I often ask is Who at Apple, Microsoft, Google, or whatever vendor says that? The reason I ask “who” is often because you can get conflicting responses from a vendor for a given question. Why’s that? When an organization gets bigger than 1, there are suddenly more perspectives than just one. When an organization gets bigger than 3, communication starts to get more challenging and it becomes harder and harder to have everyone on the same page. When an organization gets bigger and bigger (500, 10,000, 100,000), not everyone is actually…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Enable The Built-In Web Server In OS X

    OS X has a built-in web server called Apache. It’s been there for a long, long time. Once upon a time, you could enable web sharing using System Preferences. This is no longer a feature in the Sharing System Preference pane, but you can actually enable it quicker than you could before. To do so, we’ll use apachectl: /usr/sbin/apachectl start To then stop the web server: /usr/sbin/apachectl stop To see the apache status: /usr/sbin/apachectl status Or: /usr/sbin/apachectl fullstatus The default site is stored in /Library/WebServer/Documents. You can then edit this there, or replace the index.html.en file with a file/hierarchy that you wish to have. Enjoy.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Unix

    Bash: Check That A Script Is Running As Root

    Pretty much every script I’m working on these days must be run as root. Checking what user is running something is pretty straight forward, as there’s a built-in shell variable for $USER that contains the user running a script. To see this real quick, simply run the following: echo $USER You can then put this into your scripts. I’ve been using the same block of code for decades, which can be run in a script by itself if you’d like to paste this into one. if [[ $USER != "root" ]]; then echo "This script must be run as root" else echo "You are root" exit 1 fi Note: Keep in mind…

  • personal

    Apocalypse

    When I was closing in on the end of my comic book days, Apocalypse came at the tail end of the High Evolutionary. And it was great. And now I get to see it on the big screen!

  • JAMF

    Use the Jamf Classic API to Extract Device Counts

    You can leverage the API built into the Casper Suite to do lots and lots of cool stuff, without interacting directly with the database. Here, I’ll use a simple curl command in a bash script that has myuser as the username for a server and mypassword as the password. The server is myserver.jamfcloud.com. Basically, we’re going to ask the computers and mobiledevices tables for all their datas. Once we have that, we’ll constrain the output to just the size attribute for each using sed: curl -s -u myuser:mypassword https://myserver.jamfcloud.com/JSSResource/computers | sed -n -e 's/.*<size>\(.*\)<\/size>.*/\1/p' curl -s -u myuser:mypassword https://myserver.jamfcloud.com/JSSResource/mobiledevices | sed -n -e 's/.*<size>\(.*\)<\/size>.*/\1/p' This same logic can then be applied…

  • Articles and Books,  Bushel,  cloud,  Small Business

    My Predictions For How The Cloud Is Leveraged By Small Businesses In 2016

    I published an article with VMblog.com with my (and Bushel’s) predictions for how small businesses will leverage the cloud in 2016. In today’s increasingly mobile world, more and more small businesses are taking advantage of the cloud, as 72 percent indicate they use mobile apps in their business, with roughly 38 percent reporting they could not survive – or it would be a major challenge to survive- without mobile apps, says a recent survey report. Given this trend, here’s a look at what cloud-connected small and medium-sized businesses can expect in the year ahead: Read the predictions here…