I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal
Casper is an incredibly useful tool for package deployment, maintaining records of the systems in your environment and policy management. But for those of you already using Casper (or considering it) you’ll be glad to know that you can use the jamf binary to do all kinds of fun stuff that can help with troubleshooting computers in your environment. For example:
The following command will setup a hidden SSH user and restrict SSH access to be allowed by only that user:
jamf createAccount -username casperadmin -realname "Casper Admin" -password capseradmin -home /Users/casperadmin -hiddenUser -admin -secureSSH
This command can be used to display a popup on the system it’s run on that says “Hello Minnesotaâ€:
jamf displayMessage -message "Hello Minnesota"
The following command will unmount a mounted server called mainserver:
jamf unmountServer -mountPoint /Volumes/mainserver
The following command can be used to change a users home page in all of their web browsers:
jamf setHomePage -homepage www.318.com
The following command can be used to fire up the SSH daemon:
jamf startSSH
The following command can be used to fix the By Host files on the local machine:
jamf fixByHostFiles -target 127.0.0.1
The following command can be used to run a Fix Permissions on the local machine:
jamf fixPermissions /
The following can be used to flush all of the caches on your local system:
jamf flushCaches -flushSystem
The following can be used to bless the drive externaldrive:
jamf bless -target /Volumes/externaldrive
The following can be used to run a software update on the local system:
jamf runSoftwareUpdate
The following can be used to bind to an AD environment (rather than dsconfigad if for some reason you just didn’t like using dsconfigad), but would need all the parameters for your environment put in as flags:
jamf bindAD
The following can be used to enable OpenFirmware passwords on your computer to secretpass:
jamf setOFP -mode full -password secretpass
Most of these options are available inside the Casper suite, but the ability to do some simple tasks very quickly from the terminal is yet another reason to fall in love with Casper.
