Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  public speaking

MacTech Conference Sessions Posted

Not sure if I mentioned awhile back that I’ll be doing a talk at MacTech Conference in Los Angeles. This session is on Regression Testing. The official description is:

We have images, packages, scripts, file drops, managed preferences, profiles and countless other means to create change on client systems. This means a practically infinite number of combinations of change on client systems. In order to qualify whether an “image”, which is in reality a combination of all of these things, passes our test of whether or not we can roll it out to users, we must first test it. Otherwise, we end up flooding our help desk, touching systems by hand, working late hours to get things fixed or the dreaded full on reimaging! Measure twice, cut once.

But measuring every combination can be daunting manually. In this session, we will look at leveraging scripts, graphical automations and 3rd party tools to verify that our images mass the muster. We’ll start with how to get started and the easy scripting that can be done and then quickly jump into both open source and automated 3rd party tools that can be leveraged to quickly and reliably give you the insight into whether your imaging framework is doing exactly what it is that you want it to be doing!

There are a lot of really good speakers at the conference. There are also a lot of really good engineers. Some are even both, although I tend to be neither. As I’m not doing a lot of public speaking any more, this will be one of the last 3 talks that I have booked. I’ll also be doing MacTech Minneapolis and MacSysAdmin out in Gothenburg, Sweden and then likely taking a break from doing any more talks for awhile.