• Active Directory,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Article in MacTech

    For those who don’t yet get a subscription to MacTech Magazine, I’ve been a long time lurker and suggest you do the same. I recently submitted an article to them for the Enterprise Desktop Alliance and it will be in the February issue. There’s also one appearing in the March issue. They’re both fairly long and cover the topic of moving specific services off of Mac OS X Server and onto the Windows platform. I don’t recommend that any organization go out and start ripping out all their Mac OS X Servers because Apple dropped the Xserve. But I am a guy who really likes having a lot of options…

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

    The Mac OS X App Store & Managed Environments

    The Mac OS X App Store was released earlier this month as a part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. The App Store, with over 1,000 applications (including a couple of server tools), allowing people to download and install applications on Mac OS X computers without needing to understand how to click through the screens of a standard package installer, drag applications from disk images into the /Applications folder or basically how to do practically anything except for click and provide a valid credit card number. As with the App Store that debuted with the iPhone, the App Store for Mac OS X is clearly aimed at residential customers,…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Screen Sharing Through Absolute Manage

    Awhile back I did a short article that looked at using the vnc:// handler to programatically interface with the Screen Sharing application and a follow up article on invoking RDP via CoRD from the command line. Well, if you are an Absolute Manage user, you can also remotely control client computers through the admin without passing username and password information (trust stems from the agent and server relationship). This is a pretty neat feature. Absolute Manage has registered the lanrevagent:// handler at installation time (Admin). The syntax for invoking lanrevagent is similar to a REST interface, except here you define the command, followed by what exactly to run that command…