• iPhone,  Mass Deployment

    Using Apple Configurator To Automate Casper MDM Enrollment

    Enrolling iPads into the JAMF Casper MDM solution is done through Apple Configurator, messages or using links deployed to iOS devices as web clips. When doing larger deployments the enrollment process can be automated so that devices are automatically enrolled into Casper MDM when they are set up using an Enrollment Profile that is manually downloaded from Casper and deployed to device. Additionally, a certificate can be needed if the certificate is not included in the profile, an option available as a checkbox in the setup. While you hopefully won’t need to download the certificate, we’ll start there: Obtain the Certificate for the JSS Server To obtain the trust certificate…

  • Mass Deployment

    One Teletype to Bind Them (Or, Clustered SSH for OS X)

    When working at scale, and particularly with hosts that need to have the same configuration or you want to perform the same queries on, the issue becomes how do I ‘reach out and touch’ my fleet? Without centralized infrastructure backed by a messaging broker or a heavier process that leaves hooks in systems and/or requires its own domain specific language, sometimes you can get by with… plain ol’ ssh. Apple Remote Desktop can take us a lot of the way there, and one of the announced features of Mountain Lion is that screen sharing gets another piece of ARD’s pie, the ability to drag-and-drop files to transfer them to the…

  • Football,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Time Machine

    2012 Penn State MacAdmins Conference

    Don’t let the theft of the Paternoville sign fool ya’, State College is as safe as ever. That is, until a bunch of Mac guys descend on the Nittany Lion Shrine. Yes, it’s that time of the year again when Mac guys from around the world (and yes, all of the speakers are male) descend upon Pennsylvania State University from throughout the Big 10 and beyond to discuss the Penn State mascot, the Nittany Lion. Actually, it’s a mountain lion, so we can’t discuss it quite yet at that point, but we can talk about a slightly bigger cat: Lion. Lion deployment, scripted tools, Munki, InstaDMG, Puppet, migrations, “postPC,” PSU…

  • Mac OS X

    Deploy CrashPlan Pro en Masse

    Recently, I looked at leveraging the CrashPlan Pro REST API to extend the functionality of what can be done with CrashPlan Pro. It just so happens that I’m not quite done talking about CrashPlan Pro just yet. Now that you are off to the races with the API, it’s time to look at pushing that client you’ve got out en masse. Our good friends at JAMF software have been kind enough to publish a white paper that is pretty darn awesome to get ya’ started. But let’s look at what, other than setting the server address and registration key, that you can do. There are a few files embedded in…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Importing Computers Into DeployStudio

    DeployStudio has the ability to import a csv file that is populated with the MAC address and a few specific settings. This allows you to prepopulate the database with the names that you want each machine to have. If you purchase a lot of machines from Apple then you can get a list of MAC addresses, or, you can use a bar code scanner to scan them as you’re unboxing. If you have a list of MAC addresses (en0), then you will need to format them in a very specific manner. Here, I have included a sample csv file with the data that goes into each field, which I have…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Fun Times with the JAMF Binary

    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…