The jamf binary comes with a lot of cool little features that you can use to script things quickly, because JAMF has already built things to help you. We’ll look at two really quick. The first is the deleteAccount verb which, surprisingly, deletes accounts. With that verb, you’ll use the -username operator to define a given user that you’d like to remove. That username is defined as the short name (or what dscl shows) of a given user. For example, if I wanted to remove the user rorygilmore, I’d run the following command: /usr/sbin/jamf deleteAccount -username rorygilmore You can then provide a popup on the screen that you completed that…
-
-
MacAdmins 2015
I was super-bummed that I missed the MacAdmins conference at Penn State University. But, all is not lost as MacAdmins will be held July 8-10 in 2015 at the Penn Stater Conference Center and I’ll be able to see all those awesome people there next year! In the meantime, something fun and new is the 2014 MacAdmins Playlist to maybe get exposed to some new stuff: http://spoti.fi/VTdxLX. As an aside, here’s a fun pic of @derflounder and I (and others) doing a round table from a few years ago on the Penn State site:
-
(Cross-Post) Video from JSS-autopkg-addon Presentation
JSS-autopkg-addon Presentation from Allister Banks on Vimeo. (Guest post by Allister Banks) On June 26th, I had the pleasure of being invited by @Tecnico1931 to the NYC Metro JAMF user group meeting. A worksheet I created for this event may be found here: url.aru-b.com/jssAutopkg See also Shea Craig’s python-jss, and thanks go out to James Barclay, Sam Johnson, and all the folks mentioned in the video.
-
Enchantment
Some time ago, I had the good fortune of reading Guy Kawasaki’s Enchantment (thanks to MacTech for hooking me up with it!). It was a book filled with many of the things that are good in the business world today and how to make them better by adopting them in your own organization. Since reading that book, I’ve looked for enchantment. I’ve searched in the technology coming out of new products, in social causes that I’ve become involved with, in trips out of town and within myself. Today (now yesterday), I was truly enchanted. At my new employer, there is a charitable foundation publicly released at the JNUC last year.…
-
Come One, Come All: To The JAMF Nation User Conference
If you do deployments of Apple products, there are a few conferences to look at. Based on where you are and what industry you are in, some of these are better than others. But if you use the Casper Suite or are considering doing so, it would be really hard to beat JNUC, the JAMF Nation User Conference. And yes, I’d of said all this and posted this even if I hadn’t of come to work here a week and a half ago! So come one, come all to Minneapolis. And if you’re really nice, we’ll hook you up with some good old fashioned Minnesota lutefisk!
-
DeviceScout
DeviceScout is a tool that leverages JAMF’s Casper Suite to show administrators vital statistics and show alerts on client systems. These alerts display some of the critical aspects of systems, from encryption to disk capacity to backups, there are a number of pretty cool aspects of DeviceScout. Using the device view, you can view serial numbers, device types, check-in status, boot volumes, memory, etc. It’s a lot of insight into what you have on your systems. I’m a huge fan of such visibility. You will need to be running Casper to leverage DeviceScout, but it provides a very simple interface for management and even techs to see what’s going on…
-
Bring Out Yer Apps with Autopkg! (Maybe with a little help)
(Guest post by Allister Banks) Working with modern tools in the ‘auto'(dmg/pkg) suite, it sure reinforces the old chestnut, ‘it’s turtles XML all the way down.’ The thing that struck me when first diving into using autopkg was that different product recipes could potentially have a good amount of similarities when they share common processors. One example is drag-drop apps that can be discovered with an ‘appcast’ URL, which, in my recollection, became common as the Sparkle framework gained popularity. This commonality is exactly the type of thing sysadmins like myself seek to automate, so I built a few helper scripts to 1. discover what apps have appcast URLs, 2. generate the base…
-
Announcement (Cross Post) – JSS Add-on for Autopkg
(Guest Post by Allister Banks) As Venn diagram circles go, many folks in our community are getting into autopkg, and there’s even more that already use the JAMF Casper Suite. Over on the 318.com blog there’s an announcement for a new ‘processor’ add-on that can be installed with autopkg, that therefore can leverage the JSS API to fulfill many of the functions which up until present only Munki enjoyed. Please do read the release notes and give it a try!
-
Restart Tomcat Using jssutil
I recently needed to restart tomcat on a JSS (my fault not theirs). Because I had other processes running on the same box, I used the jssutil command to restart the tomcat service, using jssutil along with the rt verb: jssutil rt Turned out I had screwed things up a little more than all that so tomcat didn’t come back on its own, to get the service to kick back on, use the same command along with the startTomcat verb: jssutil startTomcat
-
Penn State MacAdmins Back for 2013
Last year, I had a great time at the Penn State MacAdmins conference. There were tons of smart people to mingle with and everyone had plenty to discuss when it came to managing the Mac. There were a lot of people from education but also plenty from companies. The talks were well run and the conference location, the Penn Stater, was awesome. I love how it’s like a big winding maze. Having gone to school in a town like State College (Athens, GA), I’ve always had a warm spot for cute college towns. And State College is clearly a special place. I’d recommend a trip there to anyone that loves…