• Mac OS X

    Repair Permissions From The Command Line

    I’ve long been a supporter of building tools in self service portals such as those provided by JAMF and Munki to provide users who don’t have administrative permissions to perform tasks that wouldn’t typically otherwise be destructive. One such example is a simple repair permissions. An administrator can simply open Disk Utility, select their disk and then click Repair Disk Permissions But if you want to do this as a user who doesn’t have administrative privileges you would need to elevate your privileges before doing so. In a larger environment this would be incredibly annoying for dozens, hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of users to bring their computer…

  • Mass Deployment

    Deploying and Managing Firefox Part 2: Working with Munki

    A special thanks to Nick McSpadden for his third submission to krypted.com. With all the new changes in OS X/Server I haven’t even had time to write as many in such a span!!! This is a follow up post to the Firefox Management guide. Knowing how to use the CCK to manage Firefox, the next big question is: how do we get this into Munki? It’s unfortunately not as cut and paste as we’d hope, because, with all things, Firefox tends to make us do a bit of work to get what we want from it. Importing Firefox 10.0.10 ESR (current version as of writing time) into Munki is easy. You…

  • 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…