Profile Manager first appeared in OS X Lion Server as the Apple-provided tool for managing Apple devices, including Mobile Device Management (MDM) for iOS based devices as well as Profile management for macOS based computers, including MacBooks, MacBook Airs, Mac Minis, Mac Pros and iMacs running Mac OS X 10.7 and up. Profile Manager has seen a few more updates over the years, primarily in integrating new MDM options provided by Apple and keeping up with the rapidly changing MDM landscape. Apple has added DEP functionality, content distribution, VPP, and other features over the years. In macOS Server 5.4, there are plenty of new options, including the ability to deploy VPP…
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Open Directory Backups Fail Due To HostName Problems
If you don’t have a HostName set on your computer then Open Directory backups are likely to fail using Time Machine. How did you promote to an Open Directory Master if you don’t have functional backups you may ask? Let’s not worry about that for now. Instead, let’s turn our attention to /var/backups. You see, if you enable Time Machine on an OS X Server, you’ll get a ServerBackup_OpenDirectoryMaster.sparseimage in that folder, which contains your Open Directory backups and gets picked up by our pal Time Machine. You can manually run a backup using the opendirectorybackup script at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/libexec/server_backup/opendirectorybackup. This could be automated, using expect to send a password, but…
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Powershell Goodies From Vexasoft
There are a number of features that make mass deployment of Mac OS X pretty easy. Some of these would be great to have in Windows. These range from systemconfiguration to networksetup and the ability to look at packages that have been installed and review their bills of material. Well, the good people at Vexasoft have built a number of Powershell libraries that, while they aren’t named as such, do a number of the features that these commands do, just for Windows clients via Powershell. And the best part is, a number of them are free. Let’s look at what some of these commands do: First, there are the cmdlets…
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Making Every User an Admin
If you deploy a large number of computers to users who are somewhat likely to play practical jokes on each other then you will run into some interesting issues. If you are deploying one computer to every user and you want each user to be an administrator of their computer then you might be tempted to allow all users to be administrators of all computers. If you do then prepare for an infinite number of sometimes amusing practical jokes. But really, being proactive about this brings up an interesting point: how do you deploy a computer and make only the user who you want to be an administrator an administrator.…
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DeployStudio: Rename a Volume with Host Name
DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really…
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Mac OS X: Fun with scutil
scutil is an app that can be used to get and set the ComputerName of your Mac. The following command will return with the name of your computer. scutil –get ComputerName Now, if you want to change the name then you would use –set. So if you wanted to set the name of your computer to kryptedmacbook you would use the following command: scutil –set kryptedmacbook Now, let’s say you’re writing a shell script and you want to put the computer name in a variable (let’s just call it computernm). You could use the following line: computernm=`scutil –get ComputerName` Happy Scripting!