• 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…

  • Active Directory,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Automatically assign admin rights in OS X based on Active Directory group membership

    Thanks to Tedd Kidd for the following article, on automatically managing administrative privileges based on Active Directory groups! This is a quick and easy way to assign any user to the local admin group in OS X based on their group membership in your Active Directory. This should also work with Open Directory or eDirectory groups if your workstations are bound to those directory services. You’ll need to include this code in the workstation login script so that it runs as root but uses the $@ variable to determine the user that is logging in. #!/bin/bash # Set group name to check against groupname=”domain admins” if [ “`/usr/bin/dsmemberutil checkmembership -U…

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

    Automatic Application Termination & Servers

    One of the new features that was introduced in OS X Lion is automatic application termination. This feature stops any applications that haven’t been used for awhile and then when you start the app back up, it fires up using the saved application state. But some processes shouldn’t be stopped. I’ve recently run into 2 cases where I needed to disable automatic termination. To do so is pretty straight forward: defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool TRUE Once run, read the key back from the global defaults domain to verify it was run correctly: defaults read -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination The output should just be a 1. Provided it’s correct, now test that…