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

    Using Payload Variables in Profile Manager

    Profile Manager allows you to leave certain fields that are user-centric blank and it will prompt at the time that the profile is installed for the blank information. These are usually user-centric fields, such as short name and password. You can also create a profile in Profile Manager for each user you want to setup mail, Exchange, iCal, Address Book and other services that are tied to a specific user. You can enter the username for each and leave the password blank and the user will be prompted for the password but have the username filled in. And then there are payload variables. Note: Before we get started on Payload…

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

    Setting Up Profile Manager in Lion Server

    New in Lion Server, Profile Manager is the most substantial new service added to Mac OS X Server in recent memory. A lot of engineering has gone into it since the introduction in 10.7.0 and in 10.7.3, Profile Manager represents a service that is ready for actual deployments. I have written a number of articles about Profile Manager, but they all revolved around working with Profile Manager once the service is setup and configured. Therefore, I have decided to document the steps used to take a system out of the box and configure it for Profile Manager. Before we get started, let’s prep the system for the service. This starts…

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

    Managing iOS Devices with Apple Configurator

    My traditional interpretation of Apple’s vision on how iOS devices are used is that everyone has an AppleID. That AppleID enables them to access their apps from any iOS device they own or Mac that they own. That AppleID enables them to access mail, contacts, calendars and even files through iCloud. That AppleID also allows users to remotely wipe their device through Find iPhone and track their friends iOS devices (as in social networking via breadcrumb tracking) through Find Friends. All of this “Just Works” in a consumer sense. And it even allows for a little sharing of content across devices you own. However, larger organizations need more. They need…

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

    Podcasting in Lion Server

    There have been a number of articles on using the Podcast Producer service in Snow Leopard and previous operating systems. The Podcast Producer service itself in Lion remains unchanged. It still needs shared storage (e.g. NFS, Xsan, etc), Xgrid, Kerberos (for Xgrid) and while seeming to sit atop a house of cards, is one of the coolest and most complex services in Mac OS X Server. But there have been a lot of environments where Podcast Producer seemed out of reach where it shouldn’t have. If you have a single server, why do you need shared storage, a truly scalable grid computing cluster and all that complex workflow goodness at…

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

    iOS Device Sales Outpace All Macs Ever (in 2011 alone)

    In search of the American Dream? Apple has sold approximately 122 million Macs over the course of 28 years. They have sold 55 million iPads since those were released in April 2010 (in less than 2 years) and sold 156 million iOS Devices for 2011 alone, bringing the total of iOS devices to 316 million. The handset market is set to increase by around 33 percent and there’s really no telling where the tablet market is set to go over the course of the next few years. What does all of this mean? It means that iOS is continuing to increase in visibility, that App Store sales will continue to rise…

  • cloud,  iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  sites,  Social Networking

    Link Baiting 101

    I almost called this article “Aliens Can Listen To Calls on Your iPhone” or “How To Hack Into Every iPhone Ever (Even When They’re Powered Off)”. But then I thought that maybe it would be a bit too much. I’ve been a little melodramatic at times, but that’s when I was younger and needed the rupees. But TechTarget isn’t young (although I don’t know if they need the rupees). I’d like to point out two recent articles of theirs: Zaphod wrote this chapter just to mess with you: Apple iOS Security Attacks A Matter Of When, Not If, IT Pros Say The Salmon of Doubt would be a much better title…

  • iPhone

    5 Free Network Troubleshooting Tools for iPhone and iPod Touch (and iPad of course)

    There are a number of ways to troubleshoot network connections on (or using) an iOS device. These can be common troubleshooting steps that you might run from the command line or a third party app on a desktop computer or they could be specific to testing the network environment for an iOS device. Some of these apps are even free. Ping Lite One of the most common tasks that most administrators routinely do to test both DNS resolution and connectivity is pinging something. Ping Lite comes with a function to show your IP, a ping tool, a tool to ping the subnet, the ability to run trace routes and for…

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

    Backing Up and Reindexing The Profile Manager Database in Lion Server

    A common task when scaling databases is to reindex tables within the database. This process makes lookups faster and databases run butter. Reindexing becomes a pretty easy step before or after backing up the database as a general housekeeping step. To backup the database, you’ll use the pg_dump command, defining the user with -U and then the database with -d. In the case of Profile Manager, the database is device_management. Given that data is distributed across a lot of tables in the device_management database, the below script will backup the device_management database and then reindex each of the tables. If you follow previous articles to enable the Postgres user, you…

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

    Working with Postgres from the Command Line in Lion Server

    Mac OS X Server 10.7, Lion Server, comes with a few substantial back-end changes. One of these is the move from SQLite3 to PostgreSQL for many of the back-end databases, including Wiki and Podcast Producer (collab), Webmail (roundcubemail), iCal Server and Address Book Server (caldav) and as the back-end to the newest service in Lion Server, Profile Manager (device_management). As such, it’s now important to be able to use PostgreSQL the way we once used SQLite3, when trying to augment the data that these databases contains, as there currently aren’t a lot of options for editing this data (aside from manually of course). Postgres has a number of commands that…