In what in my opinion is likely to be a preamble to hacking what an eventual Apple TV would look like, enterprising hax0rs have put together windowing managers and are now running iOS apps using a custom springboard for the Apple TV. Pretty awesome stuff IMHO!
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MacTech and MDM
MDM is a growing hot-button for many organizations — and many don’t yet understand why they need MDM to keep their organizations safe. With the consumerization of IT, the need for MDM has crept up on most. MacTech is doing a bunch of stuff to help further the MDM cause. For starters, with MDM being SUCH a hot topic, and so many people having no idea that they really need to pay attention to it, MacTech has created a free primer which is now available at: http://www.mactech.com/2011/11/15/mobile-device-management-primer The primer covers the following topics: overview implementation device configuration reasons for MDM user configured/owned devices configuration profiles MDM lifecycle Apple Push Notification Service…
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Dealing With Profile Manager Conflicts in Lion
Changing OS X Settings for Profiles bound to clients results in Managed Client changes (mcxread shows them) and inserts the info into Managed Client in this order: User Computer Computer Group Everyone User Group The data in the managed client attributes is replaced completely and not per-key. Installing profiles from the command line provides more information as to what is going on behind the scenes. Having said this, in some cases I can get a Provisioning Profile Validation: failed to read CMS (-25257) error when attempting to install the same profile a second time. In other cases it just fails if I try to run verbosely (in those cases it…
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My OS X Server Book From O'Reilly On Amazon!
I usually don’t like to discuss books (except in person with friends/colleagues) very much until I have an ISBN number. Well, here it is! My next book is going to address what I consider the most important challenge to Apple Server nerds like myself: can a server really be installed off the app store with no technical skills? I also tackle the meaning of life (somewhere on page 42) in this book, but that’s not nearly as interesting a topic… I am about 80 percent done with it and it should be out within the next 5 to 6 weeks. One of the things that really impresses me about O’Reilly…
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iPhone 4: Where is My FaceTime?
I am almost embarrassed how long this took me to figure out. FaceTime was missing on my iPhone 4. Apparently, if you upgrade from 3 to 4 it doesn’t automatically show up. Instead you need to go to Settings and then tap on the Phone settings. Right there, staring back at you is a screen that says FaceTime and it gives you the ability to turn it ON or OFF. Tap ON and it should reappear in your apps (required me to reboot to show up).
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MacTech In-Depth: Mobile Device Management
As many of you are aware, I will be speaking at the MacTech Conference in November. Krytped.com is also a sponsor of MacTech and I personally very much find everything they’re doing over there with these events to be great stuff. And now there’s more coming out of their incubator. MacTech has announced a great new series called MacTech In-Depth. This takes the existing format for the MacTech Conference and MacTech BootCamps that have gone on the road and brings a much more in-depth (as the name implies) approach, looking at a single topic for a full day. The first topic that is getting tackled is Mobile Device Management, in…
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iPhone Field Test Mode
iPhone can open a Field Test app. When in Field Test Mode, the device provides a lot of information not otherwise shown. For example, the IP address (no, not the one for Wi-Fi) can be located, neighboring cells can be shown, etc. To open the Field Test app, tap *3001#12345#* and then tap the Call button.
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Exporting Information From iPhone Configuration Utility
In a previous post I looked at automating iPhone and iPad deployment. There, we looked at the iPhone Configuration Utility. Now that Profile Manager is built into Mac OS X Server in Lion, and with the number of 3rd party MDM solutions on the market, many users of iPhone Configuration Utility are looking to extract information from it and move it into other places. Many of these places can import property lists. If you look at the file header for .mobileconfig and .deviceinfo files you’ll notice that they begin with the familiar: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd"> <plist version="1.0"><dict> Given that .mobileconfig and .deviceinfo files…
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Lion Server: Using Profile Manager's Debug Mode
I’ve seen a lot of traffic about people troubleshooting problems with Mac OS X Server’s new Profile Manager service. One of the more useful things in troubleshooting anything (including Profile Manager in Lion) is the debug mode. It’s easy to turn on, just run the following command from any Lion Server with Profile Manager installed: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ProfileManager debugMode 3 You will then get more information in the logs and be well armed to troubleshoot issues that arise in Mac OS X Server 10.7’s Profile Manager.
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Profile Manager, mdmclient and profiles in OS X Lion
I wrote an article awhile back, looking at profiles from iPhone Configuration Utility. In Lion, the Profile Manager service can be used to create profiles that can be pushed to OS X or iOS clients. Clients can install profiles by going to a web page or they can be deployed using scripts. Once installed, mdmclient, a binary located in /usr/libexec will process changes such as wiping a system that has been FileVaulted (note you need to FileVault if you want to wipe an OS X Lion client computer). /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and /System/Library/LaunchAgents has a mdmclient daemon and agent respectively that start it up automatically. To script profile deployment, administrators can add…