Episode 5: SSO & Puppies, Two Tales of Adoption with Tom Bridge, Pepijn Bruienne, Marcus Ransom, and I is now available at http://podcast.macadmins.org or using the embed below. Hope you enjoy! And a special thanks to Andrew Seago, Miles Leacy, and Mikey Paul for joining us!
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MacDeployment Early Bird Signups Ending on Monday!
Hey Devops peeps! Got this, so just quoting and posting: Just a reminder that the Early Bird rate for the MacDeployment Conference ends on Monday (May 16) at 23:59 MT. This applies both to the Conference day (June 16, CAD $75) as well as the Conference + Workshop days package (June 16 + 17, CAD $275). While the conference is meant to serve (and further build) the Mac Admins community in Alberta (Canada), it is open to all. Speakers include Tom Bridge, Luis Giraldo, Tim Sutton, and Teri Grossheim. For further information, visit macdeployment.ca. You should go.
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MacSysAdmin Site Now Live
One of my favorite things to do every year is head to Gothenburg to see Tycho, Patrik, and the rest of the wonderful country of Sweden (and city of Gothenburg). It’s a great city and Tycho does a great job to curate MacSysAdmin into an informative conference. And, the site is now live to buy your tickets for the 2016 event! It’s one of those conferences that sells out, so don’t wait too long to pick up your ticket! 🙂
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My Presentation On The Mac Admin Toolchain Now Available On YouTube
My presentation from MacADUK from the fall is now available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRq6rCKSHko. This was a rapid fire look at a lot of the tools available for Mac and MDM management. Thanks again to everyone at Amsys for putting on such a wonderful conference and for inviting me to be involved. And for making the videos available to anyone!
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List of Safe Complex Characters for Passwords
A number of systems require you to use complex characters in passwords and passcodes. Here is a list of characters that can be used, along with the name and the associated unicode: (Space) U+0020 ! (Exclamation) U+0021 ” (Double quotes) U+0022 # (Number sign) U+0023 $ (Dollar sign) U+0024 % (Percent) U+0025 & (Ampersand) U+0026 ‘ (Single quotes) U+0027 ( (Left parenthesis) U+0028 ) (Right parenthesis) U+0029 * (Asterisk) U+002A + (Plus) U+002B , (Comma) U+002C – (Minus sign) U+002D . (Period) U+002E / (Slash) U+002F : (Colon) U+003A ; (Semicolon) U+003B < (Less than sign) U+003C (not allowed in all systems) = (Equal sign) U+003D > (Greater than sign) U+003E (not allowed in all systems)…
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The AppleTV Software Update Feed
AppleTVs automatically update. They do so using a process similar to how iOS updates, but instead of looking at the feed I posted in https://krypted.com//mac-security/how-the-os-x-caching-server-caches-updates/, they look at http://mesu.apple.com/assets/tv/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate/com_apple_MobileAsset_SoftwareUpdate.xml. The AppleTV feed is similar to that available for iOS updates, with each dictionary having roughly the same data: <key>ActualMinimumSystemPartition</key> <integer>1482</integer> <key>Build</key> <string>13Y6234</string> <key>InstallationSize</key> <string>0</string> <key>MinimumSystemPartition</key> <integer>1534</integer> <key>OSVersion</key> <string>9.2</string> <key>ReleaseType</key> <string>Beta</string> <key>SUDocumentationID</key> <string>PreRelease</string> <key>SUInstallTonightEnabled</key> <true/> <key>SUMultiPassEnabled</key> <true/> <key>SUProductSystemName</key> <string>iOS</string> <key>SUPublisher</key> <string>Apple Inc.</string> <key>SupportedDeviceModels</key> <array> <string>J42dAP</string> </array> <key>SupportedDevices</key> <array> <string>AppleTV5,3</string> </array> <key>SystemPartitionPadding</key> <dict> <key>1024</key> <integer>1280</integer> <key>128</key> <integer>1280</integer> <key>16</key> <integer>160</integer> <key>256</key> <integer>1280</integer> <key>32</key> <integer>320</integer> <key>512</key> <integer>1280</integer> <key>64</key> <integer>640</integer> <key>768</key> <integer>1280</integer> <key>8</key> <integer>80</integer> </dict> <key>_CompressionAlgorithm</key> <string>zip</string> <key>_DownloadSize</key> <integer>856434408</integer> <key>_EventRecordingServiceURL</key> <string>https://xp.apple.com/report</string> <key>_IsZipStreamable</key> <true/> <key>_Measurement</key> <data>cm8k41In38EOJEj20IwJp5Suskw=</data>…
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Episode 3 of the MacAdmins Podcast Now Available!
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Automatically Cache Updates To Your OS X Server
A little while back, I did a little writeup on how the OS X Caching Server caches updates at https://krypted.com//mac-security/how-the-os-x-caching-server-caches-updates/. The goal was to reverse engineer parts of how it worked for a couple of different reasons. The first was to get updates for devices to cache to my caching server prior to 15 people coming in before it’s cached and having caching it down on their own. So here’s a little script I call precache. It’s a little script that can be used to cache available Apple updates into an OS X Server that is running the Caching Service. To use, run the script followed by the name of…
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Run A Caching Server On A Computer Without Ethernet
I do a lot of testing on MacBook Airs and the latest MacBooks. Neither have a built-in Ethernet port and I try not to travel with one. But, when you enable the Caching Server service in OS X on a machine without an active Ethernet connection, the AssetCache will report an error of the following: Wireless portable computer not supported The cause is pretty obvious, but bypassable because of how the sanity check was built. Simply run the following: sudo serveradmin settings caching:Interface = en0 Now try again. Enjoy. PS: Since people always jump on the article where I talk about how to do things that shouldn’t be done in…
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Migrating Objects From Active Directory To Apple School Manager
Apple School Manager is a portal used to create classes, import students, manage Managed Apple IDs, and link all these things together. You can use a Student Information System (SIS) to create these classes, import students, etc. But, only if you have a SIS with an API that Apple links to. If you don’t, you’ll need to import data using csv files. And you’ll need to import four csv files: Classes, Instructors, Staff, and of course Students. Many schools will already have this data in Active Directory or another LDAP-based solution. Here, we’ll look at getting the information out of Active Directory and into csv. The LDIFDE utility exports and imports objects from…