The Apple Certified Technical Coordinator (ACTC) Exams are now available. Since the brutal murder of the ACSA, the ACTC is now Apple’s highest level of certification. The server is much easier, but somehow many of the questions are a little harder than they were. Overall, I felt the exam was a great gauge of technical know-how, even if there were a couple somewhat esoteric questions. Anyway, click below to open the Apple IT Certification page: If you have a 10.7 ACTC then the 10.8 combo updater can be taken. If you qualify for said exam, you should have gotten an email with a special code to use on the IBT…
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Apple Pro Training Series for ACTC
Arek Dreyer and Ben Greisler have been at it again. The latest editions of the Apple Training Series books are now out, providing a guide to getting certified with OS X Server. I haven’t gotten mine yet, but I suspect that the book, as with the previous books, will be excellent. To quote the book description: The only Apple-certified book on OS X Server on Mountain Lion, this comprehensive reference takes support technicians and ardent Mac users deep inside the server for the latest operating system, covering everything from networking technologies to service administration, customizing users and groups, and more. Aligned to the learning objectives of the Apple Certified Technical Coordinator…
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Apperian's New Goodness: Remote Control for iPad
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The New Caching Service In OS X Server
These days, new services get introduced in OS X Server during point releases. OS X now has a Software Caching server built to make updates faster. This doesn’t replace Apple’s Software Update Server mind you, it supplements. And, it’s very cool technology. “What makes it so cool” you might ask, given that Software Update Server has been around for awhile. Namely, the way that clients perform software update service location and distribution with absolutely no need (or ability) for centralized administration. Let’s say that you have 200 users with Mac Minis and an update is released. That’s 200 of the same update those devices are going to download over your…
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Apple's Customer Facing SystemStatus
Apple now has a new system status page for their services, available at http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus. This site goes through many of Apple’s services and shows an indicator light for when they are up. Additionally, you can scroll down to the detailed timeline and see a historical account of what services are online. This is yet another step in Apple’s continued progress at providing more and more information to the community on, well, everything. This includes seeing Apple popping up at conferences here and there, most notably at Black Hat this year, publishing more kbase articles that detail problems and allowing more community involvement from some employees. A more open Apple is a…
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Announcing: mountainlionserver.com
OK, so I’m a little behind (what can I say, absolutely swamped these days!) on posts. I mentioned this on Twitter already, but it’s worth mentioning here as well. I’m involved with a new site, called mountainlionserver.com that takes some of the posts I did at https://krypted.com//wiki/a-guide-to-using-mountain-lion-server-mac-os-x-server-10-8 modernizes them and puts them into a much, much prettier interface. I’ll try and keep these up-to-date and expand them as time goes on, with the help of the good folks at Mac Mini Colo. Just in case anyone wonders (yes, I’ve already been asked), no $ has or will change hands, nor discounted hosting for the 3 servers I have at Mac Mini…
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Configure OS X To Restart Automatically
Servers should always restart automatically in the event that they loose power or freeze up. When you’re setting up a lot of servers, it’s helpful to be able to tell the system to restart automatically if a server freezes from the command line. The command to have a system restart automatically in such a way is systemsetup. The systemsetup command has a -setrestartfreeze option. To enable the feature: systemsetup -setrestartfreeze on To disable: systemsetup -setrestartfreeze off
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Viewing Mac App Store Purchases From The Command Line
As you may have noticed, we’ve been working on building some links between the App Store and patch management tools such as Casper, FileWave and Munki. We’ve been looking at policy-based management of apps as well. In this semi-new world of signing and stores and the such, there’s actually a good bit you can ascertain about an app both inside the app as well as inside metadata OS X keeps about the app. I’ve discussed signing (apps and packages) in the past, but let’s look at using some commands to help us out with some tasks. The first command is to determine some information about apps that are on the…
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Penn State MacAdmins Back for 2013
Last year, I had a great time at the Penn State MacAdmins conference. There were tons of smart people to mingle with and everyone had plenty to discuss when it came to managing the Mac. There were a lot of people from education but also plenty from companies. The talks were well run and the conference location, the Penn Stater, was awesome. I love how it’s like a big winding maze. Having gone to school in a town like State College (Athens, GA), I’ve always had a warm spot for cute college towns. And State College is clearly a special place. I’d recommend a trip there to anyone that loves…
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Disable the Go To Folder Menu Item
For many environments, securing OS X is basically trying to make the computer act more like an iOS device. Some of the easier tasks involve disabling access to certain apps, sandboxing and controlling access to certain features. One of the steps en route to building an iOS-esque environment in OS X is to disable that Go to Folder… option. To do so, set the ProhibitGoToFolder key as true in com.apple.finder: defaults write com.apple.finder ProhibitGoToFolder -bool true Then reboot, or kill the Finder: killall Finder To undo, set the ProhibitGoToFolder as false: defaults write com.apple.finder ProhibitGoToFolder -bool false