The jamfHelper binary is used to deploy an alert to client computers that are enrolled in the JSS. This can be a full screen alert with headings, icons, text, and countdowns. This could also just be a small utility window that informs a user that something was installed. You can do similar tasks with push notifications, but I find that a lot of times an APNs update will disappear before someone can click on it. Therefore, we can use the jamfHelper binary to send alert screens in OS X.
We’ll go through a couple of minor examples here. The first is to send a window called KRYPTED that is full screen, with test as the text and “test heading” as a larger bolded heading. Here, we’ll use -title to send a title to the screen, -windowType to set the type as fs, -description for our text payload and finally -heading for the heading on the screen:
/Library/Application\ Support/JAMF/bin/jamfHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/jamfHelper -title "KRYPTED" -windowType fs -description "test" -heading "test heading"
We called the helper using the full path to the jamfHelper binary, located at /Library/Application\ Support/JAMF/bin/jamfHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/. You might have this stored elsewhere. We also quoted our title, description, and heading. Doing so allows us to use more than one word. I find that I frequently expand variables in this command, so make sure to expand them properly.
The second example we’ll run through is using a little utility window (more similar to a push notifications screen than many of the others). This is a small screen, with a location that you can easily control. Notice that the above command was full screen, so you couldn’t see the title. Here, we’ll display a title and then just a little quick text that says “Firefox is now on your computer”
/Library/Application\ Support/JAMF/bin/jamfHelper.app/Contents/MacOS/jamfHelper -title "Firefox" -windowType hud -description "Firefox" -description "Firefox is now on your computer"
Which results in a screen that looks like this.
If you used the hud windowType instead of utility in the above command, your screen would look as follows.
There are other ways to do things like this (e.g. bighonkintext), but if you use Casper, this is integrated, requires no other languages (e.g. python), and is simple. Enjoy!