• Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Printing,  public speaking

    MacIT Is Coming Back In July

    January 23, 2015

    MacWorld is kinda’ dead. Long live MacWorld (I cry nightly over this). But MacIT, alive and well and awesome (I hadn’t really spent any time on the floor for a long time anyway)! Here’s the email announcing the MacIT dates, which will be July 14th through 16th in Santa Clara! I’m super-stoked! 🙂 Dear MacIT constituents, Mark your calendars for MacIT 2015! I’m pleased to announce that we have secured dates for the MacIT 2015 Conference. This year’s event will be held July 14-16 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, CA). Our team is hard at work to ensure the first “stand alone” MacIT is…

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

    The 12 Days Of Krypted

    December 25, 2014

    Merry Christmas ya’ll! On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me one 32 gig iPad On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me two bash one-liners On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me three Red Hat servers On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me four email blasts On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me five retweets On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me six regular expressions On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me seven lines of perl…

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  • iPhone

    SimpleMDM Now With Apps

    November 20, 2012

    SimpleMDM has updated their Mobile Device Management solution (my original writeup is here) to now include the ability to manage apps. The apps functionality really comes in two flavors. The first is the ability to load up an app. This is handled handed by clicking on Settings in the right hand navigation bar and then at the Settings pop-over, clicking on Apps. Here, you can load up an internal, enterprise app or an App Store app. Once you’ve loaded an app you can deploy it to devices by clicking on a group and then using the contextual menu to “Assign Apps.” Simple, as the name implies. The second aspect of…

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  • Mac OS X

    App My CLI, for Great Good

    August 29, 2012

    For those that have had the pleasure of working with certain Windows-based laptops, there may be one particularly crazy-making design choice: the radio-disable switch. To paraphrase Seinfeld, what’s up with that? It’s a ‘feature’ (ahem) not utilized often enough to remind folks they have it, nor explained properly to the customer by the manufacturer. And it can drive IT support personnel nuts, as almost nobody in their right mind turns off wireless access voluntarily… yet it still happens from time to time, causing both sides to be confused for quite some time until they employ Occam’s Razor. And there are various locations it might be on the laptops, too, depending on…

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  • iPhone,  Mass Deployment

    Backing Up And Restoring iOS Devices in iTunes

    August 9, 2012

    For many iOS deployment projects, iTunes is used as the primary deployment vehicle for the devices. iTunes can be used to “Backup” and “Restore” an iPad, similar to how you image desktop and laptop computers. The actual deployment process is straight forward. First we’ll create a backup in iTunes. Then we can deploy the backup using the Restore option within iTunes. Provided the backup is encrypted, the Restore option will maintain the maximum amount of data available. For example, if a device has been activated then the fact that it has been activated is maintained across a restore. As are the applications that are installed on the device. Create iTunes…

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  • iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  MobileMe

    Removing A Credit Card From An AppleID

    May 16, 2012

    Sometimes you deploy iOS based devices with iTunes. There are a number of factors that can still force you into iTunes based deployments, such as needing the icons to appear a certain way in iOS. It’s not optimal but it happens. And sometimes you need to give an iPad or iPhone to a user leveraging an existing AppleID that will have a password known by multiple users. Again, not the right way, but there are design requirements that cause you to do it from time to time. And if you’re using a shared account, one of the last things you want is for users to actually buy stuff with that…

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

    Managing iOS Devices with Apple Configurator

    March 15, 2012

    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…

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

    The OS X Application Layer Firewall Part 3: Lion

    July 20, 2011

    In a couple of previous articles I looked at automating the Application Layer Firewall in OS X. These are pretty common articles that get back-linked to the site, so I decided to update them earlier, rather than later, in the Lion release. The tools to automate firewall events from the command line are still stored in /usr/libexec/ApplicationFirewall. And you will still use socketfilterfw there for much of the heavy lifting. However, now there are much more helpful and functional options in socketfilterfw that will allow you to more easily script the firewall. Some tricks I’ve picked up with alf scripting: Configure the firewall fully before turning it on (especially if…

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