High Sierra sees the Caching service moved out of macOS Server and into the client macOS. This means administrators no longer need to run the Server app on caching servers. Given the fact that the Caching service only stores volatile data easily recreated by caching updates again, there’s no need to back the service up, and it doesn’t interact with users or groups, so it’s easily divested from the rest of the Server services. And the setup of the Caching service has never been easier. To do so, first open System Preferences and click on the Sharing System Preferences pane. From here, click on the checkbox for Content Caching to…
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Precache Now Pulls Models From Jamf Pro
Added 3 new flags into precache tonight: –jamfserver, –jamfuser, and –jamfpassword. These are used to provide a Jamf Pro server (or cloud instance), the username to an account that can list the mobile devices on that server, and a password to that account respectively. Basically, when you provide these, the script will pull a unique set of models and then precache updates for them. It’s similar to grabbing a list of devices: curl -s -u myuser:mypassword https://myserver.jamfcloud.com/JSSResource/mobiledevices And then piping the output of a device list to: perl -lne 'BEGIN{undef $/} while (/<model_identifier>(.*?)<\/model_identifier>/sg){print $1}' And then running that array as an input to precache.py. Hope this helps make the script…
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Precache Updated
Fixed an error that was causing downloads not to run. Enjoy. https://github.com/krypted/precache
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Precache Now Supports AppleTV
Precache, available at https://github.com/krypted/precache, is a script that populates the cache on an OS X Caching server for Apple updates. The initial release supported iOS. The script now also supports caching the latest update for an AppleTV. To use that, there’s no need to include an argument for AppleTV. Instead, you would simply run the script followed by the model identifier, as follows: sudo python precache.py AppleTV5,4
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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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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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Using the Caching Service Command Line Interface
The Caching Server in OS X Server 5 is pretty simple, right? You open up the server app and then click on the On button and you’re… off… to… the… races… Yup. There are also a few options that you can configure using the Server app. You can configure which IP addresses (or networks) are able to access your server. You can configure where the cache is stored. You can configure the amount of Cached used. And you can clear out that cache. Boom. Including the ON button, you’ve only got 5 things you can do here. Pretty easy. To script kicking off the service as just a proxy that…
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Install macOS Server On A Mac Running macOS 10.12 (Sierra)
The first thing you’ll want to do on any server is setup the networking for the computer. To do this, open the System Preferences and click on Network. You usually want to use a wired Ethernet connection on a server, but in this case we’ll be using Wi-Fi. Here, click on the Wi-Fi interface and then click on the Advanced… button. At the setup screen for the interface, provide a good static IP address. Your network administrator can provide this fairly easily. Here, make sure you have an IP address and a subnet mask. Since we need to install the Server app from the Mac App Store, and that’s on the Internet,…
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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…