• Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Screen Sharing Through Absolute Manage

    Awhile back I did a short article that looked at using the vnc:// handler to programatically interface with the Screen Sharing application and a follow up article on invoking RDP via CoRD from the command line. Well, if you are an Absolute Manage user, you can also remotely control client computers through the admin without passing username and password information (trust stems from the agent and server relationship). This is a pretty neat feature. Absolute Manage has registered the lanrevagent:// handler at installation time (Admin). The syntax for invoking lanrevagent is similar to a REST interface, except here you define the command, followed by what exactly to run that command…

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

    DeployStudio: Rename a Volume with Host Name

    DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really…