If you’ve been following my postings for the past few weeks you may have noticed that I’m putting the pieces together for a strategy to transition existing managed preferences in environments to profiles, most notably those managed using Lion Server’s Profile Manager as more than just a mobile device management tool, but also as a computer management tool. To put the articles into a bit more order, let’s look at the order that you’d likely use them to actually do an integration: If needed, upgrade any existing Open Directory deployments to Lion: https://krypted.com//mac-os-x/upgrading-open-directory-from-snow-leopard-server-to-lion-server Start off with getting Profile Manager installed (Part 1): https://krypted.com//iphone/setting-up-profile-manager-in-lion-server Then integrate Profile Manager with your internal directory…
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MacTech InDepth In New York
I have been added as a speaker at MacTech InDepth in New York. If you haven’t signed up yet, and you work with Mac OS X Server then you should really check out the sessions that have been planned: The Elephant in the Room: The New Lion OS X is out, now what? There are a lot of differences to contend with between Lion and Snow Leopard. Now with the new Mountain Lion update, what changes can we expect to see? We discuss the differences in advanced services, GUI simplicity, and Apache management GUI’s. We help you understand the updates in the new OS and make the transition easier. We…
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2012 Penn State MacAdmins Conference
Don’t let the theft of the Paternoville sign fool ya’, State College is as safe as ever. That is, until a bunch of Mac guys descend on the Nittany Lion Shrine. Yes, it’s that time of the year again when Mac guys from around the world (and yes, all of the speakers are male) descend upon Pennsylvania State University from throughout the Big 10 and beyond to discuss the Penn State mascot, the Nittany Lion. Actually, it’s a mountain lion, so we can’t discuss it quite yet at that point, but we can talk about a slightly bigger cat: Lion. Lion deployment, scripted tools, Munki, InstaDMG, Puppet, migrations, “postPC,” PSU…
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DeployStudio From the Command Line
Recently I did a little article on importing computers into DeployStudio lists. I got an overwhelming number of email requests to go a step further and look at importing computers into DeployStudio from the command line. I’m guessing lots of people want to bolt some middleware onto their mass deployment tools (can’t say I blame ’em). The first thing to know is that DeployStudio stores most everything in standard property lists. This includes workflows, computer groups and computers. When you install DeployStudio you selected a location to place your database. For the purpose of this example, we’re going to use /DSDatabase as our location. Within this directory is a folder…
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Importing Computers Into DeployStudio
DeployStudio has the ability to import a csv file that is populated with the MAC address and a few specific settings. This allows you to prepopulate the database with the names that you want each machine to have. If you purchase a lot of machines from Apple then you can get a list of MAC addresses, or, you can use a bar code scanner to scan them as you’re unboxing. If you have a list of MAC addresses (en0), then you will need to format them in a very specific manner. Here, I have included a sample csv file with the data that goes into each field, which I have…
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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…
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Changing the Background for DeployStudio
DeployStudio has a very nice background image that it uses by default for the NetBoot set. But you can customize the image that’s used if you wish to have something more, well, customized. Simply mount the DeployStudioRuntime sparseimage file from the DeployStudioRuntime nbi file that was created when you elected to generate the NetBoot set. You can do so by simply opening the nib file and then double-clicking on the sparse image. From here, browse into the System and then the Library and then the CoreServices directory in the NetBoot set. From here find the DefaultDesktop.jpg file. Replacing that file will replace the background that is used when you boot…
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DeployStudio: Creating a New Master Image
Once you have been using DeployStudio for a time, you’ll invariably end up creating a new master image. This is a hot topic this summer, given that Apple will be releasing Mac OS X 10.6 later this year and many people integrating DeployStudio want to make sure that they can manage the solution themselves during the subsequent updates. Provided you have been leveraging all of the best in package based imaging this might be a relatively small file, or if you are using a monolithic image for distribution it might be a fairly large file. Either way, DeployStudio makes it fairly straight forward to create a new master image. To…
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Creating a Master DeployStudio Image
Once you’ve completed the setup of a DeployStudio server you’re going to want to use it to start imaging systems. In most cases you’ll want to start off with DeployStudio Admin, found with it’s brethren in /Applications/Utilities. When you first open DeployStudio Admin, you’ll be asked for a server address, username and password. Go ahead and log in as one of the (or the) user that you setup as an administrative account during installation, enter the address of the server (followed by the port you used with the DeployStudio Assistant – you can always rerun the assistant if you need to). By default the connection information should be available in…