I made this video for my presentation at MacTech this year. The video demonstrates how to do a mission critical IT role in an organization in an automated fashion. Hopefully it helps you to automate such things in your life as well.
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Automated Regression Testing Mac OS X Clients Using Sikuli
Imaging can be a complicated task. Many imaging environments have a lot of scripts, packages, base images and other aspects of automation. The more of these that you have, the more potential combinations you have for the state of a system once they’ve been run. This gets complicated when you want to make sure that each possible combination of images will have a consistent result when installed. For example, take something simple, like a property list. Each possible combination of packages, scripts images and even managed preferences might have a different impact on that poor property list. A simple defaults command can often give administrators the ability to see what…
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New Eggplant Now Available
Eggplant has released an update of their regression testing platform. And to make things easier for us, they’ve introduced Linux support, allowing you to regression test even more systems than before using a single, streamlined interface. This update also introduces support for Mac OS X 10.6. http://www.testplant.com/news_and_events/#recent_news
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Imaging Maturity for Mac OS X environments
Seems like most companies start out manually installing their computers. This works for awhile but then they run into a situation where they’re manually installing too many and realize that for the most part they’re all pretty much the same. That’s when products like Carbon Copy Cloner and Ghost (for those pesky Windows workstations) come into play. Suddenly they’re saving time by mounting up an image and restoring it. Then there is a collection of post-flight tasks they perform, like setting up user environments, settings and directory services bindings. Then, there are just too many for this, so people start doing network based imaging. Something like NetInstall, NetRestore, ASR or…