Well, it’s that time of the year when one of my favorite conferences opens up registration! Come one, come all to MacSysAdmin for good times, good people and lots of fun Macinnerdiness! I hope to see you there! The official page is up at http://www.macsysadmin.se.
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MacIT Early Bird Registration
If you haven’t signed up for one of my favorite conferences ever, MacIT (alongside Macworld) then you should give it a go. If you’ve never been, it’s great and if you’ve been then it’s great to catch up with old friends. I hope to see you there! ———————————— MacIT®, taking place March 26-29, 2014, in San Francisco, CA at Moscone Center North (alongside Macworld/iWorld), is the definitive event for understanding Apple technology implementation and management in enterprise environments. Our esteemed faculty of industry experts provide detailed, impartial analysis of the technology and solution chains you face when putting iOS, OS X and Apple hardware products to work in large enterprise. MacIT 2014 features sessions…
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Install Fonts Using Apple Configurator
I guess someone asked for it, although it wasn’t me… But you can install fonts on Apple devices, using Apple Configurator. To do so, first open Apple Configurator and click on an existing profile or create a new profile for the font installation. Scroll down in the list along the left sidebar until you see Font. Click on Font and then click on Configure. You are then presented with a dialog box to select a font file. Browse to the font you’d like to deploy and then click on Select. Click on the plus sign (+) in the upper right corner of the screen if you’d like to deploy more…
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Testing iOS Services Using Services Test
The good folks at Amsys have built a nice little app called Services Test for verifying outbound connectivity to critical services to make iOS devices work. If you are having problems connecting to these services or activating devices, simply open the App and tap on the play button in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Click on the Info button to see what each of these servers do during the activation and management process. The app can also test a few common server services, including connecting to an OS X Server, Casper and AirWatch. These are typical services used in an iOS and Mac environment. Overall, this is…
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Disable Options At Initial Config Time Using Apple Configurator
In Apple Configurator 1.4.3, which just dropped, you can reduce the setup time for iOS devices. This is pretty helpful in Configuration Centers and when warehousing/performing thin setups of devices. To access this new feature, open Configurator and go to the Prepare screen. From there, you will have the Setup tab. Click on Setup and then in the resultant screen, you will see each of the initial screens in iOS that you can now skip. So put this in perspective, if you check the Location Services box and then prepare a device, even if not restoring a backup, you then won’t be prompted for whether or not you want to…
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Configure Messages Server in Mavericks Server
Getting started with Messages Server couldn’t really be easier. Messages Server in Mavericks Server uses the open source jabber project as their back-end code base (and going back, OS X has used jabber since the inception of iChat Server all the way through Server 3). The jabberd binary is located at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/private/var/jabberd and the autobuddy binary is at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy. Given the importance of having multiple binaries that do the same thing, another jabberd binary is also stored at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/libexec/jabberd, where there are a couple of perl scripts used to migrate the service between various versions as well. Note that the man page says it’s in /etc. But I digress. Setting…
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AFP548.com Podcast, Episode 2
I’m honored that the good people at AFP548 decided to have me in the second episode of their podcast. Thanks to all the people (@sacrilicious @bruienne etc) involved and hopefully you enjoy it! It’s available at http://www.afp548.com/2013/10/16/episode-two-eco-sphere or:
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16 Child Proofing iPad and iPod Touch Tips For Parents
Recently I woke up and my daughter was sitting on me watching something on the iPad. As I woke ever so slightly I realized that she was watching Transformers the movie on Netflix. I’m not typically a helicopter dad, hovering over her every move, but I did realize amidst the explosions that ya’, I might want to take some of the things I learned writing the book on locking these things down and put a few very basic measures in place to keep her from seeing something she shouldn’t. After all, she’s gotten about as good at navigating around the thing as I am (and these days she’s getting pretty…
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Change Your Default Search Engine Back on iOS
Recently, Safari on my iPhone started finding things I searched for using Yahoo! rather than the previously default Google search engine. Now, I’m not gonna’ hate on Yahoo! here. I actually left it for weeks so I could see the differences and nuances here and there. From the different way it displays movie times to image handling, I just didn’t exactly love Yahoo! (although it gets better all the time). So I decided to switch it back. If you decide to switch back, you do so by first opening the Settings App and then scrolling down to and tapping on Safari. From the list of available options, select Google,…
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Apple ID Bulk Importer
Some iOS and/or OS X deployments require us to create a boatload of Apple IDs. This could be to redeem VPP codes, to do iOS backups, to configure Messages, now giving the ability for OS X Server users to password reset for themselves, etc. I have sat and manually created Apple IDs for a number of clients. I’ve created dozens at a single sitting and there are some serious annoyances and challenges with doing so manually. For example, you’re gonna’ fat finger something. If you type 10 things in for 50 accounts then it’s hard to imagine you’re not gonna’ mess something up in one of those 500 fields. It’s also…