Thanks to Tedd Kidd for the following article, on automatically managing administrative privileges based on Active Directory groups! This is a quick and easy way to assign any user to the local admin group in OS X based on their group membership in your Active Directory. This should also work with Open Directory or eDirectory groups if your workstations are bound to those directory services. You’ll need to include this code in the workstation login script so that it runs as root but uses the $@ variable to determine the user that is logging in. #!/bin/bash # Set group name to check against groupname=”domain admins” if [ “`/usr/bin/dsmemberutil checkmembership -U…
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- Active Directory, Articles and Books, iPhone, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Microsoft Exchange Server
Holy White Papers, Apple?!?!?
For those of you who say Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise, Apple has released a number of assets (technical white papers) on integrating Macs (Lion) into enterprise environments at http://training.apple.com/lion. This is also the page that you’ll find links to all of the official training and certification courses for Lion. The assets up on this page are about as close to a publicly accessible book on integrating OS X into the enterprise as you’ll to see for Lion… The first covers the basics of integrating Macs into enterprise environments: The second covers self support: The third is on evaluating Macs in Enterprise environments: The fourth is on deployment: The…
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Setting Up Time Machine Server in Lion Server
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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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Video On Setting Up Software Update Services In Lion Server
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Google recently decided that it was time to force some other company to buy cloudy dispositioned upstarts, Dropbox and Box.net. Google also decided that Office365 represented Microsoft being a little too brazen in their attempts to counteract the inroads that Google has made into Microsoft territory. Therefor, Google thumped their chest and gave away 5GB of storage in Google Drive. Google then released a tool that synchronizes data stored on a Google Drive to Macs and Windows systems. Installing Google Drive is pretty easy. Just browse to Google Docs and Google will tell you that there’s this weird new Google Drive thing you should check out. Here, click on Download…
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2012 Penn State MacAdmins Slides
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WWDC Tickets On Sale
Apple has put tickets on sale for the WorldWide Developer Conference, from June 11th to June 15th in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Last year, the conference sold out really quickly, so might want to jump on buying tickets if you want to go. One thing can be pretty easily assumed, there will be plenty of talk about Mountain Lion (and maybe a new beta/DP as well).
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Moving Managed Preferences to Profiles
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…