You can disable the Connect to Server menu in OS X. This can be done via MDM or using defaults. To do so with the defaults command, send a ProhibitConnectTo key into com.apple.finder as True and then restart the Finder, as follows using the defaults command: defaults write com.apple.finder ProhibitConnectTo -bool true ; killall Finder To undo: defaults write com.apple.finder ProhibitConnectTo -bool false
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opendiff
There is a little tool in OS X called opendiff. This command can be used to bring up a quick and dirty graphical view of changes in a file. For example, if you run opendiff followed by two file names, you’ll see what’s different in the two files and what’s the same: opendiff test test1 The result then looks as follows. Note that in the above screenshot, a and b are in white lines and the others are grey, as those are consistent in the two files and the c has been removed and replaced with the four lines on the left. In larger files, this is pretty useful as…
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Choose An Existing Supervision Identity in Apple Configurator
When using Apple Configurator, you can assign an existing supervision identity to be used with devices you place into supervision. To do so, first open Apple Configurator and click on Organizations. From Organizations, click on the plus sign (“+”). From the Create an Organization screen, click Next. When prompted to provide information about your organization, provide the name, phone, email, and/or address of the organization. If you are importing an identity, select “Choose an existing supervision identity” and click on Next. When prompted, click Choose to select the identity to use (e.g. exported from another instance of Apple Configurator or from Profile Manager). Click Choose when you’ve highlighted the appropriate…
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Programmatically Grab The Location Of An Account
Namespace conflicts can be interesting. Especially with multiple local domains. To grab the path of a directory domain of a currently logged in user (when running as the user) using a script, you can run the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep AppleMetaNodeLocation | awk '{print $2}' You can then replace the string we’re using with grep if you’d like to pull a different attribute from the user record, you’d use the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep UniqueID | awk '{print $2}'
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Letting Go Of Old Tech
We’ve all got a box sitting around somewhere, full of cables and devices that used to blink away at us until we snuffed the life out of it all by replacing it. Some of us have 10 of those, full of tangled cables that maybe went to that one camera that we lost in 2009. Many of us remember the exact price we paid for each device in those boxes, such as that $699.99 firewall. It can be challenging to replace that device with one that costs 10% of that price, even though it’s more than ample to meet our needs. And we have a hard time imagining that after…
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Profile Payload Best Practices
Apple has defined some best practices to be taken when using Profiles. Obviously these don’t cover every situation, but they cover all but edge cases and lay out a pretty good description of why you should do the things we’ve mostly figured out to do by trial and error thus far. Great job to the OS X Server documentation team! https://help.apple.com/profilemanager/mac/5.1.5/#/apdE3493-C50A-4E9E-A1B6-CBCBC8C73507
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10 Things To Consider When Switching Between MDM Solutions on The JAMF Software Blog
I’ve worked with a lot of organizations switching between Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions in my career. And I’ve seen the migration projects go both really, really well, and really, really poorly. In most cases, the migration is somewhat painful no matter what you do. But in this (my first) article on the JAMF blog, I try and organize my thoughts around a few things to look out for when migrating between MDMs/MAMs, and some context/experience around those. https://www.jamfsoftware.com/blog/10-things-to-consider-when-switching-between-mobile-device-management-solutions/
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MacAdmins Podcast Episode 7
The seventh episode of the MacAdmins podcast is now available! This is my first time sitting out an episode, which might explain why it’s the best episode so far!
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MacDeployment Early Bird Signups Ending on Monday!
Hey Devops peeps! Got this, so just quoting and posting: Just a reminder that the Early Bird rate for the MacDeployment Conference ends on Monday (May 16) at 23:59 MT. This applies both to the Conference day (June 16, CAD $75) as well as the Conference + Workshop days package (June 16 + 17, CAD $275). While the conference is meant to serve (and further build) the Mac Admins community in Alberta (Canada), it is open to all. Speakers include Tom Bridge, Luis Giraldo, Tim Sutton, and Teri Grossheim. For further information, visit macdeployment.ca. You should go.
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Gist to fully reset Profile Manager