There’s a great website at https://macosxautomation.com that provides a lot of information on using Automator to build automations for the Mac. When you build automations, you can run them by double-clicking on apps or workflows. You can also invoke them with the automator command. The automator command can, surprisingly, be used to run automator workflows. I know, it’s crazy. Located at /usr/bin/automator the automator command can be used to fire up workflows. In its most basic incantation, you can invoke a workflow without much fuss. Here, I’ll use a workflow that just fires up a specific screensaver: /usr/bin/automator ~/Desktop/screensaver.workflow In addition, you can run workflows in verbose mode for simple…
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Node Plugin To Embed Device Details From Jamf Pro Into Jira Service Desk
Been working on a new plugin to embed device details from Jamf Pro into Jira Service Desk. It looks a little like this: To access the plugin, see the links below. https://github.com/krypted/Jira-Device-Lookups-in-Jamf
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Getting Started with Autopkgr
Autopkgr is basically a small app that allows you to select some repositories of recipes and then watch and run them when they update. It’s a 5 minute or less installation, and at its simplest will put software packages into a folder of your choosing so you can test/upload/scope to users. Or you can integrate it with 3rd party tools like Munki, FileWave, or Jamf using the JSSImporter. Then if you exceed what it can do you can also dig under the hood and use Autopkg itself. It’s an app, and so it needs to run on a Mac. Preferably one that doesn’t do much else. Installing Autopkgr You can…
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This New Years Day, Learn The Jot Command
This New Years Day, Learn The Jot Command The jot command is one I haven’t used in awhile. But it’s still useful. Let’s take a look at a few of the things you can do with it. First, let’s just print lines into a new file called “century.txt” which we can do by running with the number of increments followed by the starting number, and then redirecting the output into the file name: jot 100 1 > ~/Desktop/century.txt Or to do integers instead, simply put the decimals: jot 100 1.00 > ~/Desktop/century.txt Or in descending order, jot – 100 1 > ~/Desktop/century.txt Now we could change the output to be…
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Episode 63 of the MacAdmins Podcast: Security as Culture with Diana Birsan
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My Second Year On The MacVoices Holiday Gift Guide
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Episode 59 of the MacAdmins Podcast: Personalizing the Install Process with François Levaux-Tiffreau
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Check the EFI Version of a Mac
I’d written an efi version checker. But the lovely Andrew Seago texted me one that’s better than mine. So I present it here: current_efi_version=`/usr/libexec/efiupdater | grep "Raw" | cut -d ':' -f2 | sed 's/ //'` echo "current_efi_version $current_efi_version" latest_efi_version=`ls -La /usr/libexec/firmwarecheckers/eficheck/EFIAllowListShipping.bundle/allowlists/ | grep "$current_efi_version"` echo "latest_efi_version $latest_efi_version" if [ "$latest_efi_version" == "" ]; then echo "EFI FAILED" exit 1 else echo "EFI PASSED" exit 0 fi
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Create Bootable Installation Media For High Sierra Installations
A bootable installer is one of the fastest ways to install a Mac. Rather than copy the installer to a local drive you can run it right off a USB disk (or Thunderbolt if you dare). Such a little USB drive would be similar to the sticks that came with the older MacBook Air, when we were all still sitting around wondering how you would ever install the OS on a computer with no optical media or Ethernet otherwise. Luckily, Apple loves us. To make a bootable USB/flash drive of High Sierra like the one that used to come with the MacBook Air, first name the USB drive. I’ll use hsinstall…
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Install macOS Server 5.4 On A Mac Running macOS 10.13 (High Sierra)
The first thing you’ll want to do on any server is setup the networking for the computer. To do this, open the System Preferences and click on Network. You usually want to use a wired Ethernet connection on a server, but in this case we’ll be using Wi-Fi. Here, click on the Wi-Fi interface and then click on the Advanced… button. At the setup screen for the interface, provide a good static IP address. Your network administrator can provide this fairly easily. Here, make sure you have an IP address and a subnet mask. Since we need to install the Server app from the Mac App Store, and that’s on the Internet,…