As you may have noticed, we’ve been working on building some links between the App Store and patch management tools such as Casper, FileWave and Munki. We’ve been looking at policy-based management of apps as well. In this semi-new world of signing and stores and the such, there’s actually a good bit you can ascertain about an app both inside the app as well as inside metadata OS X keeps about the app. I’ve discussed signing (apps and packages) in the past, but let’s look at using some commands to help us out with some tasks. The first command is to determine some information about apps that are on the…
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App Store Article on AFP548.com
I posted an article on the Volume Purchasing Program (VPP) for Business on afp548.com. It’s available here. I didn’t think to include a link to the Apple page on the VPP, but here it is.
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Managing Mail and Safari RSS Subscriptions from the Command Line
Safari can subscribe to RSS feeds; so can Mail. Podcast Producer is an RSS or XML feed as are the feeds created by blog and wiki services in Mac OS X Server. And then of course, RSS and ATOM come pre-installed with practically every blogging and wiki tool on the market. Those doing mass deployment and scripting work can make use of automatically connecting users to and caching information found in these RSS feeds. If you have 40,000 students, or even 250 employees, it is easier to send a script to those computers than to open the Mail or Safari client on each and subscribe to an RSS feed. Additionally,…
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Deploy CrashPlan Pro en Masse
Recently, I looked at leveraging the CrashPlan Pro REST API to extend the functionality of what can be done with CrashPlan Pro. It just so happens that I’m not quite done talking about CrashPlan Pro just yet. Now that you are off to the races with the API, it’s time to look at pushing that client you’ve got out en masse. Our good friends at JAMF software have been kind enough to publish a white paper that is pretty darn awesome to get ya’ started. But let’s look at what, other than setting the server address and registration key, that you can do. There are a few files embedded in…
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VMware Fusion 3 Right Around the Corner
VMware Fusion is now in pre-order for Fusion 3. What’s new? 64-bit support for Snow Leopard systems Support for OpenGL 2.1 and DirectX 9.0c Unity works with Aero and Flip 3D to further support Windows 7 New migration tools New command line options Upgraded Virtual Machine Library Built-in Automatic Updater Reduced memory and CPU footprint Additionally, it looks like we’ll be updating the mass deployment guide so if you have any updates or points of information that should be added, let us know!
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Windows Login Screen Customizations
OK, OK, you’re right – if I’m going to cover customizing the loginwindow of Mac OS X then the least I can do is cover Windows as well. Because the registry is basically a bigger, more monolithic version of the defaults domains, we’re going to do pretty much the same stuff at the login screen for Windows. First, open the registry editor (regedit) and browse to HKEY USERS .DEFAULTControl PanelDesktop Then edit the value for wallpaper, typing in the path to the image you’d like to use. To set it as tiled add TileWallPaper and set it to the integer 1 or to stretch add WallPaperStyle and set it to the…
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Mass Deploy Parallels
Sometimes it’s just that easy. Our good friends at Parallels have developed a special Mass Deploy package, available on their site. When you control-click on it and select Browse Contents you will see a license.txt. You can paste your license into the license.txt file and then put your virtual machine into the root of the package. Once complete, you can push this package out at will. Additionally, you can edit the postflight shell script in the Resources directory, throwing your own commands at the tail end of the file, adding more virtual machines, customizing settings, etc. Good luck.
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Disable Automatic Login Programatically
Automatic logon can be enabled for Windows, or Mac OS X. We already discussed disabling automatic logon using a script for Windows, so let’s look at doing so for Mac OS X. The variable that controls automatic logon is stored in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist in the autoLoginUser key. By default automatic logon is disabled and so you can simply delete that key to disable it, which you can do with the following command: defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow autoLoginUser You can also enter an autoLoginUser into the field to define the user who will automatically be logged in. You may remember that the loginwindow defaults domain is the same location that login hooks are…