Pickled herring, salted licorice, sports I don’t comprehend and a language I don’t speak. At the outset, Sweden seemed like a place that I just wasn’t going to fit in. But certain foods can become an acquired taste (if you stay away from Burger King and McDonalds) and oddly enough, the people out here speak English better than I do. But best of all there is a Mac Systems Administrative community here in Northern Europe that comes together at MacSysAdmin; one that is filled with the same challenges that we all face. It’s a community, like many around the world, filled with a quest for more knowledge on the platform…
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Snow Leopard & networksetup (802.1x + Locations)
One of the best new features of the Snow Leopard command line, for those of us who need to do automation at least, is the addition of a few new options in networksetup. That’s why I did a little write-up on the new options at afp548.com. Check it out here!
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The Lighter The Touch… Imaging & Support
When it comes to system imaging, the most important aspect is to be methodical. If there is an error, the last thing you want to do is try 3-4 different things to see if one fixes the problem. Bust out the scientific method and find out exactly what the problem is. Because you’re about to make a change, en masse, that is going to have a resounding impact on the ecosystem that is your environment. And the smaller the change, or the light the touch, that you make then the less likely you will be to introduce a support nightmare in some other part of the enterprise. Many environments have…
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DeployStudio: Creating a New Master Image
Once you have been using DeployStudio for a time, you’ll invariably end up creating a new master image. This is a hot topic this summer, given that Apple will be releasing Mac OS X 10.6 later this year and many people integrating DeployStudio want to make sure that they can manage the solution themselves during the subsequent updates. Provided you have been leveraging all of the best in package based imaging this might be a relatively small file, or if you are using a monolithic image for distribution it might be a fairly large file. Either way, DeployStudio makes it fairly straight forward to create a new master image. To…
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Deploy EC2 En Masse
Render farms, cluster nodes and other types of distributed computing often require using a lot of machines that don’t have a lot of stuff running on them and are only needed during certain times. Such is the life of a compute cluster, which is what EC2 is there for. Because cluster nodes are so homogenous by nature you can deploy them en masse. Picking up where I left off with deploying EC2 via the command line we’re going to look at spinning up let’s say 100 virtual machines with the large designation, from a pricing standpoint. As with the previous example, we’re going to use ami-767676 (although you’ll more than…
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Mac OS X: User Templates
New users on a Mac have a certain set of default settings that are copied into their user profiles the first time they log in from the contents of the /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj directory. You can drop files into this directory or edit files that are already there that will then be copied into new accounts when they’re created, allowing you to customize the look and feel, default documents, fonts and other aspects of user accounts without having to do so each time a new user is created or logged into a system. This can be incredibly useful for scenarios where you are not using network accounts or mobile accounts…
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LISA 2008
No, this isn’t the new version of my wife (although there is a new version out and it’s awesome;). Instead, LISA’08 is the 22nd year of the Large Installation System Administration conference in San Diego California. LISA runs from November 9 to November 14th of 2008 and looks to be a conference those who do mass deployment might not want to miss. The biggee this year is virtualization: ESX, ESX 3i, Xen, etc. But there are alos talks on security, forensics, the Linux Kernel, Performance tools for Solaris and Linux, Perl mods, network performance tuning, wireshark, diskless Linux, SELinux, mass deployment of database servers, disk-to-disk backups for Unix, cfengine, directory…
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Kace and Mac OS X
KBOX supports package distribution and inventory management for Mac OS X. KBOX is more commonly known though, for providing imaging, software distribution and inventory management for Windows environments. But the imaging is what’s missing in the offering for Mac OS X. So if you’re planning a KBOX deployment then consider going ahead and also planning a NetInstall, NetRestore or InstaDMG deployment to go right along with it for your Mac environment.
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Mac OS X Deployment: Lists
Here are some pretty good list-serv’s for people doing a lot of Deployment work: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/macenterprise.html http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/system-imaging https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/radmind-users
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WinClone
Need to clone some Windows boxen from your Mac, check out WinClone: http://twocanoes.com/winclone/