• Bushel,  iPhone,  Mass Deployment

    How To View What Payloads Do To Devices

    You can see exactly what Bushel, and other MDM platforms do to your OS X devices using the System Information utility. As with all Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions that interface with OS X, you can use the About this Mac menu item under the Apple menu at the top of the screen to bring up the System Information utility. When you open this tool, you will see a lot of information that can be derived about your devices. Scroll down the list and click on Profiles. Here, you will see all of the Device and User profiles that have been installed on your computer, the payloads within each profile and…

  • Bushel,  iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Bushel Goes Into Invitation Mode!

    Yesterday the Bushel team finished some new code. This code allows you to refer your friends to Bushel! This skips the codes that everyone was waiting for and lets people create accounts immediately! From your home screen, click on Invite Friends. Or from the Account screen, scroll down to the section that says “Invite friends to join Bushel”. From here, you can post codes to Facebook, Tweet codes, post codes to LinkedIn and even email them. We’re not going into general availability just yet. But we’re definitely making it easier long-term to sign up and use Bushel! We hope you love it as much as we do! Since we’re still architecting how these…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    My Take Control Of OS X Server Book Now Available!

    Thanks to all the awesome work from Adam and Tanya Engst, Tidbits announced today that my Take Control of OS X Server is now available! To quote some of the Tidbits writeup: Some projects turn out to be harder than expected, and while Charles Edge’s “Take Control of OS X Server” was one of them, we’re extremely pleased to announce that the full 235-page book is now available in PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket versions to help anyone in a home or small office environment looking to get started with Apple’s OS X Server. As you’ll likely remember, we published this book chapter by chapter for TidBITS members, finishing it in early…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Windows Server,  Windows XP

    Yosemite Server SMB and Windows

    A few people have hit me up about issues getting Windows machines to play nice with the SMB built into Yosemite Server and Windows. Basically, the authentication dialog keeps coming up even when a Mac can connect. So there are two potential issues that you might run into here. The first is that the authentication method is not supported. Here, you want to enable only the one(s) required. NTLMv2 should be enabled by default, so try ntlm: sudo serveradmin settings smb:ntlm auth = "yes" If that doesn’t work (older and by older I mean old as hell versions of Windows), try Lanman: sudo serveradmin settings smb:lanman auth = “yes" The second…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Create a Yosemite Installation Drive

    A bootable installer is one of the fastest ways to install Yosemite. 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 Yosemite like the one that used to come with the MacBook Air, first name the USB drive. I’ll use yosinstall for…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Yosemite Server: Configure Clients In Xsan 4 Environments

    Yosemite brings Xsan 4, which brings a new way to add clients to an Xsan. Xsan Admin is gone. From now on, instead of scanning the network using Xsan Admin. we’ll be adding clients using a Configuration Profile. This is actually a much more similar process to adding Xsan clients to a StorNext environment than it is to adding clients to Metadata Controllers running Xsan 3 and below. But instead of making a fsnameservers file, we’re plugging that information into a profile, which will do that work on the client on our behalf. To make the Xsan configuration profile, we’re going to use Profile Manager. To get started, open the Profile…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Configure Alerts In OS X Yosemite Server

    The Server app, when run on OS X Yosemite, comes with a few new alerting options previously unavailable in versions of OS X. The alerts are sent to administrators via servermgrd and configured in the Server app (Server 3.5). To configure alerts in Yosemite Server, open the Server app and then click on Alerts in the Server app sidebar. Next, click on the Delivery tab. At the Delivery screen, click on the Edit button for Email Addresses and enter every email address that should receive alerts sent from the server. Then click on the Edit button for Push Notifications. Here, check the box for each administrator of the server. The…