There’s another new conference in town! Well, not my town, but Vancouver. MacDev Ops is a hot topic. One that will only increase in the coming years. Thanks to Mat X and Brian Warsing for bringing about a brilliant conference. The conference will be held on June 19, 2015 and is an easy $99 if you sign up soon. Also, submit a talk if DevOps is your thing. They’re looking to bring the following topics to the table: Puppet, Chef and other automation from Desktop to Cloud and back Software deployment with Munki and AutoPkg: the app ecosystem surrounding it Cool tools: demo of awesome Mac Admin projects from GitHub DevOps: How…
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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…
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Startup Profiles
The profiles command in Yosemite (and Mavericks for that matter), can configure profiles to install at the next boot, rather than immediately. Use the -s to define a startup profile and take note that if it fails, the profile will attempt to install at each subsequent reboot until installed. To use the command, simply add a -s then the -F for the profile and the -f to automatically confirm, as follows (and I like to throw in a -v usually for good measure): profiles -s -F /Profiles/SuperAwesome.mobileconfig -f -v And that’s it. Nice and easy and you now have profiles that only activate when a computer is started up.
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Encrypt OS X Yosemite Server
Encrypting a volume in OS X Yosemite couldn’t be easier. In this article, we will look at three ways to encrypt OS X Yosemite volumes. The reason there are three ways is that booted volumes and non-booted volumes have different methods for enabling encryption. Encrypting Attached Storage For non-boot volumes, just control-click or right-click on them and then click on Encrypt “VOLUMENAME” where the name of the volume is in quotes. When prompted, provide an encryption password for the volume, verify that password and if you so choose, provide a hint. Once the encryption process has begun, the entry previously clicked on says Encrypting “VOLUMENAME” where the name of the…
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Using The Profiles Command In Yosemite
You can export profiles from Apple Configurator or Profile Manager (or some of the 3rd party MDM tools). You can then install profiles by just opening them and installing. Once profiles are installed on a Mac, mdmclient, a binary located in /usr/libexec will process changes such as wiping a system that has been FileVaulted (note you need to FileVault if you want to wipe an OS X Lion client computer). /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and /System/Library/LaunchAgents has a mdmclient daemon and agent respectively that start it up automatically. To script profile deployment, administrators can add and remove configuration profiles using the new /usr/bin/profiles command. To see all profiles, aggregated, use the profiles command…
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Manage Profiles From The Command Line In OS X 10.9
You can export profiles from Apple Configurator or Profile Manager (or some of the 3rd party MDM tools). You can then install profiles by just opening them and installing. Once profiles are installed on a Mac, mdmclient, a binary located in /usr/libexec will process changes such as wiping a system that has been FileVaulted (note you need to FileVault if you want to wipe an OS X Lion client computer). /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and /System/Library/LaunchAgents has a mdmclient daemon and agent respectively that start it up automatically. To script profile deployment, administrators can add and remove configuration profiles using the new /usr/bin/profiles command. To see all profiles, aggregated, use the profiles command…
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New Startup Profiles In OS X 10.9 Mavericks Profiles Command
I wrote an article on using the profiles command awhile back, available at https://krypted.com//mac-security/profile-manager-and-profiles/. There is a nifty new feature in the profiles command in Mavericks, where you can configure profiles to install at the next boot, rather than immediately. Use the -s to define a startup profile and take note that if it fails, the profile will attempt to install at each subsequent reboot until installed. To use the command, simply add a -s then the -F for the profile and the -f to automatically confirm, as follows (and I like to throw in a -v usually for good measure): profiles -s -F /Profiles/SuperAwesome.mobileconfig -f -v And that’s it. Nice…
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Restricting Access To Sites On iOS Devices
One of the more common requests we get for iOS devices is to restrict what sites on the web that a device can access. This can be done in a number of ways. The best, in my experience, has been using a proxy. In Apple Configurator 1.2 there’s an option for a Global HTTP Proxy for Supervised devices. This allows you to have a proxy for HTTP traffic that is persistent across apps. Each Wi-Fi network that you push to devices also has the ability to have a proxy associated as well. This is supported by pretty much every MDM solution, with screens similar to the following, which is how…
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Automating Profile Manager Enrollment Through DeployStudio
When planning to migrate from managed preferences to profiles, one of the important aspects to consider is automated enrollment. One of the more important aspects of automating a traditional managed preferences environment is to automate the binding to directory services. You do not bind to Profile Manager; however, you do enroll devices. Much like binding computers to Lion Server’s Open Directory (by default), certificates and host names are important aspects of the enrollment process. Much as with local managed preferences, management via profiles can be done through the command line and without any involvement from a centralized source. I had written an article awhile back on using profiles from the…
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What Mac App Store ID is Bessie Using in Lion?
Users can log into the Mac App Store using their personal Apple ID. Users can also log into the Mac App Store with an AppleID that is linked to a company owned email address instead. The AppleID itself should be a company owned asset so that if/when users leave the organization, the organizations till owns the software that they purchase. Whether purchasing software through a volume purchasing program or directly, those dollars are wasted if the user is purchasing software through a personal AppleID. Therefore, you need a way to look at what AppleID that a user is using and to make sure that the organization has a way to…