• Mac OS X,  Programming,  Unix

    Mac DevOps Conference

    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…

  • Mass Deployment

    One Teletype to Bind Them (Or, Clustered SSH for OS X)

    When working at scale, and particularly with hosts that need to have the same configuration or you want to perform the same queries on, the issue becomes how do I ‘reach out and touch’ my fleet? Without centralized infrastructure backed by a messaging broker or a heavier process that leaves hooks in systems and/or requires its own domain specific language, sometimes you can get by with… plain ol’ ssh. Apple Remote Desktop can take us a lot of the way there, and one of the announced features of Mountain Lion is that screen sharing gets another piece of ARD’s pie, the ability to drag-and-drop files to transfer them to the…

  • Football,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Time Machine

    2012 Penn State MacAdmins Conference

    Don’t let the theft of the Paternoville sign fool ya’, State College is as safe as ever. That is, until a bunch of Mac guys descend on the Nittany Lion Shrine. Yes, it’s that time of the year again when Mac guys from around the world (and yes, all of the speakers are male) descend upon Pennsylvania State University from throughout the Big 10 and beyond to discuss the Penn State mascot, the Nittany Lion. Actually, it’s a mountain lion, so we can’t discuss it quite yet at that point, but we can talk about a slightly bigger cat: Lion. Lion deployment, scripted tools, Munki, InstaDMG, Puppet, migrations, “postPC,” PSU…