Profile Manager first appeared in OS X Lion Server as the Apple-provided tool for managing Apple devices, including Mobile Device Management (MDM) for iOS based devices as well as Profile management for macOS based computers, including MacBooks, MacBook Airs, Mac Minis, Mac Pros and iMacs running Mac OS X 10.7 and up. Profile Manager has seen a few more updates over the years, primarily in integrating new MDM options provided by Apple and keeping up with the rapidly changing MDM landscape. Apple has added DEP functionality, content distribution, VPP, and other features over the years. In macOS Server 5.4, there are plenty of new options, including the ability to deploy VPP…
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Configure The OS X Yosemite Server Mail Service
Mail is one of the hardest services to manage. Actually, mail is pretty simple in and of itself: there’s protocols people use to access their mail (such as IMAP and POP), protocols used to communicate between mail servers and send mail (SMTP, SMTPS) and then there’s a database of mail and user information. In Mavericks Server, all of these are represented by a single ON button, so it really couldn’t be easier. But then there’s the ecoysystem and the evil spammers. As a systems administrator of a large number of mail servers, I firmly believe that there is a special kind of hell where only spam is served at every…
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Enable Push Notifications In Mavericks Server
Push Notifications can be used in most every service OS X Mavericks Server (Server 3) can run. Any service that requires Push Notifications will provide the ability to setup APNS during the configuration of the service. But at this point, I usually just set up Push Notifications when I setup a new server. To enable Push Notifications for services, you’ll first need to have a valid AppleID. Once you have an AppleID, open the Server app and then click on the name of the server. At the Overview screen, click on Settings. At the Settings screen for your server, click on the check-box for “Enable Apple push notifications.” At the…
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Scripting Notification Alerts to Notification Center in Mountain Lion
The terminal-notifier command is a tool used for sending messages and actions to the Notification Center. It’s a gem, so to set it up we’ll first run the gem command to install it by name: gem install terminal-notifier Once installed, run the command along with the -message option followed by a quoted message: terminal-notifier -message "Hello world" This produces a message from Notification Center as follows: The title on the screen though, says Terminal. We want to change the title to something else. To do so, add the -title option. Adding the -title option along with a quoted title then displays a title in the top of the notification. You…
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Setting Up Alerts in Mountain Lion Server
Mountain Lion Server 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. To configure alerts in Mountain Lion 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 email address on file for the user…
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Basic Git Usage
Previously we looked at installing Git on Mac OS X. Now let’s take a look at using it. The first step is to add a new local git repository that looks to a remote repository. In the following example I’m going to add a local repository called custom-safari based on the git repository at packages/custom-safari on git.krypted.com. git remote add custom-safari git://https://krypted.com//packages/custom-safari.git Next make sure you’re using the latest from the repository: git pull Then checkout from the master git branch: git checkout -b custom-safari/master Now pull the files you’ve checked out: git pull custom-safari master Now you can do your work. Edit the files, wok on them and when…