Apple has published a new page that goes through all of the settings and commands available via MDM and explains many in much more detail. This is available at http://help.apple.com/deployment/mdm/. The new guide is a great addition to the work @Mosen has done at https://mosen.github.io/profiledocs/ in terms of explaining what each setting, command, and payload do. And let’s not forget the definitive MDM protocol reference guide, available at https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Miscellaneous/Reference/MobileDeviceManagementProtocolRef/1-Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40017387-CH1-SW1. Overall, I’m excited to see so much information now available about MDM, including how to develop an MDM properly, what each setting does, and now what you should expect out of an MDM!
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Replace the macOS Server DHCP Service with bootp
View Your Old Settings The first step to moving services from macOS Server for pretty much all services is to check out the old settings. The second step is to probably ask if where you’re going to put the service is a good idea. For example, these days I prefer to run DHCP services on a network appliance. But it can absolutely be run on a Mac. And so let’s look at how to do that. Here, we’ll use the serveradmin command to view the settings of the DHCP service: /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/sbin/serveradmin settings dhcp The output is an array of subnets with different settings per subnet. dhcp:static_maps = _empty_array dhcp:subnets:_array_id:22217FF5-4DDB-4841-A731-EF5DA080E672:WINS_primary_server =…
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16 Child Proofing iPad and iPod Touch Tips For Parents
Recently I woke up and my daughter was sitting on me watching something on the iPad. As I woke ever so slightly I realized that she was watching Transformers the movie on Netflix. I’m not typically a helicopter dad, hovering over her every move, but I did realize amidst the explosions that ya’, I might want to take some of the things I learned writing the book on locking these things down and put a few very basic measures in place to keep her from seeing something she shouldn’t. After all, she’s gotten about as good at navigating around the thing as I am (and these days she’s getting pretty…
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Exclusively Use a Given Interface for the Caching Service in Mountain Lion Server
The caching service in Mountain Lion Server (OS X Server 10.8) by default can use any interface installed on the system. I’ve now seen a couple instances where we have a Small Tree card and when a big update comes up, we loose file services speed due to caching data. To combat this, we can tell the Caching service to use the built-in Ethernet interface exclusively instead. To do so, first use ifconfig to determine which interface is which. Then tell the caching service which to use, using the serveradmin command, followed by settings and then the name of the setting, caching:Interface, setting the value to the en of the…
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SimpleMDM Now With Apps
SimpleMDM has updated their Mobile Device Management solution (my original writeup is here) to now include the ability to manage apps. The apps functionality really comes in two flavors. The first is the ability to load up an app. This is handled handed by clicking on Settings in the right hand navigation bar and then at the Settings pop-over, clicking on Apps. Here, you can load up an internal, enterprise app or an App Store app. Once you’ve loaded an app you can deploy it to devices by clicking on a group and then using the contextual menu to “Assign Apps.” Simple, as the name implies. The second aspect of…
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Setting Up File Services in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Server
File Services are perhaps the most important aspect of any server because file servers are often the first server an organization purchases. There are a number of protocols built into OS X Mountain Lion Server dedicated to serving files, including AFP, SMB and WebDAV. These services, combined comprise the File Sharing service in OS X Mountain Lion Server. File servers have shares. In OS X Mountain Lion Server we refer to these as Share Points. By default: File Sharing has some built-in Share Points that not all environments will require. Each of these shares is also served by AFP and SMB, something else you might not want (many purely Mac…
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Setting Up The Messages Service In Mountain Lion Server
iChat Server was sooooo easy to configure. iChat Server is now Messages Server. Both use the open source jabber project as their back-end code base. Lucky us, all Apple did in the latest iteration is change the name of the service in the Server app, leaving the command line effectively untouched. The paths to things serverish have changed. The jabberd binary is now at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/private/var/jabberd and the autobuddy binary is at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/bin/jabber_autobuddy. Given the importance of having multiple binaries that do the same thing, another jabberd binary is also stored at /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/libexec/jabberd. Note that the man page says it’s in /etc. But I digress. Setting up the Messages service is simple. Open the…
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iPhone 4: Where is My FaceTime?
I am almost embarrassed how long this took me to figure out. FaceTime was missing on my iPhone 4. Apparently, if you upgrade from 3 to 4 it doesn’t automatically show up. Instead you need to go to Settings and then tap on the Phone settings. Right there, staring back at you is a screen that says FaceTime and it gives you the ability to turn it ON or OFF. Tap ON and it should reappear in your apps (required me to reboot to show up).
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When Zones Just Won't Die
At times, you may find that information gets stuck in Server Admin and can’t be removed. For example, you see a Zone in Server Admin, and it doesn’t have a Name Server record attached to it. You can’t delete it but every time you add a Name Server it just disappears. This is often caused when you remove or change something and it gets dumped from the zone files in /var/named but not from the BIND view. Running serveradmin will show the data but as it’s serialized it can’t be removed: serveradmin settings dns Without a Name Server record, the zone is unresponsive to queries. Removing the zone can delete the…
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Firefox Settings
From Firefox, type about:config in the address bar and hit the enter key. You should then be looking at some settings for Firefox. You can double-click on any of these and provide more granular settings that what is possible from the stock settings preference panel. Have fun assigning the network.proxy.gopher_port for Firefox, I hear it comes in really handy. 😉