08 Feb Feb 2017 – Mac Managers Meeting
Feb 15th 2017 – University of Utah, Mac Managers Meeting
The University of Utah, MacAdmins Meeting is held monthly at the Marriott Library on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 1 PM Mountain Time. Presentations cover Apple technology and integration in a heterogeneous university enterprise environment. This months meeting will be held on Wed, Feb 15th 2017, and we will provide live broadcasted and archives that will be made available 2-3 days after the meeting.
If you have suggestions on presentations, questions or comments, please your the Contact Us option.
Skype for Business on Mac – By Richard Schwendiman, Microsoft
For more information about Skype for Business on Mac, see web site.
To view archived presentation, click here.
Automating macOS VM Creation – By Elliot Weiser
Continuing in the spirit of an earlier talk about Ansible, Elliot will demonstrate a development stack and workflow for automating the creation, customization, testing, and publishing of VMs (on a Mac). This talk will cover the following tools in moderate depth:
- Packer
Packer is free and open-source software for creating identical machine images or containers for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. It is used primarily to automate the creation of machine images which have a particular operating system and pre-installed software in it. Packer can be used with Vagrant or independently. Packer can also be used with configuration management tools such as Ansible, Chef, Puppet and Saltstack.
- Vagrant
Vagrant is an open-source software product for building and maintaining portable virtual development environments The core idea behind its creation lies in the fact that the environment maintenance becomes increasingly difficult in a large project with multiple technical stacks. Vagrant manages all the necessary configurations for the developers in order to avoid the unnecessary maintenance and setup time, and increases development productivity.
Molecule
Molecule is designed to aid in the development and testing of Ansible roles including support for multiple instances, operating system distributions, virtualization providers and test frameworks. It leverages Vagrant, Docker, and OpenStack to manage virtual machines/containers, with support for multiple Vagrant providers (currently VirtualBox, Parallels, VMware Fusion, and Libvirt).
- Testinfra
With Testinfra you can write unit tests in Python to test actual state of your servers configured by managements tools like Salt, Ansible, Puppet, Chef and so on. Testinfra aims to be a Serverspec equivalent in python and is written as a plugin to the powerful Pytest test engine
It is recommended to view Elliot’s earlier presentation about Ansible, as that is his tool of choice for “customizing” the resulting VM image. Familiarity with at least one virtual provider, such as Virtualbox or VMWare Fusion, is also recommended.
Elliot Weiser has been a software engineer at Comcast for approximately 3 years. He mostly works on Linux and OS X systems. At work, his primary role is to develop and operate a Jenkins-based continuous integration and delivery platform. At home, he likes tinkering and automating while he sits back and drinks coffee!
To view archived presentation, click here.
macOS Logs – by Nic Scott, Kenyon College
As good Admins we all know that logs are important, but when’s the last time you checked your logs? Do you know where they’re stored at? When you find them, what the heck do you look for? Lets talk about system & audit logs on macOS, how to create custom logging, the advantages of centralized logging, and what’s changed with unified logging in Sierra.
Unified logging provides a single, efficient, performant API for capturing messaging across all levels of the system. Unified logging provides developers with fine-grained control over multiple logging levels, includes built-in privacy protection, and integrates with activity tracing to make problem diagnosis easier. When activity tracing and logging are used in tandem, related messages are automatically correlated. Logging is also integrated with Simulator. A new version of Console in /Applications/Utilities/ displays log data from connected devices, supports tokenized searching and saved searches, and shows connections between related messages across multiple processes. Log messages can also be viewed and managed using the log command-line tool. Unified logging supersedes ASL (Apple System Logger) and the Syslog APIs. Messages are now stored in memory and a data store, rather than in text-based log files.
For more information, see Apple Developer Logging Reference.
Nic Scott is a MacAdmin with ten years experience in technology, ranging from a large fortune 100, to a small private firm, and now in education. Where I’m the Senior Apple Admin at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. I manage the Mac ecosystem and emphasize scripting and automation wherever possible.
To view archived presentation, click here.
Open Discussion
Questions, comments, problems and fixes.
Directions
Note, due to scheduling conflicts with our usual meeting location, we will be meeting at the Marriott Library room 1705A located inside the Faculty Center located north of Mom’s Cafe.
For directions to the University of Utah monthly Mac Managers Meetings see the following web page.
Archive & Live Presentation(s)
- A live broadcast of the presentations will be available from this web page.
- Archives of the presentations will be available from this web page.
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