Marriott Library - Apple Infrastructure | Jan 2017

11 Jan Jan 2017 – Mac Managers Meeting

Posted at 18:45h in Ansible, Apple, Automation, autopkg, AutoPkgr, Book, Configuration, Enterprise, Higher Education, Information Technology, Jamf Composer, Jamf Pro Server, munkipkg, Pacifist, Suspicious Package, vfuse, Whitebox Packages by Richard Glaser 0 Comments

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Jan 18th 2017 – University of Utah, Mac Managers Meeting

mac_mgrs_crowd 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, Jan 18th 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.

Installer Package Fundamentals & Management for MacAdmins – By Armin Briegel

Working with package installers or pkg files is one of the most fundamental skills for a Mac administrator. No matter which management system you use at some point you will have to build a custom package or need to re-package some third party software. Once you have the skill to make package installers you can use them nearly everywhere. This presentation will take a look at the tools built into macOS to inspect and build packages, as well as some third party solutions, like Pacifist, Suspicious Package, Whitebox Packages, munkipkg and Jamf Composer.

A popular tool to automate the tedious process of package creation is the command line tool AutoPkg and its UI frontend AutoPkgr. We will learn how to use these tools and when it is best use them and when not. We will also look at the new features of autopkg 1.0 like audit and trust. We take a closer look at these new features and how you need to adapt your workflow to use autopkg 1.0 (or AutoPkgr) and when writing your own recipes.

Armin has been working with Macs for over twenty-five years and probably held most existing technical job titles at one time or another. He worked for nearly ten years at Apple Germany and US as a Systems Engineer, Consulting Engineer, and Software Architect. Then he worked for five years as System Administrator at University of Southern California where he had to put Mac management theory in to practice with Jamf Casper, Munki, and many, many custom scripts and packages. Armin and his family recently moved back to Europe which gave him an opportunity to ponder career, the present and future of Mac management, and write about all of it.

For more information you can check out Armin’s blog, GitHub sites and his book“Packaging for Apple Admins” available on the Apple’s iBooks store.

To view archived presentation, click here.

Ansible for MacAdmins – By Elliot Weiser

Ansible is a radically simple IT automation engine that automates cloud provisioning, configuration management, application deployment, intra-service orchestration, and many other IT needs. Designed for multi-tier deployments since day one, Ansible models your infrastructure by describing how all of your systems inter-relate, rather than just managing one system at a time. It uses no agents and no additional custom security infrastructure, so it’s easy to deploy – and most importantly, it uses a very simple language (YAML, in the form of Ansible Playbooks) that allow you to describe your automation jobs in a way that approaches plain English. This presentation will cover an overview of Ansible, including examples of real-world challenges in IT, how to get started (requirements, installation, tasks & playbook) & getting the most of Ansible (tools, workflows & links) and followed by questions & answers.

For more information about Ansible, see web site: https://www.ansible.com

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! Ansible has proven to be an invaluable asset in his toolbox; He can think of very few tools that epitomize the spirit of “devops” quite like it.

To view archived presentation, click here.

JAMF Pro Server in a Virtual Box – by Topher Nadauld, Marriott Library

JAMF Pro Server in a virtual box is an automated process of setting up a test JAMF Pro Server in a virtual environment. This allows for quick & easy testing before updating your production server, including new server versions and major or dangerous modifications of server configurations. This process includes custom scripts to automate the setup of required software, users and licenses; uses AutoDMG to build a never booted disk image; and uses vfuse to convert the disk image to a VMware Fusion virtual machine image that can be used for testing.

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.

Tags:

apple, automation, client management, configuration management, enterprise, higher education, information technology, installer package, JAMF, meeting, virtual machine

Jan 2017 – Mac Managers Meeting