March 2021 – MacAdmins Meeting

12 Mar March 2021 – MacAdmins Meeting

March 17, 2021 – University of Utah, MacAdmins Meeting

The University of Utah, MacAdmins Meeting is held monthly at the Marriott Library on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 11 AM Mountain Time. Presentations cover Apple technology and integration in a heterogeneous university enterprise environment. This month’s meeting will be held on Wed, March 17th, 2021 at 11 AM MT and we will provide live broadcasts and archives that will be made available 2-3 days after the meeting. If you have suggestions on presentations, questions, or comments, please use the Contact Us option.

NoMAD 2 – By Joel Rennich, jamf

NoMAD 1.x hasn’t seen a lot of updates in the last few years. A lot of this is because Active Directory itself hasn’t changed much. Also, with the introduction of Apple’s improved Kerberos SSO Extension, there was a hope that NoMAD’s time had perhaps passed. However, after watching the number of people in #nomad MacAdmin Slack channel increase and continued usage of the product, it started becoming more clear that the time had perhaps come to do a major rework of the codebase to allow for modernization.

Most of NoMAD 2 is focused on code cleanup and modernization with a particular focus on ensuring lingering threading and other issues are properly addressed. However, there are some new features that you’ll find in NoMAD 2.

• Support for Single Sign-On Extensions. NoMAD 2 has a full Credential SSOE.
• Lights Out Operation where the NoMAD menu bar item is not visible. The background operations still occur and users will get notified when they need to react. This also includes an “Actions Only” mode where the only elements in the menu bar are the Actions menu.
• Multi-account support. You can have an unlimited number of accounts from any AD domain you’d like listed in NoMAD 2. Accounts can all have saved passwords and be enabled for automatic sign-in for each account.
• PAM module to support authentication to AD, without binding, for administration purposes.

This presentation will give an overview of the new features & functionality of NoMAD2.

About Joel Rennich

Joel Rennich currently resides in Minneapolis and helps Jamf do great things on Apple devices with identity.

Previously Joel founded Orchard & Grove, app development and consulting firm in Austin, Texas. In 2016, Joel released the popular open-source application NoMAD and other tools that help to make Mac admins’ lives easier. Before that he spent over a decade working at Apple as an Enterprise Systems Engineering Manager doing all kinds of fun things with lots of cool people while solving crazy problems to allow for integrating Mac and iOS devices successfully into enterprise environments.

Prior to Apple, Joel was frequently seen speaking at Macworld, WWDC, and other international conferences and gatherings of Apple-minded admins as the founder of AFP548.com.

Joel is a classically trained journalist and plied his trade as a paparazzi chasing Monica Lewinsky in Washington, D.C., before rising to become the Director of Photography for United Press International. If you’re lucky he’ll even tell you some of his Monica stories, as the stories are better than the photos.

• Video – To view the archived presentation video, click here.
• Slides – To view the archived presentation slides, click here.

Introduction to Sassafras AllSight 7.7 – By Jason Schackai, Sassafras

With the latest major release, Sassafras KeyServer has been renamed Sassafras AllSight. No longer a simple license manager, the new name better describes the full-featured IT Asset Management suite the product has become.

 

In this presentation, Jason will provide a walkthrough demonstration of AllSight’s new features, including enhanced dashboard-based reporting, lab availability maps (with remote access integrations), SSO support for Google, Okta, & Azure AD, one-click usage tracking for software product families, and more.

 

Guacamole integration, explained in detail in the video below, allows for a completely streamlined, browser-based remote access experience. SplashTop Business and NoMachine support is also available. Additional enhancements have been made to remote access features for both direct links and the integrations described above. For example, remote access links for individual computers within a division or tag-based floorplan/computer list can be controlled with the new Map Availability dropdown in Computer Details. An Auto-logoff toggle allows the client agent to automatically sign a user out of a computer’s operating system if they disconnect their remote session without a proper logoff (after a 3-minute delay).

M1 Recovery and Reinstall of macOS – By Ryan aka Mr. Macintosh

 

If you experience issues running macOS Big Sur on your M1 MacBook Air, ‌M1‌ MacBook Pro, or ‌M1‌ Mac mini, or you want to start afresh with a new installation of the operating system, you’ll need to boot into macOS Recovery, which is done slightly differently on Apple Silicon Macs compared to Intel machines.

 

Do you think the M1 Restore process is confusing? Mr. Macinosh will explain the whole process and show you why it’s better than Intel.

Open Discussion

Questions, comments, problems, and fixes.

Directions

Due to the coronavirus (aka Covid-19) crisis, this meeting will not be meeting in person but will currently be done virtually using Zoom video communications architecture.