10 Sep September 2019 – MacAdmins Meeting
September 18th, 2019 – 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, September 18th, 2019, 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 use the Contact Us option.
What’s New – By Todd McDaniel, Univ of Utah, Marriott Library
This presentation will cover new information pertaining to Apple administration including operating system & application updates, security, hardware support & how-tos and other notables.
- Video – To view archived presentation video, click here.
- Slides – To view the presentation slides, click here.
Kinobi Overview – By Duncan McCracken, Mondada
In Jamf Pro, the patch management process is different for Apple Updates than for third-party macOS software title updates. Patch management for Apple Updates consists of running Software Update on computers via policies. This process installs all updates available from Apple. To customize the process, you can use the Software Update Service (SUS) with open source solutions like NetSUS or Reposado to control which computers get which operating system updates, or deploy macOS manually.
Patch management for third-party macOS software titles consists of taking inventory of the software titles and versions in your environment, determining when vendors release new updates, creating a package for update becomes available and upload and distribute the update.With Jamf Pro 10.2 or later, you can integrate external patch sources with Jamf Pro. Patches management functionality by connecting to a source hosted by the community, or by using a server application in your environment that responds to the following endpoints and can receive communication from Jamf Pro. Software titles hosted on an external source can be used for patch reporting, patch notifications, and patch policies. Your external patch server could be solutions like Kinobi, PatchServer or your implementation may be as simple as a small Python server.
As Bryson Tyrrell gave a great overview at last months meeting on of how Jamf’s Patch Management functionality works, this presentation will focus on one of the tools he mentioned, Kinobi. It is an external patch server (or patch source) for Jamf Pro. It provides a simple interface for creating and editing patch definitions, as well as the appropriate endpoints for Jamf Pro server to connect. We will cover a little of the history behind the creation of Kinobi, show some of its features, for each of the tiers, and expose a little of the future roadmap for the product and related services.
Duncan is the Technical Director of Mondada, an organization that had its beginnings in macOS packaging services, and subsequently has created Kinobi. Duncan has presented at various Apple-centric conferences in Australia, Europe and the US. He usually responds if mentioned on the MacAdmins Slack @duncan.mccracken .
- Video – To view archived presentation video, click here.
Making a Jamf Pro Uploader for Everyone – By Josh Harvey, NASA
This presentation will cover how to give your site admins the ability to upload and edit scripts, packages and profiles on a Jamf Pro server without giving away the keys to the kingdom. Sites are organizational components that allow you to control which items each Jamf Pro user can manage. Implementing sites in your environment involves adding sites to Jamf Pro, granting Jamf Pro users access to sites, and adding items to sites. When a user logs in to Jamf Pro with an account that has access to a site, the user sees only the items that belong to that site. If the user has access to multiple sites, a pop-up menu is displayed at the top of the page, allowing the user to switch between sites.
We developed a web page that interfaces with Jamf Pro Server to allow site admins the access they need to upload packages and scripts to the Jamf Pro server, without having to give them full access to Jamf Admin.
In addition to being able to upload new scripts, packages and profiles, site admins will also have the ability to download any script that is being used in your JSS (With the option to add a filter if needed), make any edits to that script, then reupload it to the server. This allows for any changes to be made on the most up to date version.
- Video – To view archived presentation video, click here.
- Slides – To view the presentation slides, click here.
Intro to Pre-Commit – By Elliot Jordan, Nordstrom
Pre-commit is a multi-language Git hook manager that helps you catch errors before you commit your code. Git hook scripts are useful for identifying simple issues before submission to code review. We run our hooks on every commit to automatically point out issues in code such as missing semicolons, trailing whitespace, and debug statements. By pointing these issues out before code review, this allows a code reviewer to focus on the architecture of a change while not wasting time with trivial style nitpicks.
This presentation will show you how to install pre-commit, demonstrate a few pre-commit hooks that might be useful to Mac admins, and describe how these hooks can be distributed among your team members.
Elliot has secured and automated Mac management at a diverse range of companies over the past 15 years. A frequent open source contributor and collaborator, Elliot co-created Recipe Robot, led the AutoPkgr development team, and maintains over 1,000 public AutoPkg recipes. Elliot works on the corporate security team at Nordstrom and lives with his wife Jacqueline in Seattle, WA.
- Video – To view archived presentation video, click here.
- Slides – To view the presentation slides, click here.
Open Discussion
Questions, comments, problems and fixes.
Directions
The meeting will be held 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.
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