Administration

By: Richard Glaser - Revised: 2014-10-06 by Pierce Darragh and Tyler Crouse

Table Of Contents
    This is remote presentation by Joe Kissel who is Senior Editor of TidBITS, a weekly electronic newsletter about the Macintosh and the Internet, and the author of numerous print and electronic books about Macintosh software, including Real World Mac Maintenance and Backups (Peachpit, 2007).

  • BRU
  • This presentation was an in-depth interactive discussion of Bru. Since the release of Mac OS X, BRU has become the standard of reliable Mac OS X data backup and restore. This interactive demonstration shared technical insights into BRU's support of Mac OS X as well as other platforms in networked system environments.

    The Casper Suite from JAMF Software has been a leader in Mac OS X client management. JAMF's latest release, Casper Suite 8.0, adds comprehensive Mobile Device Management (MDM) capabilities for iPad, iPhone and iPod touch devices. Administrators can now manage iOS devices using the same console they use to manage their Macs, benefitting from deep integration with the Apple ecosystem while leveraging their existing technology. In this live demo, JAMF Systems Engineer Ben Graham will show how the Casper Suite can inventory, secure, manage configuration profiles and assist with app distribution for iOS devices.

    CrashPlan is the easiest, cross platform, enterprise-grade backup solution for education, business and service providers. This presentation will introduce CrashPlan and address concerns and solutions to using CrashPlan in an enterprise environment.

    Data Resue is known as the bes data recovery software for the Mac platform. It can recover data from faulty, unmountable or corrupted hard drives, deleted or trashed files. Recovers icons, dates and even folder hierarchy and allows you to select a safe location to save your recovered files to (including FireWire, SCSI, ATA, USB, or Network volumes). Also comes with a bootable CD for emergency use.

    There are several approved methods for data sanitization that satisfy these legal requirements or meet even more stringent corporate or government secrecy requirements. Many methods for sanitizing data include deleting files, drive formating, block overwrite, in-drive secure erase, physical drive destruction, degaussing, and encryption.

    duti is a command-line utility for managing application ownership of document types and URL schemes on Mac OS X. Learn how to take advantage of duti's features to control which applications will launch when users click links or open files on the Mac OS X desktop.

    Doug Willen of Swarthmore College, Greg Neagle of Disney, and Jeremy Reichman from RIT discuss topics for consideration when deploying Macs. What questions should be asked in preparation? How can you effectively deploy in a multi-platform environment? Come discuss deployment strategies with experienced Mac administrators.

    Iceberg is an integrated packaging environment (IPE) that allows you to create packages or metapackages conforming to the Mac OS X specifications. With it you can quickly create your installation packages using a graphic user interface similar to your favorite development tools. Iceberg can also be useful for Administrators who want to gather in a metapackage numerous packages for remote distribution via Apple Remote Desktop.
      This presentation will cover an overview of Iceberg with a demonstration of procedure in creating an installer.

    This session introduced newcomers to the Mac and its management environment. We discussed the planning, imaging, deployment and management solutions available for the Mac, as well as concepts of workflow. This session was a basic introduction for those new to managing Macs.

    Apple's iOS 4.3.1 update included fixes issues that impacted campus Exchange web services. Dave will discuss the issue, give status of iOS devices upgrading to latest release and quick Q & A.

    An overview of KeyServer, a software licensing management package.

    Used on the largest networks world-wide, KeyServer is one of the most stable, flexible, and comprehensive network-independent software license management tools available. It is now Mac OS X native.   This presentation will give a brief overview of new features in K2, and a demonstration of the new software.

    This presentation focused on improving instruction effectiveness with LanSchool Classroom Management Software for the Mac. It covered deployment, features, security and a roadmap LanSchool on the Mac.

    This presentation will go over how to create and capture Local MCX settings using Workgroup Manager and then how to deploy these captured settings to your Mac OS X clients.

    Drawing on lessons learned from the Higher Education Mac OS X Labs Deployment Project, this Apple Computer sponsored seminar was held out the U of U in May 2003.

    MPP (Message Processing Platform) is anti-virus, anti-spam & security framework for Mac OS X mail servers. It uses scalable policy-driven email security architectures, create differentiated service levels, and quickly deploy and layer security technologies. The policy engine enables centralized management of embedded and best of breed email scanning technologies. The security manager can apply configuration options and scanner combinations on a per-group basis to enforce security or compliance policies or support differentiated service offerings.   Phil will give an overview of the framework and how his department has implemented it.

    Nagios is a popular open source computer system and network monitoring application software. It watches hosts and services that you specify, alerting you when things go bad and again when they get better.   Tom Ammon, a Network Engineer of Center for High Performance Computing instructed a class on Nagios. This class is broken up into three parts.

    This web page covers the steps of setting up the NetBoot service on a Mac OS X 10.6.x client, includes script that automates the setup, and details on setting up diskless NetBoot which is usefull in situations where you want run utilities like Disk Utility or DiskWarrior on the local hard disk of the NetBooted client and want to do it on more than 10 clients which is the concurrent limitation of Mac OS X client using Apple Filing Protocol [AFP] via File Sharing.

    Richard will provide an overview on the campus network time services and options to modify the configuration on Mac OS X clients, like System Preferences, ARD 2.x, editing ntp.conf and using a script.

    Have you ever wanted to have a non admin user run a script as root? This is actually very easy to do! It just involves adding a line to the "/etc/sudoers" file.

    The three participants will present their work in Parallel computing with the Macintosh:
    • Combining powerful, numerically-intensive parallel computing clusters with the famed ease-of-use of the Macintosh, Pooch is the only solution that merges a modern graphical user interface with supercomputer compatible parallel computing. This software enables users, without any expertise with OS X, world-wide to develop and run parallel code eficiently and productively.
    • This session will also include discussion of a particular biological model and the architecture of the Xgrid-aware application built to run computations used to analyze biophysical studies done in the lab towards the goal of better understanding one receptor involved in heart regulation.
    • Since the official release of XGrid, it has been used to render POV-Ray and Maya animations with more accuracy and ease, using modifications of Apple’s Xgrid sample code to submit jobs. Experiences and future plans for releasing a submission and job queue engine for Maya and POV-Ray will be shared.

    A brief (and unfinished) overview of patch management and its features.

    Despite Apple's recommendations that software developers make their applications work from read-only directories, many developers have failed to do so. In order to function properly, many apps need write access to individual files within an application's directory, to the entire directory where the app resides, or to files/directories elsewhere in the file system (such as /Library/Application Support).
      This creates potential problems for Mac Admins who don't want to give multiple "Joe Users" write access to these areas. Ideally, applications should only need read/write access to files and folders located within a User's home folder, such as ~/Library/Preferences or ~/Library/Application Support, or to other common world-writable areas like /tmp/.
      Some installers (such as Omnipage Pro X) will not work unless the installer is given root privileges, which should immediately make OS X admins a bit nervous. One should also be wary of installers that ask for an admin login/password.
      Luckily there are a few options for solving these problems. I will go over a few examples and workarounds.

    Indepth overview of using the command line tool pmset to view, edit and schedule power management options on Mac OS X.

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    Configuration profiles are XML files that can contain device security policies and restrictions, VPN configuration information, Wi-Fi settings, email and calendar accounts, and authentication credentials that permit iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad to work with the University of Utah systems. We have the following profiles available for campus services like email, wireless and VPN for iOS devices.

    Configuration profiles are XML files that can contain device security policies and restrictions, VPN configuration information, Wi-Fi settings, email and calendar accounts, and authentication credentials that permit iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad to work with the University of Utah systems. We have the following profiles available for campus services like email, wireless and VPN for iOS devices.

    Configuration profiles are XML files that can contain device security policies and restrictions, VPN configuration information, Wi-Fi settings, email and calendar accounts, and authentication credentials that permit iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad to work with the University of Utah systems. We have the following profiles available for campus services like email, wireless and VPN for iOS devices.

    Information about utilities that help track and migrate system software.

    The SpamAssassin system is software for analyzing email messages, determining how likely they are to be spam and reporting its conclusions. It is a rule based system that compares different parts of email messages with a large set of rules. Each rule adds or removes points from a message's spam score. A message with a high enough score is reported to be spam. SpamAssassin is an open source solution to spam. It is available as a standalone system, as well as being part of MPP (Message Processing Platform) from RAEInternet. It has also been included with the mail system in OSX 10.4 server (Tiger).

    This presentation focused on tracking software updates on Mac OS X using Mac OS X Software Update, Mac OS X Software Update Server, Adobe Application Manager, Microsoft AutoUpdate, MacUpdate Desktop, Mac App Store, MacPorts and Fink.

    Detailed, step-by-step instructions for connection to the campus VPN system on OS X.

    Xgrid is an amazingly easy way to create a super computer. It is kinda like a wagon compared to Virginia Tech's rocket ship, but at least you don't need to know how to program to use Xgrid. In fact, anyone can set it up in a single day, elevating anyone to alpha geek status in a snap.
      The Student Computing Labs is very interested in this technology from Apple because we manage 350 Macintosh computers that sit idle at night and other times when our labs are closed. For some time we have wanted to perform distributive computing on these computers, but doing so is a small priority compared to our main duties. Using Xgrid, distributive computing is now easy enough that even we can set it up in almost no time at all.