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Disabling updates in Acrobat Pro X: A case study in wasted effort
Adobe’s Acrobat family of products has been historically painful for IT to distribute and manage. While this article focuses on a simple management setting – suppressing update checks and notifications...
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Modifying the TCC database
Mountain Lion introduced a new iOS-like feature to allow users to be notified when an application requests access to that user’s contacts: …and to be able to modify this access later: Why does Final...
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Xcode deployment: The dvtdownloadableindex and iOS Simulators/SDKs
Around the time of the release of OS X Mountain Lion, Xcode moved to a single drag ‘n drop .dmg model to simplify the user installation experience, and Apple was nice enough to make the Command Line...
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Interfacing with DeployStudio using HTTP
DeployStudio is frequently a starting place for deploying and configuring Mac systems. It has a computer database that can store information like computer/host names, default workflows, management...
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Customizing hardware model filters for NetBoot
Until the release of Lion, differentiating NetBoot images for DeployStudio Runtime to support different models was fairly simple. You’d have a Universal 10.5 image for booting PowerPC machines, and a...
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Flat packages: persisting obsolescence
Packaging is somewhat of a black art on OS X. The Flat Package format has been in existence since 10.5, but only recently are more 3rd-party packaging tools like JAMF Composer starting to move to this...
View ArticleRolling OS X packages with FPM and Homebrew
Two cool open-source package managers, FPM and Homebrew, recently got some new OS X Installer Package capabilities. fpm -t osxpkg Jordan Sissel’s FPM packaging tool was designed for systems...
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Introducing Brigadier, a tool for automated Boot Camp driver download and...
Anyone doing Windows deployment on Macs, and dealing with getting and installing the Boot Camp drivers, has probably found it to be a pain point. I recently wrote a small tool called Brigadier that I’m...
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Monitoring Apple’s XProtect meta feed for changes
Greg had an interesting blog post yesterday on handling Apple’s XProtect Updater mechanism for managed environments, as admins were still scrambling to resolve clients that suddenly had their Java Web...
View ArticleNew utility: XProtect Packager
Roughly a week after the first widespread panic with the XProtect mechanism disabling Java on OS X, the same thing happened with the Flash plugin, with Apple issuing a definition update blocking all...
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Everything you’ll wish you didn’t know about disabling Java 7 updates
Oracle’s Java 7 JRE for OS X was first officially released in October 2012. As expected, there have been issues deploying and testing it, amidst confusion about Apple’s Java 6 updates and it disabling...
View ArticleManaging Xcode CLI tools
In a previous post on deploying Xcode components, I showed how the iOS Simulators are defined in a metadata file used by Apple, called dvtdownloadableindex, which is a binary plist containing...
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Java 7: How not to use launchd for your app
The Oracle Java 7 package contains launchd items to support its Sparkle-based background update check app that I complained about previously. In this post we’ll go through its logic exhaustively and...
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Configuring ColorSync display profiles using the command-line
Managing ColorSync ICC profiles for displays is something I do for certain workstations via MCX, and it’s always been a pain. Typically I would manually configure a profile for a display, then open up...
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Java 7 web plugin deployment: redux
The Oracle Java 7 JRE (a web plugin) began shipping last year, and has grown a small maze of clever mechanisms to maintain a schedule of checking for updates. It’s a sad tale of the misuse and abuse...
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Deploying Xcode and CLI tools: what’s new in Xcode 5
Xcode 5 was released to the public on September 18 along with iOS 7. If you deploy Xcode and the command-line tools, a few things have changed since 4.x. There’ve been a couple other posts on this blog...
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Installing Command Line Tools automatically on Mavericks
In Mavericks, the Xcode Command Line Tools can be downloaded from the ADC downloads page like with previous versions. Now, though, they can be also be installed on-demand in a similar fashion to how...
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How to Package Profiles
Part of a managed Mac’s configuration is often one or more Profiles, either Configuration Profiles, or an Enrollment Profile for an MDM server like Apple’s Profile Manager or Cisco Meraki Systems...
View ArticleBuilding native extensions since LLVM 5.1
With LLVM / clang 5.1, Apple introduced a change where any unrecognized command option causes a hard failure. Unfortunately, there are many packages in the Python package index that have not yet...
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A tour of Charles, your HTTP(S) Swiss Army knife
There are times when it’s helpful to be able to know exactly what HTTP traffic is being sent or received on your Macs. Perhaps you’re auditing a 3rd-party application to see what connections it makes...
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