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casper-munki osx-system-administration

Munki Software License Tracking

Beginning with the 0.9.1 builds of the munki tools, Munki can query a webserver to determine if there are available seats for licensed software (or any software you wish to make available via optional_installs, yet control the number of deployed copies). In order to use this wonderful new feature here are the things you need. lient running munkitools 0.9.1.x or later Web service that is tracking available seats and that provides information in a specific format in response to queries. One such server is MunkiWebAdmin as of 16 July 2013....

cocoa-code

Cocoa App: Animal Age

In an effort to learn more about Objective-C programming I have created a simple OSX Application that mimics one of my more popular widgets the Dog Age Widget. Its a native Objective-C Animal Age calculator that allows you to convert the ages of various animals against human lifespans and see life expectancies based on different breeds of animals. While this may not seem like an exciting or useful application I am using it as a tool to learn more about GIT how it works and also to learn more about...

cocoa-code

Cocoa Control: Print View

Apple has changed decades ago by introducing to the world single window applications. Ever since we have seen tremendous applications all taking advantage of this form. Functionality that compliments that form are things like window sheets, those cool pop-under windows that slide up and down from the top of the application top bar. Sheets magically show us controls when we need them and then whoosh them away when we don’t. Not surprisingly Apple has built in controls for system level windows to use this wonderful technology. However its not very...

microsoft-imaging

PXE Boot Clonezilla Live with Synology

I was excited to see that Synology have recently integrated a PXE solution in their latest version of Diskstation Manager – DSM 4.2 beta. This makes their NAS devices even more ideal in a home virtualisation lab as they are both cheap to buy and to run (the DS212 unit that I own consumes less than 20W in use), but also easy to configure and they offer a wide range of storage and network services such as CIFS / AFP / NFS / iSCSI, LDAP, PXE, TFTP, VPN, DNS. They...

bash-scripts osx-system-administration

Install Zenoss on 10.9 Mavericks with VMWare Fusion

If you are a network (or systems) administrator, you know how crucial it is to have the right tools for the job. One of the toughest tools to really nail down is a network monitoring tool. Although there are plenty of such tools out there, they range from the over-priced to the under-featured. Where do you look for any sort of middle ground where features don’t lose out to price? Zenoss is an outstanding, enterprise-ready network monitoring tool that includes all of the features you are accustomed to finding in...

casper-munki osx-system-administration

Deploying Printers with Munki on 10.9 Mavericks

It is possible to add, remove and manage printers using Munki. You might be asking: Why add and remove printers using Munki? Why not just use Profile Manager? You can use Profile Manager to manage printer lists but the functionality is limited. One major issue with managing printer lists with Profile Manager is if you add a printer to an Profile Manager client’s printer list, and the driver file for that the printer isn’t installed on the client system, the printer will be added using the Generic Printer Driver. Even...

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