tlarkin.com

Using a Compiled Image as your parent configuration in Casper

Submitted by tlarkin on Thu, 03/04/2010 - 16:10

So, I ran into a little quirk with Casper not too long ago. Since Casper has a package priority feature, where you can set a value to any of your packages you create from 1 to 20 it tells Casper in what order to install the package. This is an important feature if you are applying multiple updates and you need to install them in order. That way the latter updates you can give a higher number and they will be installed chronologically by the number you give them. 1 is the first package and pretty much reserved for OSes since your OS should always be installed first, and 20 would be anyth

2 shell scripts to maintain standard naming conventions

Submitted by tlarkin on Thu, 09/24/2009 - 13:09

So, you have some Macintosh computers at your work and you have a standard naming convention. Something that needs to be in place because of how policies are ran, say by a computer name list or a group of computer names. If a user changes it, it could break something you have in place.

So, I came up with a sort of clever way of maintaining the computer name at all times. My method does have a few requirements though. Here is a list of what you must do and have in place for this to really work:

Managed dual booting with Casper

Submitted by tlarkin on Tue, 08/25/2009 - 10:07

So, lets say you have a lot of managed user accounts, that do not have admin rights. Let us also say you have a dual boot environment so all of your users need to be able to boot back and forth between OS X and Windows. This puts you in a bit of a pickle since your users are managed.

Passenger v3.7.9 review

Submitted by tlarkin on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 15:49

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How to deploy NWEA TestTaker 6.4 on Intel Macs with Casper

Submitted by tlarkin on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 16:01

Hello everyone. The title of this says it all. If you are like me and you work in IT for a school system that uses NWEA Test Taker for their assessment testing, then you know it is one giant pain to deploy. I am lucky that we have the Casper Suite, so I use their tool sets to accomplish this goal.

What exactly is the Casper Suite? A review in many parts

Submitted by tlarkin on Thu, 08/13/2009 - 23:45

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I am on several forums and mailing lists for OS X Administrators. Time and time again I see people trying to accomplish things with in their environment and they hit a barrier. A lot of the time the barrier is not due to their lack of skills, but due to the lack of what their current technology can do. I am lucky, as the powers that be that spend our money in my department decided to get this little software suite called Casper. Casper is developed by JAMF software, and it is an amalgamation of many differen

Search and Destroy

Submitted by tlarkin on Tue, 01/13/2009 - 10:48

Im a street walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm...
Im a runaway son of the nuclear a-bomb...
I am a worlds forgotten boy...
The one who searches and destroys..

Create local user accounts

Submitted by tlarkin on Thu, 11/20/2008 - 16:08

Here is a simple script to create a local user account, this script is designed with the idea of it being in an educational environment, so if you decide to use make sure to tweak it to your needs. I have tested it in mass in OS X 10.5.3 and 10.5.5 (several thousand clients) and it works great.

Here it is!

Uninstalling ARD Admin

Submitted by tlarkin on Thu, 10/23/2008 - 15:23

Hello, and welcome to another tech solution that I came up with ARD Admin. Since at my work we have a very large Apple computer deployment of 6,000 Macbooks and probably another 1,500 to 2,000 Mac desktops, we use ARD Admin on a regular basis. Probably every single day. My co-workers and I have ran into a few problems with ARD Admin. Mainly with it running sluggish or crashing then evolving from that into not running at all. Then having to force quit the application itself all the time over and over again.

Add PDF export of Man pages in OS X

Submitted by tlarkin on Sat, 08/30/2008 - 15:14

So, if you use Unix or a variant like Linux you are familiar with the command line. Which means that you have probably sifted through the man pages (manual) of several commands in the past. A lot of times it gets fruturating or annoying having to refer to a man page or to have multiple terminal windows open just to be able to read the command's manual. So, there are two solutions I can suggest to remedy this. The first one is a free third party applicaiton that will open up all man pages in a web browser. This will allow you to keep the manual open in a web browser while you test out c