Slides from 2014 Penn State MacAdmins Conference

I have uploaded the slides from the presentation that Matt Hansen and myself presented at this years MacAdmins conference at Penn State.  If you have never been to this conference I highly recommend attending next year as many of the top notch Mac Admins attend this conference and deliver great content on how to manage OS X systems in an enterprise environment.  For those of...

2014, Jul 10   —  1 minute read

Installing the Casper Enrollment Package with Munki

Our college has purchased the Casper suite and we have performed setup and created the MDM service and profiles that we would like to distribute. Since we are going to continue using Munki for software deployment we wanted to have a way to deploy the Casper Enrollment package so it is a seamless transition from either Profile Manager or local install profiles from Profile Manager...

2014, May 29   —  5 minute read

Allowing Users to install Mendeley's Word Plugin

A lot of our faculty and staff use the Mendeley application which also has a Microsoft Word Plugin that can be installed with Mendeley. The issue however is that Mendeley's Word Plugin must write files to the following places: /Applications/Microsoft Office 2011/Office/Startup/Word/ - Mendeley.dot file ~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/Word Script Menu Items/ - Mendeley Apple Scripts (Accessible from the Menu) Since the plugin install installs files to...

2014, Apr 16   —  2 minute read

Configuring TeamViewer Host 9 to be deployable with Munki

TeamViewer has released version 9 and made a few changes which require us to change some of our script in Munki. After testing and help from Erwin and Robert, it has been determined that TeamViewer 9 now has a new encryption that will prevent our previous method of inserting the password using the defaults write command to insert the password via a data binary for the...

2014, Apr 16   —  5 minute read

Deploying/Revoking Admin Rights with Munki

In our college we have users that would like to have administrative access to their machines even though Munki provides the ability to install software approved by the College. To allow this we have created a packageless install for Munki which will issue a basic terminal command to add administrative rights for the user listed. This package can also be uninstalled which will revoke access....

2014, Feb 07   —  2 minute read

Your thoughts on Casper Management Suite

We are currently looking at purchasing Casper as the new version of Profile Manager unfortunately borked all of our OS X (10.7) clients plus we would like to utilize the Apple VPP Program without having to re-enroll the iPads. I was wondering what everyone's experience with Casper has been and was hoping that everyone would share. The key pieces we are looking for in Casper...

2014, Jan 29   —  1 minute read

Java 7 Update 51 Global Exceptions list

With the new version of Java, new settings were introduced which define new security requirements for browser plugins, applets and web start applications.  This can keep plugins from running, however Java now has an exceptions list which can be defined to allow these applets to run. This exceptions list is on a per user basis and could be very troublesome for each user to maintain.  In...

2014, Jan 16   —  3 minute read

Allowing a VirtualBox VM to be run by ALL Users

A few months ago we were tasked with allowing a user to use a Windows program on a Mac until the Macs can be recycled for PCs. Of course the first response was to buy PCs however this could not be done immediately. The next best thing was to use VirtualBox as it is a free Virtual Machine application for OS X. The challenge however...

2014, Jan 16   —  3 minute read

Configuring TeamViewer Host 8 to be deployable via Munki

Over the past few weeks the College of Education purchased TeamViewer as it allows for us to remotely assist users on Macs and PCs from either a Mac or PC. The cross platform ability was a great asset for us however in order to accomplish this there were challenges. The first thing we noticed was that the TeamViewer Host version for Mac which runs all...

2013, Sep 27   —  8 minute read