http://homepage.mac.com/gregneagle/iblog Using radmind and other tools to manage an installation of machines running Mac OS X gregneagle@mac.com © Greg Neagle Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:56:31 -0800 Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:56:41 America/Los_Angeles iBlog 1.3.1 I haven't posted here in over a year. May I direct your attention here , instead? ]]> Fri, 10 Feb 2006 18:50:35 -0800 In one-to-one deployments, you may not have direct control of a user's Dock - especially if you do not use Macintosh Manager becuase you are using a non-Apple directory. When you update applications on a user's machine, this sometimes breaks Dock items. We faced this when updating machines from Office v.X to Office 2004. I wrote a script that ran at login that changed any existing Office v.X Dock icons into their corresponding Office 2004 icons. ]]> Sun, 02 Jan 2005 09:15:44 -0800 Let's say you've assumed responsibility for managing a new group of Mac OS X machines. These machines were previously set up by a variety of people, and have different local admin account names and passwords. To simplify your life, you want to standardize the local admin account name and password, and additionally, create a way to update the local admin password periodically. ]]> Sun, 02 Jan 2005 09:00:36 -0800 Thu, 30 Dec 2004 19:04:25 -0800 Apple seems to have missed a bit of functionality with their screensaver: when a Mac is sitting at the loginwindow, the screen saver never comes on. If you have a Mac sitting at the loginwindow for many hours a day, and you do not have the Mac set to dim the screen after a short time, you could begin to burn-in the loginwindow's image into the screen!
There may be other reasons you need a screensaver to run at login. Whatever those might be, there's a fairly simple solution. ]]> Tue, 15 Jun 2004 19:36:31 -0700 It's useful to be able to quickly view radmind data via a webpage. Kris Steinhoff has written a radmind management module for Webmin. This module allows one to perform many common radmind management tasks via a webpage. We wrote a standalone CGI that gives us read-only access to radmind data. (With the help of Chris Buskirk, I've added some files the CGI depends on and updated the script to fix the viewing of check-ins in domains other than .com - you should be able to get this up and running very easily on a Mac OS X radmind/web server) ]]> Sat, 22 May 2004 23:41:42 -0700 Here are some more of the scripts I use to automate radmind... ]]> Mon, 10 May 2004 22:10:58 -0700 Here is the run_radmind script I use. It's called on demand at logout, and as a periodic task nightly. ]]> Mon, 10 May 2004 21:22:32 -0700 (Updated 5/7/04) Once you have set up some sort of automation for radmind, so that it runs automatically every night, for example, it becomes important to be able to monitor the machines you manage to see if they are running radmind regularly and to be notified if there are any problems. ]]> Fri, 07 May 2004 22:46:49 -0700 One of the main reasons I started this blog was to communicate my adventures in using radmind to upgrade machines from 10.2.x to 10.3.x. It turned out not to be trivial, so I wanted to share my experiences so others could benefit.

It's far past time for an update on my progress.

So far I have successfully upgraded about 85 machines from 10.2.6 to 10.3.1 or 10.3.2 using radmind. I continue to upgrade a few each week. I will have moved most of our OS X boxes to Panther before the end of January. ]]> Sat, 17 Jan 2004 17:38:20 -0800 Mac OS X 10.3.2 adds a feature to the Proxies tab of the Network Preferences Pane. This allows you to specify a URL to automatically configure proxies. This URL points to a "PAC" (Proxy Auto Configuration") file. These files are traditionally used Netscape and IE for Windows to configure their proxies. Now that this feature has been added to Mac OS X, Mac OS X applications can take advantage of this feature. ]]> Sat, 17 Jan 2004 17:05:56 -0800 In this blog, I've posted several scripts that we run at startup, without being terribly specific as to the details. Today I'd like to remedy that. I'll show you a custom startup item that can run any number of scripts (or executable binaries for that matter) that you place in a special directory. ]]> Sat, 17 Jan 2004 17:04:46 -0800 We had a need on certain machines to ensure that the ColorSync monitor profile was always set to a specific ColorSync profile, regardless of who logged in. This would ensure color consistency for all artwork created at a given workstation. ]]> Tue, 18 Nov 2003 21:44:35 -0800 For our environment, we are required to enforce a screensaver that comes on after 10 minutes of inactivity and requires a password to clear. Here's how we accomplish that for all users of a system. ]]> Tue, 18 Nov 2003 21:39:03 -0800 In most managed environments, workstations will all have either the same root password, or an admin account with a common password. This allows support personnel to access any machine they support and perform admin tasks. A problem arises when it is necessary or desirable to change the password on these admin accounts. If each machine must be visited individually in order to change the password, it probably won't happen very often, if at all. Here's one way to ensure password consistency... ]]> Sat, 15 Nov 2003 21:28:21 -0800