Casper Suite 8 is now deprecated

[andyinindy]

Just got an email from my account manager announcing that the 8 series is now considered to be deprecated. Just curious as to how many people are still on 8, and what impact (if any) this decision will have on your enterprise.

We are currently in the throes of our move to 9.4, with our targeted cutover two weeks out. This is mainly due to a critical vulnerability in Self Service that was discovered by our house security team that allows for management passwords to be disclosed. This issue will not be patched, which means that we either had to disable Self Service, or upgrade immediately (we chose the latter).

Honestly this is a Good Thing™ for us, as we needed a kick in the tookus to get us moving on the upgrade, but we were a bit surprised that such a critical vulnerability would not be patched. I figured that I would get the word out, as an issue of this type could cause major problems for those of you that are still on 8.

Anyway, back to upgrading! I'd be happy to share the details of the vulnerability off-list for those that are interested.

Thanks,

--Andy

[mm2270]

I just got the same email. I'm not in the least bit surprised that version 8 is being deprecated. The handwriting of it being deprecated has been on the wall since last year when JAMF announced that the 8 series would only get basic Mavericks support, but no new features (By the way, its not deprecated yet. but will be once the Yosemite/iOS 8 compatible release is out.)

We're still on version 8.73, but are also planning our move to version 9 very soon. In fact, we were just discussing the move plans internally when I got the email - very fitting.
I'm a little concerned about some of the 9.4 known issues still lurking about, so I'm really hoping JAMF comes out with a very solid mostly bug free release soon that we can feel comfortable moving to.

[CasperSally]

Usual friendly reminder to all those updating - if at all possible, test, test, test in test environment first!

[acdesigntech]

Oddly enough I haven't gotten any notification on this...

It's becoming more and more apparent to me that support for v8 is almost non-existent at JAMF. Not sure I agree with the logic behind this, JAMF, but it doesn't really matter I suppose. Being an Apple admin I should be used to things like this by now (though it still seems fairly recent for everyone to be hopping on the 12 - 18 month release cycle these days), so I'm planning an upgrade to v9 sometime towards the end of the calendar year, but might have to wait for the end of fiscal next Feb since we're trying to force through two Mac refreshes back to back, and I just won't have time to test before then. Hopefully JAMF doesn't can whatever's left of v8 support until then (fingers crossed).

Good thing I (finally) got approved to go ahead with a hardware order (albeit not the one i WANTED, got stuck with a Mini server. Though at least I get to play with an xRack from Sonnet and a nice 1U SANS Digital RAID unit, so not all bad in the end). With the commoditization of OSes that Apple is shooting for, not such a big deal to upgrade your server anymore so SUS shouldn't be as much of a concern with newer OSes like it used to be in the 10.4/5/6 days. Honestly it's mostly a good thing since it will force the dinosaur I work for to upgrade.

That said, I am pretty concerned about the type and number of bugs introduced with the 9.4 update. I might plan on upgrading to 9.32 or similar unless 9.4.x is released with some pretty decent bug fixes (which it should be).

[calumhunter]

@CasperSally
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