Dummy Receipts and Custom Triggering a Policy

milesleacy
Valued Contributor

Gents,
I'm taking this back on list because there may be others in the community
that would benefit from this discussion.

To Recap, there are two questions: how to use custom triggers and how to
create dummy receipts.

To use a custom trigger there are two things to do:
1. Create a policy and in the General tab, choose "other (Manually specify
the run at action in this field) -->" from the "Triggered by:" drop down
menu and enter your custom trigger in the text field next to this drop down
menu. I use Apple-esque run-together phrases with caps, such as
"memberAccountingComputerGroup" for my custom triggers. I'm not sure what
the upper limit is for custom trigger length, but I haven't hit it yet, and
I like to be descriptive with my triggers.

Re: "Dummy receipts"
The so-called "dummy receipt" is a receipt from a payload-free package. I
create empty prebuilt Apple .pkg files using Composer like so...
1. Create an empty folder with the same name as your intended package (and
receipt) in /Applications/The Casper Suite/Temp/ (see attachment "Picture
1.png")
2. Open Composer, choose this prebuilt package and save it as an Apple .pkg. (see attachment "Picture 2.png")

Some may find that using these "dummy receipts" creates clutter, but if you
integrate the concept into your workflows, document your work, and maintain
clear and consistent policies (in the general sense, not Casper Policies)
and naming conventions, use of receipts in this way can be a very efficient
and effective method to extend your management capabilities.

----------
Miles A. Leacy IV

? Certified System Administrator 10.4
? Certified Technical Coordinator 10.5
? Certified Trainer
Certified Casper Administrator
----------
voice: 1-347-277-7321
miles.leacy at themacadmin.com
www.themacadmin.com

6 REPLIES 6

milesleacy
Valued Contributor

Oops, I realized that I forgot to mention the second thing to do to use
custom triggers. Ryan mentioned it further back in the thread, but here it
is again...
After you save your policy that is triggered by "other", for example, let's
say that other="customTrigger".

You call the custom-triggered policy via the jamf binary like so:

sudo jamf policy --trigger "customTrigger"

----------
Miles A. Leacy IV

? Certified System Administrator 10.4
? Certified Technical Coordinator 10.5
? Certified Trainer
Certified Casper Administrator
----------
voice: 1-347-277-7321
miles.leacy at themacadmin.com
www.themacadmin.com

talkingmoose
Moderator
Moderator

Very nifty!

I'd like to see this get added to the JAMF KB. Couldn't find anything like
this there.

--

bill

William M. Smith, Technical Analyst
MCS IT
Merrill Communications, LLC
(651) 632-1492

Not applicable

Miles,

Thanx for your thorough info. Question on syntax used below. Should there be
two dashes '--' or one dash '-' before trigger? Noticed Ryan also using two
dashes but Jamf help pages has only one.

Thanx for clarifying this.
Cyrus

milesleacy
Valued Contributor

A single dash is correct. Sorry for the typo.

----------
Miles A. Leacy IV

? Certified System Administrator 10.4
? Certified Technical Coordinator 10.5
? Certified Trainer
Certified Casper Administrator
----------
voice: 1-347-277-7321
miles.leacy at themacadmin.com
www.themacadmin.com

ernstcs
Contributor III

So now that you have all these message compile a single one that's all correct. =)

Thanks, for the info, Miles!!

Craig E

Not applicable

Miles,

Have a question regarding Dummy Receipts. Why are you packaging them as .pkg
instead of .dmg? Will there be a problem if PackageMaker is not present when
creating such packages pre Composer 7?

Thanx,
Cyrus