#JNUC - The College Challenge: Mac Management at the University of Oxford

[cam]

When: Tuesday, October 23, 2012. 1:00 p.m.
Where: Wurtele Thrust Stage

Marko Jung will present on how the University of Oxford's uses the Casper Suite. This session will cover many of the processes and best practices used by the University, as well as explain the extensive use of Extension Attributes throughout the system management process.

More of the technical info will be posted here after the session so check back frequently, and feel free to post any questions here as well!

[localhorst]

Thank you all for the great feedback! It was an honour to give you a brief insight on one aspect of our Mac management strategy.

As promised the slides are now available online at http://goo.gl/2z57N

Please let do not hesitate to ask questions in this forum or send me a message.

[bcornwell]

Would love to get a copy of the hdd partitioning script you mentioned once that is redone.... Could that be posted here too?

[bountyman]

I second that. Any of your scripts are much welcomed.
Thanks a lot Marko, I really enjoyed your presentation at the JNUC.

[jacob_salmela]

This was my favorite session. I loved your approach to the management and I would be very, very interested in those scripts.

[franton]

I'm more interested at this point in the triggers used. You have an install, an update and uninstall trigger. How are these set up?

(btw Marko, i'm in contact with Marcus Saunders as he's providing assistance to our project here at UAL London ;) )

[kenergy]

Yes by far one of the best presentations at the conference, would be very interesting in those scripts.

[tkimpton]

Been waiting for those scripts since the London conference. Luckily Ben Toms script sorted our the fstab for me :)

[agirardi]

I found this to be a very good presentation. Would love to implement this configuration at our large, and fragmented university.

[franton]

Hang on, isn't fstab depreciated in OS X?

[bentoms]

@Tim Kimpton.. Thanks fella!

Anyways, the following is what I knocked up as at last years London RUC Oxford UNI also presented but didn't release the slides/scripts.

http://macmule.com/2012/07/31/how-to-use-fstab-within-a-casper-imaging-workflow/

[rob_potvin]

servus! vielen Dank mate!

interested in using fstab in my imaging workflow

Thanks, great session

[franton]

I hate to be a doubting thomas but hasn't fstab on OS X been depreciated since at least 10.5? Also, now that Apple is seriously using Core Volume for it's "Fusion Drive" product, doesn't that sound like deathknells for fstab?

I'm unwilling to go with a strategy that has some reasonably clear signs of being depreciated and not working in the semi to near future.

[localhorst]

We are currently cleaning up and documenting our partitioning script. It will be released early 2013 and we hope to make it a community effort to enhance it.

[cam]

Full video of the session is available here: http://www.jamfsoftware.com/news/2012/12/11/video-the-college-challenge-mac-management-at-the-univer...

[tkimpton]

I'm in favour of what works and fstab works! Cheer Ben matey its working great!

[rderewianko]

I was just wondering when we'll see a copy of the scripts from this session.

[jacob_salmela]

This was my favorite sessions and I would love to see the scripts!

[jguz]

Thanks Marko, found this session really enlightening, really excited to see your partitioning script.

[jhbush]

Marko, would you be able to share the notify.rb script that you are using to notify users that you are making changes to their systems?

[franton]

If you look carefully at Marko's slides, they're using Growl for notification purposes. It's reasonably easy in either Ruby or Bash to make Growl do that, however it does require a version 2 site licenced copy of Growl to do this legally.

[rob_potvin]

No not necessarily. I am using a forked version of their free product that works with lion. Haven't tried it on mountain lion.

[franton]

Must be massively forked. External messaging commands are only in the version 2.x series ...

[rob_potvin]

https://bitbucket.org/pmetzger/growl/

Again using it on lion not 10.8

Working so far

[quedayone]

I was just wondering when we'll see a copy of the scripts from this session.

[jacob_salmela]

Were the scripts ever released for this?

partitionDisk.pl
buildPreInstall.sh
buildPostInstall.sh

[tkimpton]

nope promised but not released.

See Ben Toms link

[franton]

Don't ask how I know this please, but there's apparently a certain amount of script sanitising and release approval that has to happen. I don't know timescales however it's certainly possible to create your own less sophisticated scripts to do the same thing.

For example, I came up with these based on Marko's slides and Ben Tom's work (elsewhere on this forum).
https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=7022

I'm sure there's major room for improvement.

[jacob_salmela]

Interesting, thanks! I will check out that script and I'm sure it is sophisticated enough!

[tkimpton]

nice, thanks!