Munki, autodmg, autopkg, jssimporter, etc...

[kyoung]

Anyone have any thoughts on the best 3rd party tools/workflow to use to keep pkgs in Casper up to date? I am a newbie at this so any advice would be appreciated. Thanks.

[pblake]

I use AutoPkgr in conjunction with AutoPkg.

[kyoung]

If I use those tools where is the best place to install them? On the Jss itself, my admin computer, a separate server?

[pblake]

I run it off my admin machine, but if you have a reporting or management server, that wouldn't be the worst idea either. I use my machine and I have AutoPkgr send email alerts when new updates are detected to myself and my team.

[kyoung]

I go to autopkg at github and the first thing I see is this:

A brief "getting started" tutorial

Some parts of this short tutorial assume you have a working Munki repo configured that you can mount from your admin machine. Munki isn't strictly required to use AutoPkg - for example, it can simply build packages - but Munki is so far the only supported system that can be "imported into." If you aren't using Munki, you can still use AutoPkg to find the latest updates, download them, and repackage them (if needed) for deployment -- you would then need to manually import them into whatever software distribution system you are using.

Does munki provide some whiz bang extras that make the whole process easyer?

[kyoung]

I have also heard of jssinstaller (also on github) that is supposed to work with autopkg. Any thoughts?

[rderewianko]

I think the best place to explore is a list by /url">@rtrouton][/url [https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2015/02/04/free-tools-for-the-budget-minded-mac-admin/

Munki, is like casper but fully open source. It's a great solution but running both munki and casper together isn't a great idea.

[adamcodega]

Use Autopkgr, which will install Autopkg, Git and the JSS importer dependencies and integrate automagically with your JSS.

[RobertHammen]

Tools I use in conjunction with the Casper Suite:

a) AutoDMG - to make never-booted up-to-date base OSes with a Recovery Partition included (no screwing around with capturing it as a second image, partitioning, and scripts to hide it)
b) AutoCasperNBI - to make NetBoot images for Casper Imaging
c) AutoPkgr - use this to download packages of software I care about, and optionally add these packages to the JSS and more. http://www.lindegroup.com/autopkgr/ and https://derflounder.wordpress.com/2014/07/15/autopkgr-a-gui-for-autopkg/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bghtRQ3FAIc

Hope this helps,

--Robert

[kyoung]

I am sorry but I am confused. The Casper I am talking about is a commercial product from JAMF. My boss is hoping i get good use out of it soon so we see some return on our investment. If you are talking about an open source tool that is also called Casper it might conflict with Munki but JAMF's Casper product is supposed to work fine with Munki.

[adamcodega]

Munki has nothing to do with JAMF's Casper Suite, Munki manages the installation of software on your computers in an pretty effortless manner, there is no integration between JAMF Casper Suite and Munki.

If you want to use a program that will keep the software you distribute in Casper Suite up to date, look at Autopkg (which automatically downloads software as it's released) and Autopkgr (which will be the link between Autopkg and your JSS server). The resources in RobertHammen's post are great.

Technically Autopkgr uses JSS Importer to help link Autopkg to your JSS, Autopkgr is a great GUI to setup and configure everything.

[calumhunter]

@kyoung
for a bit of history and perhaps context
autopkg was developed by the same guy that developed munki (plus a couple other developers) so its initial use case was for keeping a munki system up to date with packages.
However some developers put it some work to make it also upload packages to a casper server.
Then some more developers came up with AutoPkgr (note the r on the end) which is a GUI front end to autopkg which makes it super simple to have it setup with casper.

There is no requirement to have munki in order to use autopkg, but you will likely find that the documentation is heavily biased towards that as that is the best use case. But for sure you can just autopkg with Casper