Open Call for Session Questions

Would you recommend distribution points to use afp or smb? Seems like smb connections are slower on macs.

What is the best way to handle the Casper Admin conflicts when we have multiple administrators at multiple locations? On many occasions, someone will leave casper admin open and then leave, someone else at another location will then open it up to add a package or make some other changes. When the person who left it open comes back and closes Casper Admin, the changes the prior person made are overwritten. We have about 10 smb distribution points using DFS-R replication and currently going with JDS would not fit into our environment. Are there any plans to allow full administration through the web interface? Is there something already in place that I may not be aware of?

@FritzsCorner, we've avoided/reduced the shared Casper Admin issues by using a shared Mac, which admins remote into to do their work, quitting Casper Admin when done.

@roiegat

In general, both should be acceptable.

We are aware of a few platform wide issues with SMB and Macs, especially if the SMB share is running on Windows 2008R2. The main problem seems to be with the way Apple’s implementation of SMB passes credentials, and what we see when it becomes an issue is that either we can’t connect at all or that we get a prompt for credentials that are not accepted even if they are known good.
When connections do happen, they may be slow to the point of timing out in those situations.
Windows 2012 and Linux SMB shares seem to have lower instances of this happening, though we still see it occasionally, and if the SMB share is running on OS X it’s usually not a problem.

There is a pretty detailed thread about the SMB issues we’re aware of here: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/discussion.html?id=11266

It’s also worth noting that, if you use (or plan to use) the NetInstall Creator, it will not work with an SMB share. It will simply be unable to mount the share and imaging will fail. We’ve got a short KB on that here: https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/article.html?id=74

If you’re already using, or plan to use the NetInstall Creator, you’ll want to go AFP for that.

Thanks!
Amanda Wulff
JAMF Software Support

I'm in the middle of scaling out my JSS from a single Xserve to a load balanced infrastructure running on Redhat VM's, for a managed install base of ~2500 Macs. Is there a point at which I should consider moving to dedicated hardware for the MySQL database instead of a VM?

At the end of the session it was mentioned concern of Casper Admin being left open by another admin. A while a go I had resubmitted a feature request regarding this issue. This was unfortunately shot down from a duplicate request 2 years ago. As Casper teams expand exponentially having a safe guard in Casper Admin would be extremely helpful. A simple alert when a user logs into Casper admin if another admin is logged in, would save a lot of hassle and potential support issues. Is this something that can be reviewed again?