Recent Posts

MacDMV: New DC, MD, VA Mac Admin Group

Last Friday I was feeling a little jealous of the San Francisco area Mac Admin’s group Macbrained on getting a group of individuals together to discuss new items in the Apple world (Mavericks and iOS7). I know many Mac Admin’s in the DC Metro area and believe that a DC group would thrive! I was venting my frustrations to @natewalck on freenode’s osx-server channel of which he replied: “make one!”. Tom happened to be in the channel as well… and in about 10 minutes we purchased a domain, established email accounts, and created a twitter user for future broadcasts. [ Read More... ]

Bonk Hard Racing: Berryman Adventure Race 2013

Over the weekend of September 28th, 2013 I had the opportunity to do the Berryman Adventure race with my Brother-in-law Shawn which is a multi-sport race for Run, Bike, and Canoe… BUT you have to take everything with you. Food, water, clothes, paddles, etc. The Berryman Adventure races is an orienteering race where the night before we get a list of lat/long locations that we have to find using traditional methods of locating things; a map and a compass. Between each checkpoints you do not have the luxury of nice foot paths that are carved to take you from point “A” to point “B”. You have to “Bushwhack” your way through trees, streams, animals, twigs, brush, poison ivy, etc, and make your own path. [ Read More... ]

Casper Suite 9: JDS Ubuntu Server Install Example

In the last article Casper Suite 9: Cloud and JDS Distribution Points I gave you information about things to take into consideration before installing a JAMF Distribution Server (JDS) into your Casper Suite 9 environment. In this article I’ll take you through an example install of a JDS in Ubuntu. [ Read More... ]

Casper Suite 9: Cloud and JDS Distribution Points

The Casper Suite has been able to provide installation packages to Managed OS X clients by AFP, SMB, and/or HTTP(s) for a long time, but now JAMF Software has introduced two new methods to provide packages: JAMF Distribution Server (JDS) and Cloud Distribution Point (CDP). Both of these DP installation methods make deploying web-based package distribution EXTREMELY easy and quick to stand up in a test or production environment vs. needing to configure multiple services in a Windows or OS X Server setting. [ Read More... ]

Debug APNS issues for JAMF Software’s Casper Suite

For this post, it is a good idea to review my last article on how Apple’s Push Notification System (APNS) works when managing OS X and iOS devices. It’s not required reading to comprehend, but it does provide an an overview on how complicated APNS is AND the beauty in its architecture to make everything happen in an instant! What I now want to discuss is not when APNS works, but when it doesn’t “What are the common things I check when APNS is not working”. Most of these debugging steps are for the initial setup of your APNS environment, if this were working “fine” but now nothing works… there may be something else at hand. [ Read More... ]

Justin Rummel