Firstly, thanks if you came to my talk and putting up with me! You can get my slides and code from the GitHub repository.

It seems like Yosemite introduced an undocumented change that requires any packages that are added an OS X installer (e.g. Netinstall or createOSXinstallPkg) be distribution style packages, or you get a nasty failure accompanied by one of the most unhelpful error messages ever. To fix this, first-boot-pkg now builds distribution style packages.

I’m delighted to say that the first (first meet that isn’t “let’s go to the pub and get drunk”, anyway!) London Apple Admins meetup is happening on the 3rd September at The Red Herring in St Pauls. I’d like to take all of the credit for organising it, but it was down to the hard work of Ben Toms. The theme this time is “this is what I’m working on at the moment”, so I’ll be talking about my new favourite toy, Docker. ...

The first step to getting any Mac set up is to get some software onto it. I’m not going to cover how to set up Munki or AutoPkg - there are lots of other places for that information. As a sysadmin, I’m forever testing things. Rather than destroy my own machine, I like to do this in Virtual Machines. My preferred virtualisation solution is VMware Fusion, but unfortunately it’s not very easy to deploy out of the box. You need to do a little bit of work to get it into a package that you can import into Munki, but fortunately the process is well documented on VMware’s site. ...

Earlier this year, I professed my love of Boxen - the personal automation solution based on Puppet released by Github. Indeed, it served me well for quite some time, but I began to find myself spending more time fixing Boxen than actually getting things done. As Boxen was designed for internal use at Github, it set some things up how they liked them - which wasn’t necessarily how I liked them. Sysadmins have similar needs to developers, but not exactly the same. ...

A massive thanks to everyone who came to my talk today, and thanks to everyone who helped out with the Q&A at the end. All of the code I used in the talk is up on GitHub and here are the slides. Hopefully the video will convey how much fun it actually was - it could have been a disaster, so I’m hugely grateful to everyone who contributed to the discussion at the end.

Thanks for everyone that came to my talk today, it was fun to finally show off what I’ve been working on for the last year or so. I’m sure the video will be up soon, but in the meantime, here are the slides from the talk.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve had the same conversation over and over: people telling me that once they get started using Munki, their next step will be to start using AutoPkg. I gave each person the same response: “you’re doing it wrong”. AutoPkg a has a reputation of being difficult to use. This is totally unjustfied. You don’t need to be using Munki for it to be useful, you don’t need to set it up to run automatically via Jenkins or a LaunchDaemon. If you need to get software into a package, AutoPkg is the easiest way. ...

Setting up everything you need for Sal can be difficult, especially if you only have an OS X server available. Thankfully, Sal is built on top of a very common Python framework, Django. And even more thankfully, you can run Django on a whole host of PaaS providers, including Heroku. Heroku has a very generous free tier that will easily handle a small Sal installation, so let’s get started. Heroku toolbelt If you’ve never used Heroku before, you’re going to need to head over to their site and sign up for a free account. Whilst you’re there, you’re also going to need to install their toolbelt. Grab the package and follow their instructions for linking it to your account. ...

There are some packages that can’t be deployed to an unbooted OS, such as when building an image with AutoDMG. If you are using Greg Neagle’s createOSXinstallPkg, the OS X installer environment doesn’t have everything a full OS X install has. For times like this, you need to install the packages at first boot. For a long time, I’ve used Rich Trouton’s First Boot Package Install, however I found myself repeating things quite a bit and having a folder full of first boot packages. ...