Sal 3.0 is a massive upgrade on Sal 2.7, so massive thanks to everyone who has contributed code and bug reports. In particular, big thanks go out to @sheagcraig for his work on the completely rewritten application inventory features. What’s new in Sal 3.0? Inventory Sal’s application inventory tracking has been completely re-written (thanks again Shea), and is much more useful, allowing for greater detail on what is installed, and where across your fleet. ...

I’m delighted to announce that the lovely people at Amsys have asked me to return to speak at MacAD.UK 2017 for it’s second year. This year I will be talking about Airbnb’s transition from a commercial macOS management platform to an entirely open source stack - “Something something commercial, something something open source”. See you all in February!

If you attended my talk in Gothenburg today, thank you! The slides from my primary talk, “0 to Imagr-ing in 45 minutes” are [available here](/images/posts/2016-10-06/0 to Imagr-ing.pdf), and you can find the all of the code I used on GitHub. If for some reason you would like my slides on beer in London (or, VMware is slow at imaging a disk and I needed to fill time), you can [also get them here](/images/posts/2016-10-06/Beer in London.pdf).

Last time, took our first steps to notify our users about updates in a slight nicer way. This time we are going to modify our script so that our users are only bugged once a day, and also not promoted to install 10.11 if they’re already running it. Unfortunately for some, whilst this will be possible if we stuck to using bash, it would drive me insane, so we are switching to Python. Don’t be scared! Python makes a lot of sense once you get your head around it, and you’ll be a much happier mac admin once you leave the 1500 line bash scripts behind. ...

Last time, we took our first look at the fantastic Yo. This time, we’re going to o something useful - we’re going to open an item up in Managed Software Centre. Let’s build our command to show the notification. Note that InstallElCap is the name of the relevant item in Munki. You could for example, replace it with munki://detail-GoogleChrome. $ /Applications/Utilities/yo.app/Contents/MacOS/yo --title "Update Required" --info "Your operating system is out of date. Please upgrade ASAP." --action-btn "More Info" --action-path "munki://detail-InstallElCap" ...

Have you ever wished you could let your users know about something without completely taking over their screen with Munki or jamfhelper? Perhaps something that would respect macOS’ Do Not Disturb settings? Then Shea Craig’s Yo is what you need. The first thing you’re going to need is the Yo installer - you can grab that from https://github.com/sheagcraig/yo/releases. It will drop Yo.app into /Applications/Utilities - but don’t go thinking you can just double click on it. Well, you can but you won’t have much fun with it. Let’s send it a basic notification. Open up Terminal.app and run: ...

Thanks to Mat and everyone else who put so much effort into MacDevOps:YVR - it’s been awesome, and I can’t wait to come back next year. Here are my slides, and I’ll slim down the handout for use in the real world where you don’t have a room full of nerds hammering a single access point shortly and update this post.

I’m pleased to announce that Imagr 1.1.1 is out! Why am I so happy? This is the first release that’s made up nearly all of community contributions. So many thanks to everyone who has helped out with code, documentation and filing bugs. And if you’re going to be at MacDevOps:YVR in a few weeks, we’ll be taking a look at how to use some of these new features. Find out more about this release over on GitHub.

For one reason or another, I may need to stay out of the US for a bit this year, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be giving any talks - no siree! In June, I’m going to be heading over to Vancouver for MacDevOps:YVR where I will be leading a workshop that will take you through getting started with Imagr, and I will also be sitting on a panel that is focusing on configuration management. ...

I’ve been wanting to write this post ever since Rich Trouton wrote a similar one after MacADUK, but I finally got the kick to finally write it after I saw this job advert. That’s right, they want an experienced Mac admin who is willing to work for around what McDonald’s pay a trainee manager. If you are indeed starting out in your career supporting OS X, know that you don’t have to settle for appalling renumeration like that! Ok, rant mode over. Here is the post I wish I’d read before I started doing all this 8 years ago. ...