Last time we saw our heroes, there was the unfuffilled promise of making small NetInstall sets. Now is the time to deliver on that promise. We’re going to make a small NetInstall that will open up Terminal.app. If you’ve not read the previous post (and have got AutoNBI), go and do it now. I’ll wait. All done? ...

Another day, another tool made by Mr Bruienne! A while back, Pepijn released AutoNBI - a tool for automating the creation of NetInstall sets. At the time, it was filled away in the “this is cool, but isn’t this what System Image Utility does?” section. Then I saw his NetInstall running at MacTech (are you seeing a theme here?). It had this really simple DeployStudio like imagaing app - it was really cool. And suddently it made sense why you can replace the Packages directory with AutoNBI - a NetInstall is a really stripped down OS X environment, so it it much easier to distribute and use - we’re looking at around 1.8GB for my current NetInstall vs 5-6GB for a normal NetBoot. ...

Over the past few months, I’ve been trying to take small pieces of our workflow and see if we can expand on the number of people able to manage it. We’ve got AutoPkg populating our Munki repositories without any manual intervention, but we still need to edit pkgsinfo files to move items through development to testing to production catalogs. Sure, there are existing tools like MunkiWebAdmin or MunkiAdmin, but they either still require knowledge of how Munki works or full access to the repository via a file share of some sort. And we obviously already have a tool for assigning software to machines in Sal+ - we needed something that can speed this incredibly common task. ...

A while back, Nate Walck wrote scriptRunner. It’s a tool that can run a script either every time a user logs in or just the one time. It has served the test of time, but last year Joe Chilcote released Outset. It has all of the functionality of scriptRunner, but it can also install packages at the Mac’s first boot, and run scripts as root at either the first boot or every boot. This comes into it’s own when you’re trying to do things like skipping the iCloud screens on 10.10 using Rich Trouton’s script - this script needs to run after every OS update, so it makes sense to run this every time the Mac boots. ...

Obviously I’m a little biased, but I love Sal. But, it can be a little tedious to get everything set up the first time if you have hundreds of Business Units and Machine Groups. I’ve quietly ignored the problem for a while, but then I saw this tweet pop up in my feed: @hunty1er Pretty sure you could automate BU/MG creation through the DB backend. What say you @grahamgilbert ? — Pepijn Bruienne (@bruienne) December 8, 2014 What say I Mr Bruienne? Like the man from Del Monte, I say YES! The plan We’re going to use a few of the parts that make Django and Docker awesome. We will: Make a custom management command that will read in a CSV The command will make the Business Units and Groups if they don’t exist We’re than going to run it in a temporary Docker container when we’re ready to do the actual import. This is one of the strengths of Docker - we can spin up a linked container that will operate on the main database, but won’t interfere with your container serving the app. ...

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. ...