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I’ve written a few times about DEPNotify; I really think it’s a great tool for deploying your Macs without much fuss. Since I started using it I’ve always said it would be useful for providing feedback for installs for users when using something like Jamf’s Self Service. I never got around to writing anything because I either didn’t have the time or the desire to do it…until now!

If you're a visitor to this site you may notice that I have not had an update in sometime.  I also haven't really done any changes to my Git Page either, both stopped in November.  Coincidence? Not really.

This year I was given the opportunity to speak at the Jamf Nation User Conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota.  This was my first big speaking engagement and I was so happy when my presentation was accepted.  I chose to speak on my DEPNotify process; basically the process I wrote about/presented before but with the completed automated process.

On June 21 the Greater Philadelphia Mac Admins held their monthly meet-up (also their 3 year anniversary!).  I decided I wanted to present my DEPNotify process to the group.  The event was recorded and live-streamed.  If you're interested in watching the recording, you can head over to this Youtube link...

In my previous post I discussed our process of using DEPNotify to assign and deploy laptops.  After writing the post and sharing it, several people asked me "what happens if the policy runs before the GUI is ready?"  I found that the deployment policy ran and would just hang due to no user input because the DEPNotify window wouldn't show.  My simple, yet crude solution was to have our tech's manually create the admin account (which would then log in automatically) and just wait for the dock to launch.  This also proved to be problematic as the Dock process would start too quickly and the DEPNotify window would again fail to open.  I knew it was a matter of time until I switched over to a launch daemon...well....that time is now.

"Imaging is dead!" is the new phrase for Mac Admins.  Nearly every Mac blog I follow has a post about the death of imaging, but I've held off on it because I think enough has been said about it already.  I will start this post off with my very condensed thoughts on the death of imaging:

I like being able to NetBoot and completely erase and install a system.  It's something that's been around for a very long time and it works very well.  I'm fine with adding more options for deploying/setting-up a system, but why remove something that's worked for so long?  I used to be able to send out a single command to every machine, have them reboot to a NetBoot set, image, and be waiting for me in the morning...now I can't.  So while I'm sad(angry) that imaging is apparently going away if Apple gives us the tools to make DEP deployments easier, I'll finally praise that "imaging is dead." 

Until then, long live imaging.

Okay, now that I got that out of the way I can continue on the whole reason for this post; DEP deployments with DEPNotify!

What is DEPNotify, and why?

DEPNotify is a tool by Joel Rennich, the creator NoMAD, to "let your users know what's going on during a DEP enrollment." Basically, it's an application that you lay down at enrollment time and then script it to show the user that DEP is actually doing things instead of having them done in the background.  It's a simple tool that doesn't really require much setup on the server-side and can be scripted very easily.

My post Install Logic Pro with All Audio Indexed for All Users has been the most clicked link on my blog from the last year.  Granted, there are not many posts available but it always seems to be the one that I link to the most on Jamfnation and Slack. Since I posted that I've discovered a few things that will make life easier down the line for when imaging and NetBooting goes away completely; whenever that actually will happen is unknown but it will most likely be coming very soon if we are to take hints from the iMac Pro.  As a Mac admin, I'm very worried about this but I do believe that Apple will give us the tools needed to do massive, automated deployments.  That question still has no really acceptable answer (internet recovery is a bad option) but I digress.  Below I will outline the new method that we are using to deploy audio loops and indices that is more flexible and a little more future-friendly.  Please note that the method outlined in my last post will still work, but it's highly inflexible and requires a NetBoot in order to get receipts on the machine.

Does anyone remember Xgrid?  How about Qmaster? I do!  If you don't, check out those links and come back.  TL;DR: Apple made distributed rendering (relatively) easy to configure and Xgrid was particularly great because it was built into Mac OS.  Apple was making headway for some easy distributed rendering for use with their pro software and hardware.  Unfortunately, Apple hasn't been kind to their professional line; I believe Qmaster lives on in Compressor but most traces of Xgrid at least are all but gone.  When I was working at (what was then) NYUPoly I managed a small Mac lab and set up a very basic Xgrid system with our 15 machines and it worked, one time. So when we were asked if a distributed rendering system (or render farm) for Maya (and possibly others) was something that can be done here at UArts I thought "Oh fun!  I can spend countless hours on this again and have one person use it!"  To my surprise, I only spent a few hours looking into this and managed to get a proof of concept working with Autodesk Backburner 2017 and Maya 2017.

Having Parallels in your environment is great, unfortunately some issues come into play when you're trying to push out a customized VM to your users.  One of the problems we ran into was the name of the machine; if you're pushing out one VM image you're going to see tons of duplicate names on your network.  What if you could change the VM name to the name of the host without having to worry about asking the user to do it?  Well, that was a task I was given and I feel that I resolved it successfully.  This was all tested with Parallels Desktop 11 and a Windows 10 Professional VM. Using a few scripts (which can be found here) you can accomplish this fairly easily.

One of the most annoying tasks I was given when I started working at UArts was to package and install Apple Logic Pro X with all of the audio add-ons as well as indexing for all users. This took a lot of trial and error, but I finally managed to get it to work and I want to share how I was able to accomplish it especially since I've seen many people in the MacAdmins.org slack channel and JAMFNation ask about it. In order to get everything you need, you have to figure out if you want to have Logic only or if you want to install GarageBand as well. Why would you want this? if you're in a lab environment you might have different user levels or you may have different people requesting. Either way, it's something you need to take into account because both Logic and GarageBand share audio. I installed both, so I had a lot of data to get and push out.

I image my lab once a year. This ensures that I have the latest updates for every machine for all programs, but it also cleans out the old stuff from the previous year that builds up over time. Apple makes imaging very simple by installing a NetBoot feature on all of their machines and including a NetBoot server installed with MacOS X Server. In the past I used Bombich NetRestore, a free AppleScript based program that helped make NetBoot image sets and helped with deploying them. Mike Bombich stopped making NetRestore and suggested everyone to try DeployStudio for imaging..so I did. I must say that DeployStudio is an amazing program especially for a free program. It's also very simple to get running and fairly robust. In this post I'm going to go over image creation, setup, and deployment with DeployStudio (DS) and also go over some issues I encountered and how I fixed them.

Sometimes it’s tough to stock a lab full of computers with software. You want to get the best software of course but that usually means the most expensive. Sometimes the expensive programs aren’t even the best either.

As I’ve mentioned before, I manage 2 Apple Xservers and a lab full of Macs. When classes ended for the summer I decided to upgrade our Tiger server to Leopard. This was a task that I knew was going to be a lot of work especially because I was consolidating our old Dell web/mail/DNS into the Leopard machine. These computers were set up well before I came into the picture, and I was still learning new things about them as time went on. For example: I didn’t know that the old system (Wanda) ran another DNS on top of the university DNS. Confusing.