On 2013-08-15 at 21:53 +0000, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) wrote: > To all those people who responded, saying use casper, etc - What kinds > of things do you do to OSX with these tools?
I've not used Casper, but have had a work-issued laptop which had Casper on it. Back five years ago, now. SuperDuper is just backup/recovery, right? Meanwhile, Casper is agent-based system management, which can report back what software is installed, manage deployments and upgrades, force various system settings to corporate values, manage FileVault recovery keys, etc etc. So you can track and make sure you have adequate licenses for software in use, force security updates to go out, ensure malware scanning is actually running (and be able to "prove" it, with dashboards). For me as an end-user, it meant that when Snow Leopard came out, the crazy MacOS setup meant that the system "hung" for a few minutes upon establishing a VPN connection, to sync the LDAP directories so that getpwent() and friends would work, and I had to keep smacking Casper aside to get that to stop. Not Casper's fault: it was merely enforcing local policy, which was horrendously broken and meant that the company's Mac offering was unfit for purpose for SREs oncall for a production service with SLAs. (Think "WAN link drops a couple of times, so each time the VPN re-establishment hangs the client OS for a few minutes"). I switched to the employer's Linux laptop offering, which was horrible, never had reliable working audio and had me gritting my teeth a lot, but at least I could get online and establish a VPN connection in a sane amount of time, and deal with connection hiccups. System management software, whether it's Casper or Puppet or anything else, can be used to achieve great things, far more than backup/restore. When deployed across client devices of technical staff, enforcing broken policy, they can also lead to great angst as folks become less able to repair their "own" systems to be able to get work done. -Phil _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
