I work for a school district with 33 sites and we use it to manage 6000+
OSX 10.6 and 10.8 machines. We use casper for:
- installing software based on location (e.g. photography lab)
- installing software based on person (e.g. science teacher vs nurse)
- installing software based on external hardware (e.g. document cameras
or smart boards)
- customize the look and feel of the macs to each site where they are
located (e.g. the default web page is set to the school's home web site)
- self service where folks can install site licensed software if they
need it
- push out emergency fixes (e.g. when Apple decided that java was bad
and blocked it thus breaking our legacy student records app)
- inventory of the macs so we know which ones need to be upgraded and we
can better allocate them to where they are needed
- utilization rates of the macs so we can move the ones that are not
being used to places where they will be used
- set desktop preferences and lock down functionality so students (and
teachers) do not break them
- our last upgrade from 10.6 to 10.8 was done via casper
- change root passwords
- update and install patches on all the macs
- prevent the installation and running of restricted software (e.g.
games, hacker tools)
- adhoc installation of fixes and updates when needed to a small group
of macs
- screen sharing for tech support (like ARD)
- keep track of what was installed when and what version
- find out what macs have X software package installed on them
- track number of installations of Y software so we do not go over our
license limit
- track down stolen macs (when they are stolen we turn on a special
policy that takes pictures and uploads them to an FTP site along with
the IP address)
- allow tech assistants to perform tasks that would normally require
root privileges without having root privileges
Allmost of the above was done without the programming knowledge that
puppet or cfengine requires.
cheers,
ski
On 08/15/2013 02:53 PM, 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 supported OSX at work for years, and never used any
deployment/configuration tools other than SuperDuper (and trials of
SuperDuper competitors). I'm curious if I'm missing some opportunity
for automation, or if you're simply supporting configuration stuff's
that I'm not addressing.
_______________________________________________ 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/
--
"When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it
connected to the entire universe" John Muir
Chris "Ski" Kacoroski, Director of LOPSA, [email protected],
206-501-9803 or ski98033 on most IM services
_______________________________________________
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/
