MacAdmins Conference

Speakers: Jesse Smillie

Level: Presentation

Excerpt: Over view of how Gateway School District moved from JAMF Pro to Mosyle Manager in April 2020 while also moving to K-8 1:1 across the district. Will go through some of the methods we use to prepare iPads for handouts, handle breakage, and general support. Methods including utilizing the MosyleAPI and MOSBasic command line (home baked Mosyle CLI.)

Description: Gateway School District has been on a wild roller coaster of highs and lows of 1:1 deployments for years now. Previous deployments strategies presented at MacAdmins in 2019 for our 1:1s in grades 5-8 completely revamped to go K-8 with only months to plan. Further adding to the steep drops on this coaster starting a migration away from JAMFPro to Mosyle Manager in late Feburary 2020 for all district Macs and iPads.
Since moving we’ve refined our craft. We will show you how we utilize Mosyle Limbo mode to prepare iPads a head of time before hand out to slim out the demand on our Wifi network during deployments. How Limbo mode is also utilized to replace Shared mode iPads in our loaner program (you know when things get broke…) We will go through how we utilize the MosyleAPI to get a head of problems by querying device groups. GSD also has started work back in September 2021 on a command line tool called MOSBasic which is a homebrew solution not necessarily for a problem but to do more faster. Things like: mass deployment/assign devices, work with lost mode, generate reports on what devices are in lost mode, and output general info.
All of this will be rounded out with explaining how you can leverage CFGUTIL, command line utility backed into Apple Configurator 2, to easily reprovision deployed iPads and get them back to Limbo state and ready for the next user with minimal clicking on your part..

About the speaker

Jesse Smillie

Mac Administrator for GSD since 1999.
ACMT since 2005
Solo Apple Tech until Sept 2021
Presenter at PSU MacAdmins 2019
“Ask Apple: Mosyle Spotlight” Presenter April 2021
Drinker of the Apple Kool Aide and future Mosyle Cult member

Speakers: Stephen Grall

Level: Presentation

Excerpt: Many organizations have struggled with patching compliance in today’s era of Cybersecurity initiatives and directives. One of the biggest pain points of late has been keeping macOS up to date, especially given Apple’s irregular update release schedule. Balancing security with user productivity can be challenging. Organizations can customize workflows to best meet their unique needs by leveraging scripting, a script and notification-enabled MDM like Jamf Pro, and the softwareupdate command line tool built-in to macOS. Leveraging notification tools like jamfHelper, user-friendly workflows can be developed with customized deferral periods, as well as countdown to patching deployment enforcement.

Description: I currently use Jamf Pro as a means of managing Apple Software Updates at NCI. I plan to present an overview of the softwareupdate command line tool in macOS, changes over the past few years from Apple relative to Software Update methodology, information on how to leverage jamfHelper in scripts, and best practices for scripted automation of macOS updates, leveraging a decade of lessons-learned at NIH. This will go into ways of controlling which updates are available, methods of deploying macOS updates with Jamf (both scripted and non-scripted), as well as troubleshooting and workarounds for common issues and/or bugs still present in some releases of macOS relative to the deployment of these updates. If I am able to obtain permission from my employer, I may provide a sample script in full (as-is); otherwise, I will provide examples of specific functions and methodologies..

About the speaker

Stephen Grall

I am a Senior Mac Engineer working at the National Cancer Institute of National Institutes of Health. I have supported NIH on and off since 2013, mentoring many other Mac Engineers on best practices with Mac management. I have nearly 20 years of experience in Mac support in total.

Speakers: Hamlin Krewson

Level: Presentation

Description: One former Mac Genius’ thoughts on taking command of any situation, learning not to fear unemployment, embracing change, communicating through documentation, learning new things, and what it means to be an IT Pro.

About the speaker

Hamlin Krewson

I’m a former Mac Genius (13 years at JordanCreek) with two degrees in art. Started supporting Macs in ’94 when I realized how unstable my Performa 6115CD really was. Worked at a local service provider for a year, then got the Genius role. After that, I worked for a couple of years for Wondermint (local MSP) before leaving and being hired by one of their former clients. Passionate about communication, documentation, scripting and disc golf.

Speakers: Sebastien Stormacq

Level: Presentation

Excerpt: Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) allow development teams to be agile and respond to rapid business changes while increasing software quality. Multiple tools are available to build CI/CD pipelines using traditional infrastructures or serverless systems. But what about developers on Mac platforms building iOS, tvOS, or watchOS applications? These require access to Apple machines running macOS to build, test and deploy the apps. In this talk, you will learn how to combine these two worlds: orchestrate and automate builds and tests using CI/CD serverless services in the cloud and delegate the actual building and testing to Amazon EC2 instances running macOS.

Description: This talk briefly builds up AWS EC2 Mac instance, but most dives into the intrinsic of command-line building, signing, and uploading to AppStore connect. Most of its learning can be applied to any CI/CD system.

There is a 15 minutes demo showing an end-to-end build, test, sign, and publish pipeline line running in the cloud.

About the speaker

Sebastien Stormacq

I am a Developer Advocate for AWS. I have been developing for iOS since iOS 2.0 almost ten years ago and have had five apps published on the app store.
I specialize in developing tools and processes, anything that can make the life of a developer easier.

Speakers: Bob Gendler & Dan Brodjieski & Allen Golbig

Level: All Levels, Lecture

Excerpt: The macOS Security Compliance Project is an open source effort that can be used to create customized security baselines of technical security controls, which are mapped to various compliance frameworks.

Description: In this session, Mac Admins will learn more about the macOS Security Compliance Project and how they can leverage the project to build their own security compliance guidance.

About the speakers

Allen Golbig (Twitter: @golby) – Mac Systems Engineer – NASA GRC

Allen has worked as a Mac admin in healthcare, education and now in the federal space at NASA Glenn Research Center. Yes, NASA is in Cleveland.

Dan Brodjieski (Twitter: @brodjieski) – Senior Macintosh Engineer – DISA – JSP

Bob Gendler – IT Specialist – NIST

IT Specialist in the Apple world. Jamf guru, wizard of Mac Management, and mastermind of Apple trivia.