Laziness is the Mother of Efficiency, or How We Automated Ourselves Out of Our Jobs and into Careers

Speakers: Jeremy Baker J David Hester

Level: Fundamental, Lecture

Excerpt: We will present on how we automated our LANrev installation to the point where we have almost nothing left to do.

Description: With LANrev as our base, we have almost completely automated our Mac’s lifecycle. From provisioning, to maintaining, to even picking itself back up when it falters.

Utilizing Autopkg and AutoPkgr, Google’s PlanB, and scripts, we can:

a) Auto provision new computers in under 10 minutes
b) Automatically update 3rd-party patches
c) Automatically repair broken agents, and even…
d) Using an integrated database, send emails to accountable users to track down wayward equipment with information from LANrev

Follow our lead and you can spend your days doing more interesting and important things…


About the speakers

Jeremy Baker – Mac Systems Administrator – NIMH (Twitter: @jerbaker10)

I am a Mac Systems Administrator for the National Institutes of Mental Health.


J David Hester – Senior Systems Architect and Subject Matter Expert – LCG Inc. (Twitter: @altpibroch)

My first computer was an Apple IIe which ran on Beagle Brothers DOS. Taught BASIC and Fortran before most of you were a gleam in your parent’s eyes. Then I went onto more interesting things in the humanities, where I got my PhD in religious history, rhetoric and ideology. After finishing my post-doc in Germany analyzing the patient-parent-physician relationship and the rhetoric of constraint in cases of newborn hermaphroditic (intersex) children, I returned to the US to return to IT. Been at the National Institutes of Health for 10 years where I’ve helped a number of ICs integrate Macs and support iOS devices. I also play the bagpipes.

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