Speakers: Bryson Tyrrell
Level: Intermediate, Lecture
Excerpt: Are you a Jamf Pro customer and wanting to learn more about leveraging “External Patch Sources” for your own patch definitions? Learn about the open source tools aiding others in setting up custom patch reports and patch policies, and then hear from a current Jamf customer on how they have put this to use within their environment.
Description: Jamf released “External Patch Sources” as a feature for Jamf Pro back in January 2018. This finally allowed our customers to use their own patch definitions instead of relying only the curated list that Jamf provides. Batteries are not included, however, and there is some work that needs to be done to setup your patch server and create your custom definitions.
In this session, Bryson will discuss two open source projects that share the goal of making it easier to create, subscribe to and share patch definitions: PatchCLI and Community Patch. The former is a command line utility to create and maintain the JSON files that detail a software titles and its version history. The latter is a public, and free, external patch source that allows anyone to host their patch definitions for their use and use by other Jamf admins.
After going over these tools, Dan Engh of the University of Minnesota will take over to show how they are using their own external patch source along with Autopkg to keep their fleet of Macs up to date with the latest versions of their software.
About the speaker
Bryson Tyrrell (Twitter: @bryson3gps) – Systems Development Engineer II – Jamf
Bryson Tyrrell is an IT professional from the Twin Cities. He works at Jamf on the Platform Engineering team on automation and services for Jamf Cloud. In past years he has presented at the Jamf Nation User Conference, Atlassian Summit, Penn State MacAdmins, and MacADUK. You can normally find him in the MacAdmins Slack @brysontyrrell.