MacAdmins Conference

Speakers: Zachary Wasserman

Level: Advanced, Hands-on (BYOD for attendees)

Excerpt: macOS is a complex beast! Learn how osquery can tame the complexity and enable rapid iteration on insights, becoming a critical component of monitoring pipelines. This workshop will expose the important concepts through hands-on examples.

Description: Accessing the data that admins are interested in on a macOS system can require many distinct methods: Parsing command output, accessing public and private system APIs, accessing POSIX and mac-specific configuration files and more. What can we do to tame this complexity and focus on the underlying data we are after?

Enter osquery. Open-sourced by Facebook in 2014, this tool standardizes all of these disparate sources of state, enabling rapid iteration and understanding without writing any code. We can craft simple SQL queries to extract, transform and combine data sources that interest us. In this workshop we will learn how to explore data we are interested in, incorporate it into scripting workflows, and use osquery for monitoring of important data.

These skills will be useful for anyone interested in accessing macOS internals from a security or IT perspective.

About the speaker

Zachary Wasserman (Twitter: @thezachw/) – Principal Engineer – Kolide

Zach has been contributing to osquery since its inception in 2014, and believes that open-source is the future. He is cofounder and Principal Engineer at Kolide, where he builds products to help operators drive more value from osquery. Outside of this work, he climbs rocks and is an amateur Arduino programmer building blinky devices.

Speakers: Yoann Gini

Level: All Levels, Lecture

Excerpt: Here, a year ago, Yoann introduced EasyLogin for the first time during the session “Past, Present and Future of Directory Services.” This project aims to be the Open Source future of a directory service, made for mobility, made for the cloud. This 2018 session will be a first too: the introduction of an alpha version with an initial deployment tutorial.

Description: EasyLogin was able to handle Mac directory support in 2017. The 2018 flavor is now able to talk LDAP and fully integrated with AirWatch. During this talk Yoann will explain architecture choice, deployment methods for the alpha version, steps needed to integrate with AirWatch and demonstration of this cloud-based directory service working with Network Extension for the MDM protocol (needed to target profile to users instead of devices).

Yoann will manage time needed for Q&A and advanced explanations based on attendees expectations at the end of the session. He will uncover all information kept secret during the initial announcement of EasyLogin.

About the speaker

Yoann Gini (Twitter: @ygini) – CEO – Abelionni

Yoann is CEO of Abelionni, a consulting working anywhere on the planet, on anything related to a SMB information system, highly experimented on scenario with intellectual property to defend.

You might already have used one of his tools made for system administrators like the Admin Tool Radius, ARD Inspector or Hello IT. He works on a day to day basis with macOS, iOS, Windows Server, AirWatch, and always try to develop advanced usage like Mac-based virtualization infrastructure, Cloud based directory for Mac done right, etc.

His skills include reverse engineering of Cocoa application and security work related to macOS and iOS.

Recently, he started to work on easylogin.pro, an Open Source initiative here to serve as a modern directory service, made for mobility and cloud.

Speakers: Joel Rennich

Level: Fundamental, Lecture

Excerpt: This session will cover how to use NoMAD, the open source tool for interacting with AD and other directory services, to make your existing environment better and remove the need for binding to directory service at all. In addition, Joel will show off how NoMAD will soon be able to interact with other SAML-based directory solutions, smart card authentication, and our newest product NoMAD Helper.

NoMAD Helper allows you to configure users, admins and even authentication mechanisms for users over MDM with no directory service involvement. Scope users to machines by adding that machine to a configuration policy in your favorite MDM management tool. Allow your users to elevate themselves to admins without involving someone from the Help Desk. NoMAD Helper will even allow you to fully provision local accounts on DEP systems in a programmatic fashion. And when you don’t want the account on the machine anymore all you have to do is remove the configuration profile.

Description: This session will cover how to use NoMAD, the open source tool for interacting with AD and other directory services, to make your existing environment better and remove the need for binding to directory service at all. In addition, Joel will show off how NoMAD will soon be able to interact with other SAML-based directory solutions, smart card authentication, and our newest product NoMAD Helper.

NoMAD Helper allows you to configure users, admins and even authentication mechanisms for users over MDM with no directory service involvement. Scope users to machines by adding that machine to a configuration policy in your favorite MDM management tool. Allow your users to elevate themselves to admins without involving someone from the Help Desk. NoMAD Helper will even allow you to fully provision local accounts on DEP systems in a programmatic fashion. And when you don’t want the account on the machine anymore all you have to do is remove the configuration profile.

(This session will not be recorded.)

About the speaker

Joel Rennich – – TruSource Lab

Speakers: Eric Hall

Level: Fundamental, Lecture

Excerpt: As the demand for the Mac OS increases from end users across the enterprise, IT staffs need to prepare to deploy and protect these devices as effectively as they do their Windows machines. A common misconception is that Mac devices are not susceptible to malicious attacks; however as the ransomware industry (and the preference for Mac) continues to grow, inevitably, Macs will be targeted. IT teams globally need to be prepared to protect the vital data stored on these devices and ensure the policies and procedures are in place to recover from catastrophic events. Code42 will share how IT can protect data with complete visibility and integrated management while delivering the self-service capabilities and uninterrupted productivity that end users demand.

Description: TBA

(This session will not be recorded.)

About the speaker

Eric Hall – Customer Success Systems Engineer – Code42

Speakers: Steve Goodrich

Level: Fundamental, Lecture

Excerpt: Whether you are onboarding a new employee or resetting an entire lab, imaging your Macs can be a large part of your job. Come learn how Ivanti Endpoint Manager can help. We will also take some time to introduce you to other services provided by Ivanti software and give you a chance to ask questions about recent changes in the company.

Description: This session will focus on provisioning and imaging Macs using Ivanti Endpoint Management. We will try to keep the session fairly practical and technical. We also recognize that with the recent mergers and such, people are curious about where the company is going. We will take some time to help attendees understand our vision for future Mac administration.

About the speaker

Steve Goodrich (Twitter: @zepedebo) – Software Engineer, Apple Technologies – Ivanti

Steve is an Apple technologies specialist at Ivanti (or as his team like to say iVanti). Steve has been a professional software developer for over 30 years. He has written embedded systems, telecom engineering software, warehouse management systems, and integrated medical practice management and EHR software. Steve has extensive experience teaching and has taught a wide variety of classes including AI, database, UNIX system and network programming, compilers, Java, and software quality for Weber State University.