MacAdmins Conference

Speakers: Mac Justice

Level: Intermediate, Lecture

Excerpt: An overview of GitLab, an open source, self-hosted GitHub alternative. GitLab is an attractive option for smaller or non-tech industry organizations without dedicated code development infrastructure. Features include git repository hosting, permissions management, an in-browser editor, git-lfs support, continuous integration and deployment, issue tracking, a container registry, and even a Slack clone. Includes a demo of Imagr and Munki workflows.

Description: Git is an extremely popular and powerful tool for source code management and collaboration. But if you work outside of the tech industry, or for a smaller organziation, you might not have infrastructure in place to reap the benefits of a git-based workflow. This talk aims to show how GitLab can help smaller organizations get access to DevOps-style workflows for increased communication, change auditing, and improved productivity.

GitLab is a free web application you can host yourself. With GitLab, you get a nice web UI for managing git repositories, very similar to GitHub. You can use GitLab to host anything you would normally put into a git repo, whether it’s your grab bag of scripts, configuration profiles, or even a full Munki repo. Once your stuff lives in GitLab, you also have access to a whole load of other features to help you collaborate with your team and automate repetitive tasks.

Speakers: Nick McSpadden

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

Excerpt: Learn to use source control as a concept, with git as a tool. Incorporate source control into all of your daily work, and learn to automate and record all of your progress.

Description: Source control is critical to success in larger and complex environments. Even in smaller ones, utilizing source control effectively can be the difference between crisis and apocalypse. ‘git’ is the most common source control tool, and is a fantastic way to store your tools, scripts, documentation, notes, and text files. Learn to use git and incorporate it into your daily work so you can always record your progress, pick up where you leave off, and share and work with others in the same environment safely.

About the speaker

Nick McSpadden (Twitter: @mrnickmcspadden) – Client Platform Engineer – Facebook

Client Platform Engineer at Facebook. Started in education with a small fleet of Macs and iPads, and now works in a large-scale environment. Everything should be automated!

Speakers: Yoann Gini

Level: Advanced, Lecture

Excerpt: A classic directory system relies on LDAPv3, a revision of the most common directory protocol written in 1997. 20 years later, the world has changed. We now live in a world of mobility! End-users want to work from all around the world and third party services hosted on a cloud are more and more common. Even management has changed with end-points being managed by the MDM protocol, instead of directory based settings.

Description: During this session we will explore why LDAP based directory services are at the end of life, we will take a look at the NoMAD/Enterprise Connect solutions to explore what admins are trying to achieve and we will look at modern directory services to understand what the future looks like.

Modern directory services will be illustrated by references to JumpCloud and OneLogin, and demonstrated with a brand new project that will be announced for the first time ever during this talk.

Not to worry, this talk will not be a commercial talk. Regardless of the project announcement, this talk will be highly technical (as always with Yoann) and whatever your current situation is regarding directory services, you will be inspired.

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 Server and always try to develop advanced usage like Mac-based virtualization infrastructure.

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

Speakers: Joseph Chilcote

Level: Intermediate, Lecture

Excerpt: How Apple’s Unified Logging changes the way we create, discover, gather, and analyze logs in macOS.

Description: Apple’s Unified Logging supersedes ASL (Apple System Logger) and the Syslog APIs of the past. Let’s discuss what this means for diagnosing and troubleshooting common system issues, collecting logs for later analysis, and creating custom log events for our management tools. We will cover using Apple’s rewritten Console.app, the `log` cli interface, and third party tools, as well as legacy logging tools that are still in use.

About the speaker

Joseph Chilcote (Twitter: @chilcote) – Sr Systems Engineer – Splunk

Sr. Systems Engineer at Splunk.

Speakers: John Kitzmiller & Rich Trouton & Greg Neagle

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

Excerpt: An open forum where a panel of Mac and iOS experts will answer any questions you have about managing Apple devices.

Description: Rich Trouton and [insert others here] will answer any questions about Apple device management. With a combined [however many] years of experience across many different solutions and environments, you’re sure to find an answer to any question you can come up with.

About the speakers

Greg Neagle (Twitter: @gregneagle) – Sr. Systems Engineer – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Greg is the engineer primarily responsible for deploying and managing OS X machines at Walt Disney Animation Studios, a studio with a long history of family entertainment reaching back to “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and forward to our latest films: “Zootopia” and “Moana”.

Disney Animation has released as open source several Mac management tools developed by Greg. Among those are Munki, a software deployment framework, Reposado, a platform-agnostic replacement for Apple’s Software Update service, and the “createOSXinstallerPkg” tool set. Greg is also a contributor to the popular AutoPkg tool.

Greg has presented on various aspects of OS X management at Macworld, Apple’s WWDC, the MacTech Conference, Penn State Mac Admins, and MacSysAdmin. He is a frequent contributor to MacTech Magazine.

Rich Trouton (Twitter: @rtrouton) – IT Technology Senior Consultant – SAP

Rich Trouton has been doing Macintosh system and server administration for over eighteen years and has supported Macs in a number of different environments, including university, government, medical research and advertising. His current position is at SAP, where he works with the rest of the Mac CoE team to support SAP’s Mac community.

John Kitzmiller (Twitter: @johnkitzmiller) – –