Recaps

JNUC 2015 - Day 3

On Thursday was the last day of the JNUC 2015. There were quite a few talks lined up along with a couple of panels. The talks that grabbed my attention were:

  • Integrating & Automating Your Help Desk Ticketing
  • Security Matters: Making Infosec Your Friend
  • Simplifying Complex Management Infrastructures
  • Security Panel/VPP & DEP Panel

There were a multitude of other talks that grabbed my attention but alas I can only be in one place at a time. Integrating & Automating Your Help Desk Ticketing was an interesting talk. The takeaways from this talk were:

  • Develop Automation
  • Automation is proactive when done right
  • Use APIs from Casper and your Ticketing system

I had a few conversations with people about this talk and some have done this an automated even further. They assign the ticket to an technician with all the appropriate information, so there is no need to decide who will complete each newly created task.

The infosec talk caused many users to think differently about how you deal with your infosec team. At times Macadamias only think of things in terms of what we need to do in order to patch or repair a machine. If you talk or create a relationship with your infosec team you will learn about their worries or concerns on OS X.

  • Spotlight EULA, which sends results to Microsoft BING
  • Bluetooth Vulnerabilities
  • Setting EFI Password to protect machines
  • Using FileVault
  • Adobe FLASH
  • Web Browsers, keeping them up to date
  • Network Layer Attacks

By having open conversations with your infosec team you can collaborate, reduce frustrations, and provide a more secure environment for your users and employer.

Simplifying Complex Management Infrastructure provided great examples of how you can take your environment no matter the size and manage it using the Casper Suite. That is management of OS X servers and knowing all the information about what is installed, Software Updates, or updating software. OS X admins have servers located in many locations and sometimes basic updates from OS X server are not enough. The Casper Suite can provide inventory information and can automate server management tasks.

I hoped between both panels but they provided great information about each particular topic. People were able to submit questions via JAMFNation, Twitter, or in person via a JAMFer. The twitter hash tags are:

  • JNUCSecurity
  • JNUCVPP
  • JNUCDEP

Lastly, the conference ended with a wrap up session where people talked shop, said their goodbyes, and finished their conference questions for speakers. It was a great time in Minneapolis for the JNUC. Can't wait for next 2016.

JNUC 2015 - Day 2

Today, the JNUC was filled with very entertaining talks. The day started off with a talk from the team at IBM, discussion the integration of 30,000K Macs. It was quite impressive to see a deployment at such scale. During the talk IBM talked about Workstation-as-a-Service (WaaS), which is an interesting approach to defining your workstation infrastructure. IBM is deploying 1,900 Macs a week, with a support staff of 24, and still growing. 98.7% of their Mac tickets are solved on first call in attempt. The folks who are working on the Mac deployment at IBM are very passionate about the product and the people they serve. IBM is leveraging DEP for their OS X clients which gives them the ability to:

  • Printed Welcome Insert (inside of Macbook Boxes)
  • Self Service (Only location for Mac Applications)
  • Users are ADMINS on their workstations
  • NO Active Directory

Check out the article about their presentation:

Mac@IBM, Zero to 30,000 in 6 months

This was a great presentation about Culture and how Macs work at IBM, think user first and build backward.

A highly entertaining and informative talk was Ben Toms, Let's Talk About Certificates. Ben reviewed:

  • PKI
  • SCEP
  • CSR
  • APNS
  • Root and Intermediary CAs

It was quite informative and even had the appearance of a few plumbers. Watch the video when it is released.

Lastly, I went to a talk about Make Your JSS Feel New with the Help of API. It was a great talk and provided great examples of why you want to start over with a new JSS and how to automate the process of migrating JSS framework in under 30 minutes.

Day two was great and I will share more on day three later.