The first time a VP brought you their iPhone to configure, it was a new toy. It was fun, even if it took twenty minutes of typing on that tiny onscreen keyboard. Now with version 2.0 and Exchange support, the iPhone it isn't new or a toy anymore, but it would still take you weeks to individually configure all the iPhones your company needs.
It's for these enterprise-wide deployments that Apple provided the iPhone Configuration Utility, an OS X native application to create and distribute settings for corporate iPhones. Install the program on any Macintosh (or use the web-based version for Windows) and you can create .mobileconfig files that set passcode policy, wireless networks, VPN, POP/IMAP or Exchange email, and more.
First, open the iPhone Configuration Utility, select "Configuration Profiles" and click "New" in the toolbar above. Moving through each of the application's tabs, fill in the appropriate access and account information for your network. Individual account names and passwords need to be input on each device by the user, but security certificates can be pre-loaded by your administration team. You can create as many configurations as are reasonable for your environment, offering different setups for different classes (or departments) of employee.
Once your policy and access information is in place, you can distribute each configuration by clicking "Export" to save the file to disk then upload it to any web server. This method (preferred over email distribution for large deployments and new devices) requires that your web server transmit .mobileconfig files uncompressed and with a MIME type of application/x-apple-aspen-config. Mac OS X Server 10.5.3 and above are pre-configured this way, while Windows users can set this in the server Properties page of IIS Manager. Those running earlier versions of OS X can add this information using the MIME Types pane of the Web settings in Server Admin.
By simply browsing to the appropriate URL, each iPhone will automatically begin the installation. While this process will prompt the user for their domain authentication criteria before configuring the device, it's still advisable to limit access to the URL by only serving the .mobileconfig file to your intranet. Also, while adding a signed profile in the "General" pane (using a certificate issued by one of Apple's pre-installed trusted root authorities) isn't required, it's simpler to get a new security certificate issued for this purpose than try explaining to users why it's OK to install an unverified profile that lacks the attractive green "Trusted" icon.
With very little work up-front, this process offers not just a way to minimize initial deployment times company-wide, but also allows a method to distribute network access changes across your entire enterprise down the line.
Recommended Reading: For further information on customizing iPhone configuration, download Apple's iPhone Enterprise Deployment Guide [PDF - 728KB].
Posted on 23 July 2008 by Ellis Jordan Bojar
Since Mac OS X premiered in 2001, a wide range of applications have shipped with installers in Apple's .pkg format. While the contents of these installers were originally browsable in the Finder or from the command line, determining exactly what will be installed (and where) can still be a difficult and time-consuming process. It's made all the more frustrating by the fact that .pkginstallers lack an uninstall option, making such detective work a requirement to completely uninstall some third-party software. And in Leopard, there's a new "flat package" format, which can't even be read without Apple's Developer Tools.
That's where Suspicious Package comes in, a Quick Look plugin that lets you view exactly what and how will get installed by any package-format installer.
Just select a .pkg file in the Finder, hit the space key, and you're greeted with an interactive Quick Look window. The folder structure of the installer can be browsed using the unfolding arrows to the left of the file names, and the installation scripts can be read with the expansion button to the left of the script icon. Suspicious Package even lets you know if an installer requires an administrative password to run, or that your machine be restarted after installation.
Designed to do just one thing, and do it very well, Suspicious Package is an incredibly clever (and incredibly useful) little utility. It's also an enormous time saver, and a fantastic extension of Apple's Quick Look framework.
Suspicious Package is available for free from Mothers Ruin Software.
Posted on 16 July 2008 by Ellis Jordan Bojar
You've just installed a new hardware firewall with the same IP as one that's being replaced. Your routers can all see it, but traffic from your Macs seems to just disappear. Or you've renamed a series of servers the whole company uses, and the Macs can only find them by IP now. You know you can just reboot the problem machines, like you'd power-cycle an unmanaged switch, but that solution is impractical during business hours (and time-consuming on nights or weekends). How can you force a couple hundred Macintosh computers to update their network caches?
The ARP (Address Resolution Protocol) DNS (Domain Name System) caches are very different, but they server very similar purposes. ARP tables hold the information mapping ethernet MAC addresses (0a:1f:b5:c0:8e:4a) to network IPs (192.168.0.75), while DNS servers translate fully qualified domain names (like router.makemacwork.com) into IP addresses. Both types of information are cached to make subsequent lookups faster, but when changes take place on your network it's hard to predict when that information will get updated.
Fortunately, it's trivial to flush these caches on the Macintosh command line, and those commands can be sent to hundreds or even thousands of machines at once using Apple Remote Desktop's "Send Unix Command..." function.
On individual machines, you can clear the ARP cache in the Terminal and typing:
sudo arp -d -a
The DNS cache (along with all Directory Services caches) can be reset by typing:
sudo dscacheutil -flushcache
If you're sending the commands out with Apple Remote Desktop, leave out sudo and instead be sure to set the "Run command as" user to "root".
That's all it takes to force your Macs to fetch new routing and domain information, without ever having to interrupt the people working on them.
Posted on 9 July 2008 by Ellis Jordan Bojar
Last week, in part one of this series, we took began deploying Portable Home Directories, reviewing their prerequisites and enabling the mobile managed preferences. This week we'll continue the process, by setting up an AFP share to host our user homes and configuring our Open Directory accounts to take advantage of them.
Sharing Portable Home Directory Files:
In order to make your server-based home directories available to other machines, you'll need to share them out to your network (preferably via AFP). In Leopard, the "File Sharing" settings reside in the Server Admin application. Open it, then select your server name, and choose the gear-shaped "Settings" button from the toolbar. You'll see a collection of potential server features to enable (such as allowing SSH and ARD access) including a listing for "Server Side File Tracking". Checking the box and clicking "Save" will allow Mac OS X server to cache file changes prior to synchronizing home directories, which offers a significant performance boost over Tiger's system of scanning and comparing home directory contents.
Next, select "File Sharing" from the Server Admin toolbar (or the equivalent settings in Tiger's Workgroup Manager). If your server has fast redundant disk space available to hold your portable home directories, there's not a compelling reason to not just share out /Users. If you have a large number of users (or a small boot disk), you'll want to create a separate share on external storage. In either case, select the "Volumes" and "Browse" buttons below the toolbar and select the folder you'll be using for your Portable Home Directories, then click the "Share" button right above the file browser and "Save" at the window's bottom-right.
Once you share the directory, a new "Share Point" button will appear at the center of the "Sharing" pane. Select it, then check "Enable Automount". You'll then be asked to enter an administrative user name and password for your Open Directory domain. Keep the default setting of mounting user home folders over AFP by clicking "OK", then move on to the "Protocol Options" button below it.
When Portable Home Directory deployments go wrong, it's usually at this stage. In the AFP "Protocol Options", be sure that "Allow AFP guest access" is checked (you'll also want to uncheck the options to share via SMB, FTP, or NFS). If you have other AFP shares active (which you most likely do), be sure guest access is turned off on the rest of them. Then select "AFP" from the service list on the left of the Server Admin window, choose the "Access" pane, and check "Enable Guest access" there as well.
This may seem counterintuitive, as guest (or unauthenticated) access to the home directory share may sound like a terrible idea. In most cases you wouldn't want any data shared out to network guests, and Apple even forces you to confirm the setting in two separate places. In the case of Portable Home Directories, however, the shared volume gets automounted prior to any user logging in. The data inside each home directory stays private, but the root of the share needs to be accessible to any machine bound to the Open Directory domain. Guest access is the mechanism through which this is achieved, and without it the remainder of your deployment process won't get anywhere.
Assigning Portable Home Directories To User Accounts:
Now that your mobility preferences are set and your AFP share is set to automount, the final step is assign home directories to your existing users. Open Workgroup Manager and select "Accounts" from the toolbar, then highlight a test user from the left column and choose the "Home" pane. By default, two options are offered as home directory locations, /Users and None. Instead, click the "plus" button at the bottom of the list to add an additional option.
In the dialog sheet that appears, use the first field to enter the AFP address of the home directory share in URL format (such as afp://server.example.com/Users). In the second field, fill in just the name of the user's home directory, which should be the same as their account "short name". In the third field, enter the full path of the automounted home share as it will appear on client machines. This begins with /Network/Servers/, then the address from the first field minus the afp:// prefix, and finally the user's short name. When all three fields are filled properly, click "OK", then assign the user a disk quota (somewhere between 20-40GB is reasonable for most user environments) and hit "Save".
With this first account done, you can now highlight all the users who'll be getting mobile accounts, select your pre-configured share point, assign a quota, and save those settings to the entire list at once. If these are new accounts, you can even use the "Create Home Now" button to populate your AFP share with custom home directories. If you'll be syncing existing home directories on client machines, you don't have to create a home folder at all, instead allowing the data to copy to the server on their next network-based login.
Recommended Reading: For the full story on Portable Home Directory setup, try the essential Leopard User Management Guide [PDF - 2.5MB] at Apple.com.
Posted on 2 July 2008 by Ellis Jordan Bojar
Available since version 10.4, Portable Home Directories have become one of the most elegant and well-implemented features of a full Mac OS X Server deployment. Functioning much like Windows' roaming profiles (or earlier Solaris NFS/NIS environments), they allow a user to log in from any computer on your network while retaining their personal data and settings. Unlike entirely network-based systems, however, they do so by synchronizing user data to the server (so that a full copy of the home directory exists in both locations), eliminating the need for constant connectivity.
Portable Home Directories make for simpler backup of user data, both by copying off the server rather than each client machine, and by allowing remote users to synchronize via VPN. They also free users from being tied to a single machine, allowing for greater flexibility and less service down-time. It's because this functionality is so powerful that it's often assumed to be difficult to put into practice. Instead, with the proper infrastructure already in place, deploying Portable Home Directories is practically the reward for having done everything else right.
Planning For Portable Home Directories:
Before you actually implement any kind of server-based account storage, you'll want to make sure you have sufficient storage and bandwidth on an available OS X server. This may seem obvious to some, but for reasonable performance, fifty users with a 40GB quota requires at least 2TB of relatively high-speed (and hopefully redundant) disk attached to a gigabit network switch. This isn't an exotic setup by any means, but it may be more than you just have lying around.
You'll also need clients bound to a functioning Open Directory environment, complete with internal DNS. If you don't yet have this set up, refer to our earlier series on how to master Open Directory. Once Directory Service users and groups are in place, Portable Home Directories are nothing more than cleverly deployed managed account preferences. There's a lot to keep track of, but very little you wouldn't already know how to do.
Configuring Portable Home Directory Preferences:
In Workgroup Manager, browse to the "LDAPv3" directory (as opposed to the local user directory), then choose the multi-headed "Groups" button on the left and the "Preferences" icon from the toolbar. Select the group (or groups) you're offering Portable Home Directories, then click the "Mobility" icon in the center of the window to configure that group's settings. If you're deploying this feature to all your users, you're better off creating an all-encompassing "Employees" group to do so.
Beginning in the "Account Creation" tab with the "Creation" pane, choose to manage these Preferences "Always", the check "Create mobile account when user logs in to network account". Uncheck the box which requires confirmation, as this allows the user to skip the Portable Home Directory set up for their individual account. Below that, choose to "Create home" directories "with default sync settings".
Next comes the Account Expiry tab, new to 10.5. By allowing you to set a time limit after which the client-side copy of a home directory expires, it helps clean up the occasional "orphaned" set of user data (a full home directory left, for instance, on a machine only used once by that user during maintenance on their own machine. This feature can reduce the chance of accidentally filling client machines with multiple unused accounts, but does so at the risk of letting the computer determine when data should be disposed of. If you enable it, do so with caution.
Finally, the "Rules" tab lets you set what data will synchronize and when. Start with the "Login & Logout Sync" pane and once again click the button to "Always" manage, then check the box to "Sync at login and logout". The first list above allows you to set which directories you'll sync, and unless you feel you can fully predict your users' behavior the best approach is usually to select the entire home directory (as represented by the tilde symbol). You can then choose what not to sync in the second list below, including full paths, partial names, and even regular expressions. Be careful if you delete any of Apple's pre-configured items to skip, especially ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices, which can result in synchronization issues and potentially data loss. The "Merge with user's settings" box allows you to decide if individuals can add or subtract to the list of data being synchronized.
The Background Sync pane, functions identically, and in most cases makes sense to configure identically as well. The only exceptions would be huge local files which change often, or live databases which won't sync properly. The Entourage database, for instance, sits both criteria and should be excluded from background synchronization. The "Options" pane also allows you to choose how often background sync takes place. With your configuration decided, click the "Apply Now" button to save your settings.
Next week, in part two, we'll set up the AFP share where your new Portable Home Directories reside and configure your Open Directory accounts to store user data there.
Recommended Reading: While I might not recommend implementing it in a production environment, Greg Neagle's multi-part article on Portable Home Directory Without Open Directory provides fantastic under-the-hood information on exactly how Portable Home Directories function at his "Managing OS X" blog.
Posted on 25 June 2008 by Ellis Jordan Bojar
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