Tag Archives: conference

No NetBoot, No problem: installr and bootstrappr

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It’s 2019, and NetBoot is almost dead. All new Macs have T2 chips. Sent from the future to protect us from …. ourselves? No more NetBoot, no problem!!

When NetBoot first appeared and I was able to boot entire labs of Macs across the network I was amazed and overjoyed. It was awesome. Spinning globe, spinning…

Netboot-GlobeSpin.jpg

But in the years since I’ve moved on to no-imaging. Using Munki to manage software means no more imaging, just install Munki and a small config change to point to the Munki server, thereafter the software that should be there goes on, and what’s not supposed to be there goes away. Simple. Just install one package, well, maybe two, then you’re good.

Well, what if you want to streamline or automate these things? What if these are new Macs which don’t have users configured? What if we could do all this from recovery mode? Hmm… Enter bootstrappr and installr!!

bootstrappr

This awesome project allows to add packages to install in one step while booted in recovery mode. Plug in a USB stick with the bootstrapr script to run the package install magic or mount a disk image over http. Create a DMG with the included script make_dmg.sh. And now this is the best part: in recovery mode open the Terminal app from Utilities and type:

hdiutil mount http://server/yourDMG.dmg

Then:

/Volumes/bootstrap/run

When it’s done you can Reboot the Mac and you’ll have a set up customized to your liking with Munki installed and configured with custom settings.

installr

The installr script works in the same way but adds the macOS installer to the party. You can also mount the DMG over http and re-image a Mac and then add your custom packages. It’s awesome. Truly amazing.

One note: Added packages in Installr must be in a special format. From the installr site: startosinstall requires that all additional packages be Distribution-style packages (typically built with productbuild) and not component-style packages (typically built with pkgbuild)

productbuild --package component.pkg --version x.y --identifier com.example.component distribution.pkg

In one of my first tests with installr and pycreateuserpkg I was caught up by this, even though it is properly mentioned in the read me. Packages that work in Bootstrappr or munki directly don’t necessarily work when called by the macOS installer (startoinstall). Armin Briegel was helpful in the MacAdmins Slack and reminded me of this. Thanks Armin and thanks everyone on the MacAdmins Slack.

Many Thanks to Greg Neagle for creating these tools and Munki. Looking forward to hearing him speak at the next MacDevOps:YVR conference June 12-14, 2019. Greg will be speaking about his efforts to port some parts of Munki from Python to Swift. More info on the conference and speakers here: https://mdoyvr.com/speakers/

Also a shout out to Graham Gilbert who has worked on Imagr (MDOYVR talk), over the years, an imaging and automation tool which was also an inspiration (along with bootstrappr and installr) to Tim Perfit and his MDS project.

Update: corrected the names of installr and bootstrappr in the title because… autocorrect.

 

My Thunderbolt Nightmare

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It was a dark and stormy night of cables and capacitors when suddenly I heard the door knocking, or was something falling of a shelf? I was in a cramped server room, if you’d call it that, and I was day dreaming, sorry, night terrorizing, of days gone past when I worked in nice big well ventilated server rooms with proper enterprise gear. Oh wait, did I really dream that? Did it really happen? Maybe it was less well ventilated and there were cables strewn about the tall 42U shelves and sometimes we found a Mac hidden underneath spaghetti. Sometimes. I vaguely remember the long shiny metal servers, they talked to me, they sang, a whiny pitch of whale song. Dream on, dream on.

Now. Today. Apple Music on my iPhone plays every single Arcade Fire album in a long playlist, in order. And I follow the white rabbit of Thunderbolt cables. This is my thunderbolt nightmare. Dead drive in a Thunderbolt Promise Pegasus unit, web ticket filed for registered hardware. Legacy. That’s the word they used. Where’s Marshall McLuhan when you need a proper redux of the shit storm you’re in? Thunderbolt 3 uses USB-C and everything is possible. Can’t wait to step into that confusing identity crisis. OK, back to the present day when I stared at the red blinking drive, a replacement drive from not long ago dead again, sitting in the last row of a now legacy Pegasus R6 unit. RAID 5, the most dangerous kind, this is what stood between me and uncertainty. The worst kind of RAID. Well, not as bad RAID 0. Raid nothing. Raid 5 is one bad drive away from a bad day. Backups? Hmm, I got those, I got plenty of those, but I don’t want to be tested today. No, not today. Not this bloody day.

I open the Pegasus utility and the GUI wants an update. Hmm, that’s not in autopkg, I think. Why is out of date? Munki let me down. I start to drift, to side shift into adding newer better recipes to autopkg, to tweaking my Munki repo, to what sessions would be awesome at the next MacDevOps:YVR conference. Gee whiz, I love open source, and everyone in the Mac Admins community…. Snap out of! I slap myself in the face. I was hallucinating. Stay on task. I update the Pegasus utility. I stare at the critical reports from one of the three R6 units attached to this Mac Mini server. Did I say server? But it’s so small, so little. It works. It’s magical, kinda neat. Until you stare too close at the back. The Thunderbolt cables go from the Mac Mini to the first Pegasus unit to the SANlink fibre channel adapter to the LTO 6 tape library to the next Pegasus utility to the second SANlink adapter to a third and final Pegasus RAID unit. What’s is going on? Where does this cable go? Let me just follow it to the next jumping off point. My brain slows, the lack of oxygen in this cold machine room start to affect my thinking. I lose my way.

I download the report for the Pegasus unit. I had to unlock a pretty neat lock icon and click on the save report. I upload it to the web support and add it to the ticket. Tech support gets backs to me in a day and said all is good, and to carry on. I can’t. The drive is dead. What are they not seeing? It’s right in front of me. I download the report again. Again the same response. Fine. It’s time to stop messing around and pop open Terminal. Loading up promiseutil I check out the options and switches and get into an argument with myself about the currently valid optionals of letters and numbers that are required. I check my notes, online knowledge base, and try again. It’s broken. It doesn’t work. Stumbling around the command line typing imprecisely incorrect statements gets nowhere fast. I realize that there’s no way for the cli utility to properly change its focus to the broken unit with the busted drive. Both the GUI and the binary are stuck on the one R6 unit and won’t see what’s in front of my face.

I call tech support. This is humiliating. This was supposed to be easy. Drive dead, drive reported, drive ordered, drive replaced, then no one the wiser. Data saved, not dead. Backups not tested. Not today. No, not today. Tech support treats me like the imaginary newbie IT people sometimes treat everyone with. He repeats his instructions to me. He is polite. Download the report. I can’t. It won’t work. Unplug the unit. Plug it into something else. I can’t. The cables. The Thunderbolt cables are everywhere. It’s magical, and daisy-chained, and stuck. “Can I remote in and see?” he asks, hoping to resolve this quickly. Sorry. That’s impossible. Even if I thought it was a good idea. I remind him that I have a dead drive. That’s why I called. I want to get a replacement drive. “Sorry sir that legacy unit is not under support most likely,” I know that. I realize that now. That I wasted my time. It happens sometimes. The truth is staring at you. You need a mirror to see. “You need to order compatible drive from the compatibility list.” I am a well spring of emotions. I thank him. I am nice. He was polite. But now I know what I need to do. Oh wait, what? Order a drive now! Order two.

McLuhan never had a chance to evaluate Thunderbolt storage technology but the insane genius and simplicity of Thunderbolt reduced expensive enterprise fibre channel storage to the dust bin. Magical SAN for video editing with a Mac Mini and Thunderbolt RAIDs. Cheap enough to buy with a departmental credit card, fewer meetings to attend, more films to shoot and edit. Backup, archive, repeat. McLuhan would have no doubt reminded me that the tetrad of technology would have flipped Thunderbolt on its head, Fibre channel never went into a dust bin, but was firmly relegated to well cooled storage room, and long ago legacy drives in the enterprise units are humming a long while the cursing wind and emotions swell over the Thunderbolt mountain. Fibre channel just became cool again. Retro smart.

MacDevOps:YVR 2017

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wr

We’ve had incredible feedback from the last two events and it was so much fun we’ve decided to do it again. Join us on June 5-6th in Vancouver, BC, Canada. Early bird tickets are on sale now.

As a conference we like to gather to discuss Open Source solutions to manage Macs in the enterprise and everywhere else. This year we focus on the new APFS filesystem and what that means for all of us. How do we manage macOS if it is becoming more closed and like iOS? They’ll be talks on what is MDM?, Is imaging dead?, managing Macs with various open source tools, and how to leverage the cloud.

Join us for the technical talks by speakers from Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Airbnb, Square, Uber and many more. Or hang out in the break room and the hallway track. You’ll meet the awesome community members that make up the MacDevOps family. We are all here to share what we know, and to learn from others.

For more information go to our website:

MacDevOps:YVR website

A limited number of early bird tickets are on sale now at Eventbrite:

Get your early bird ticket now!

Mac IT training

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I’ve been asked about Mac IT sysadmin training ideas, and I thought perhaps sharing some initial ideas might help other aspiring Mac IT sysadmins.

It’s hard to recommend a training site or specific place for Mac IT training these days. It used to be that you could sign up for a Unix SysAdmin or bash scripting class and that would be most helpful. And those both are helpful but Mac IT specific technologies are discussed at Mac IT conferences such as MacTech in LA (and periodically in other cities), PSU Mac Admins (Penn State), MacIT (San Jose), MacSysAdmin in Sweden, MacDeploy in Calgary and MacDevOps:YVR in Vancouver. As well as Apple sponsored camps for ACNs (Apple Consultants). Some of these conferences post their video online for free (PSU, MacSysAdmin and MacDevOps) so these are great resources to learn from.

Online learning: there are resources such as mail lists which have lots of helpful Mac Admins: mac-enterprise (MACENTERPRISE@LISTS.PSU.EDU), munki-dev (munki-dev@googlegroups.com), munki-discussion (munki-discussion@googlegroups.com), autopkg (autopkg-discuss@googlegroups.com) and the Slack MacAdmins channel (http://macadmins.org) and perhaps lots of other places I’m forgetting.

The most important is local meetups, and right now we’re not hosting anything in Vancouver. But I do want to start some local meetups here to encourage fellow Mac Admins to help each other out learning MacDevOps skills and getting into the greater Mac IT sysadmin community. There are great meetups in many cities across North America and the world. Finding out where they are means looking at afp548.com for info, or check out Watchman Monitoring’s new Mac Meetup site: http://www.macmeetups.com/find/, or check on Jamf Nation (https://jamfnation.jamfsoftware.com/index.html). Lots of options.
Here in Vancouver we are also contemplating some more in depth workshops for the next MacDevOps:YVR conference and perhaps sooner than that. How to get started with Mac IT technologies and how to build a beautiful Mac Admins community by being a part of it, and sharing what you know with others.
Anything you all want to learn specifically? What do you want to know about? Let me know.