Preference Delivery in Font

Creating QR Code JIS X 0510 in Font Preference Delivery

The good news is that the Managed Preferences system for OS X is relatively easy to understand and implement. It s largely misunderstood by system administrators, due to a lack of exposure and convenient, thorough documentation. One thing you do need is a way to deliver these preferences to your fleet. 6, Delivering Managed Preferences is dedicated to just this topic and will dive into it more deeply. If you re using OS X end-to-end (OS X Server and OS X clients), you bind your clients to Open Directory, set preferences using Apple tools, and it all just works. However, we re finding that there are more and more companies adding Macintosh computers to their fleet with no other Mac OS X infrastructure at all. Moving away from the pure Apple toolchain can be a little confounding. While we ll cover the all-Apple scenario----which can be extended even past what Apple supplies you with----through this book, we re really focusing on the lone Mac in a Windows or Unix world variety. The point is that preferences don t just magically appear on a client machine. You ll need some kind of infrastructure for delivery. That infrastructure may take the form of a directory service that clients can bind to, such as Open Directory or ActiveDirectory. It may even take the form of a script that runs periodically on a client (an agent ) that pulls preferences from a central location. Understand that this is a critical part of how you will deliver preferences.

This book is about managed preferences. You ll sometimes hear the phrase client management used interchangeably with managed preferences. But client management can, and often does, refer to a wider range of management topics, like software installation, OS patch management, account creation and more. There are many tools out there to help OS X administrators manage client machines. Some cover some aspects of client management; some cover other aspects. Some ship with OS X, some are available from Apple, some are open-source, and some are commercial third-party tools.

Experienced UNIX administrators are often tempted to just write a bunch of scripts to help manage machines, and scripts can be used to manage preferences and settings. Using scripts to manage OS X client machines is very powerful, but also presents many challenges. If you choose to write a script to configure or manage a certain setting in OS X, here are some of the problems you ll need to solve: Figuring out where the setting is stored; which file or datastore contains the settings you are interested in. Choosing the right tools to modify the setting. Do you need to use defaults, PlistBuddy, systemsetup, networksetup, dscl, or some combination of tools Choosing a scripting language: OS X gives you an embarrassment of riches here. You have several different variations of shell languages (sh, csh, tsch, bash, and zsh), Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, and even the old Mac stand-by, AppleScript, at your disposal. Some languages are better fits for certain tasks than others. Writing, testing, and debugging the script itself. Delivering the script to each machine. Getting the script to run in the appropriate context (e.g., as root, or as the current GUI user). Getting the script to run at the appropriate time (e.g., at startup, at login, or on a repeating basis).

For these last points, there are several Apple-supported ways to run scripts at specific times. Here are some:

deprecated, but still available for use. While we don t recommend using StartupItems for much of anything these days, you may find them around as a holdover from days gone by. Unfortunately, StartupItems are installed too often by commercial vendors who haven t learned the newer way of handling this under OS X. StartupItems run at boot time, before any user logs into the system.

Login Hooks: When login hooks became available in OS X, many administrators rejoiced. A single script can be set to run when a user logs in. This script runs as root and is passed the ID of the user who is logging in (console logins only). This gives login hooks tremendous flexibility. Login hooks are a valuable part of OS X management. Huzzah! Login items: Most people are familiar with login items----programs set to run at user login. Users have control over adding to the list of items that run when they log in. This can be managed via the Dock, by choosing the Open at Login item from the contextual menu for a process on the Dock, or via the Accounts Preference Pane in System Preferences. Nicely, Apple s Managed Preferences can add to this list also.