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Configuration Profiles: The Future is… Soon

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Let’s say, hypothetically, you’ve been in the Mac IT business for a couple revisions of the ol’ OS, and are familiar with centralized management from a directory service. While we’re having hypothetical conversations about our identity, let’s also suppose we’re not too keen on going the way of the dinosaur via planned obsolescence, so we embrace the fact that Configuration Profiles are the future. Well I’m here to say that knowing how the former mechanism, Managed Preferences (née Managed Client for OS X, or MCX) from a directory service interacted with your system is still important.

 
Does the technique to nest a faux directory service on each computer locally(ergo LocalMCX), and utilize it to apply management to the entire system still work in 10.8 Mountain Lion? Yes. Do applied Profiles show settings in the same directory Managed Preferences did? Yes… which can possibly cause conflicts. So while practically, living in the age of Profiles is great when 802.1x used to be so hard to manage, there are pragmatic concerns as well. Not everyone upgraded to Lion the moment it was released, just over a year ago, so we’re wise to continue using MCX first wherever the population is significantly mixed.

 
And then there’s a show-stopper through which Apple opened up a Third-Party Opportunity (trademark Arek Dreyer): Profiles, when coming straight out of Mac OS X Server’s 10.7 or 10.8 Profile Manager service, can only apply management with the Always frequency. Just like the former IBM Thinkpads, you could have any color you wanted as long as it’s black. No friendly defaults set by your administrator that you can change later, Profiles settings, once applied, was basically frozen in carbonite.

 
So what party stepped in to address this plight? ##osx-server discussions were struck up by the always-generous never-timid @gregneagle, about the fact that Profiles can actually, although undocumented, contain settings that enable Once or Often frequency. Certain preferences can ONLY by managed at the Often level, because they aren’t made to be manageable system-wide, like certain application (e.g. Office 2011) and Screen Saver preferences (since those live in the user’s ~/Library/ByHost folder.)

 
The end result was Tim Sutton’s mcxToProfile script, hosted on Github, which works like a champ for both of the examples just listed. Note: this script utilizes a Profiles Custom Settings section only, so for the things already supported by Profiles (like loginwindow) it’s certainly best to get onboard with what the $20 Server.app can already provide. But another big plus of the script is… you can use it script without having ProfileManager set up anywhere on your network.

 
So there you go, consider using mcxToProfile to update your management, and give feedback to Tim on the twitters or the GitHubs!


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