Sed on nonpunctual

No Free Space For Complexity

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

It is amazing how systems can be connected today compared to 10-15 years ago.

Enterprise chat platforms were nascent, but ascendant then. Now, all sorts of fancy stuff probably happens in your chat app. Maybe you:

get notifications about computers & servers being configured
make tickets in a help desk system
do AI searches with bots in Salesforce data
get AI-generated sentiment summaries from customer calls

The sky is the limit! (Well, the sky, the amount of 💰 you have to spend on integrations, the complexity of your tools & the patience your IT person has to configure all of it…)

JSON & the Arg-nauts

Fri, 05 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

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NOTE: These posts are being re-created from old Jamf Nation posts not because they are the best but because they may have useful things that were mangled in the Jamf Nation transition to its most recent hosting platform.

That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

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UPDATE: Something I thought would never happen has happened. Since the beta features are under NDA, I guess I can’t really say what it is, but, IYKYK, &, it makes everything in this post mostly obsolete. :) Cheers.

Yule Logging

Thu, 21 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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These posts are being re-created from old Jamf Nation posts not because they are the best but because they may have useful things that were mangled in the Jamf Nation transition to its most recent hosting platform.

That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

As it is the holiday season, I wanted to offer up a little gratitude in the form of 🎁 boilerplate code 🎁 related to topics that come up in the Mac admins #scripting & #bash channels again & again. I hope people find it here & find it useful.

A Haiku On Regular Expressions

Sun, 18 Jun 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

For whatever reason, there was a day when the Mac admins slack was particularly goofy & there was a call for poems. I posted this:

Dynamic Token Of Static Appreciation

Mon, 08 May 2023 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

It’s been a while since I posted anything, so, for (future) me & for you I am posting this script that dynamically updates Static Group membership.

Googalogically Speaking

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

tl;dr: This script is dumb. Do not read this.

Long version: I have seen lots of “curl the package then install the package” scripts. Some are ghastly, some are complicated (ahem, _APS…)

The networkQuality Is Not Strained

Wed, 15 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

I posted this in the Mac admins Slack & kind of forgot to post it here…

Collect Year From Mac Marketing Model Name

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

I’ve seen a few tricks for getting what Apple calls the Marketing Model name of a Mac in Terminal. One uses the last 4 characters of the serial number in a curl command. This seems to work (it requires the -L flag on curl). It may stop working because of changes to Apple serial numbers.

Removing System Roots (is probably a bad idea)

Thu, 17 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

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I haven’t tested this recently. I am pretty sure you can’t do it. I guess you can test if it’s possible by disabling System Integrity Protction (SIP) but that might not even work. The script techniques are still vaguely interesting…

There may come a time when you need to delete a System Root certificate. This is not something you should do lightly, but, maybe a cert was installed by an update that you know is bad. Maybe a cert is expired. This isn’t a huge deal, but, there’s no reason for it to be there.

The Date Command Is Pretty Hard To Use

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

So, I don’t know about you, but, when I use the date command it’s usually to match some arcane format. This means I am then scrolling to the bottom of the date man page to find the name of the man page where all the format options are listed. Every time is just like the 1st time, but, not in a good way! (It’s strftime by the way… good luck remembering it.)

Thinking About Extension Attributes

Sun, 25 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

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That, & they were always supposed to be blog posts anyway… I didn’t have a blog then.

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For other Jamf Nation posts under my brock_walters “employee” account, see: https://community.jamf.com/search/activity/reactions?userid=45006

One great thing about JAMF Nation is that awesome workflows can be shared so easily. Sometimes, however, ones that are slightly less than optimal get propagated. The other day I happened to come across an instance of this that I thought maybe I could help explain.