Trevor Gerzen's Blog
Develop and Design smooshed into one conglomeration, much like me :)
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Right now if you buy a computer system and you want to solve one of your problems, we immediately throw a big problem right in the middle of you and your problem; which is how to use the computer.
I think Apple has as chance at solving that problem because Apple is founded on one principle… There is something much different when you have one person and one computer…
I know it’s one of the most overly talked about companies but this caught my attention. This level of focus on the user is what made Apple stand out and is still making Apple stand out from everyone else. It didn’t make them instantly successful in the beginning, but they are now. They are successful because they care about the user, and the principle of the company (not just the product) is one-to-one.
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News is never a 9 to 5 job.
Wednesday evening, with the news that Apple visionary Steve Jobs had passed away from pancreatic cancer, TIME managing editor Rick Stengel (center) decided to stop the presses on the issue the staff had just finished earlier that afternoon. Staff members poured back into the TIME offices for an emergency edit meeting, which left us just over three hours to produce a new issue, many of us working on the very Apple devices that Jobs created.
Thursday, we’ll announce our latest issue featuring Jobs on the cover for the eighth time.
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Let me preface this with some things. I used to work full-time doing front-end web stuff and absolutely LOVE it, but a job opened up at a wonderful elementary to be the I.T. Manager so I took it. Now I spend my days keeping around 200 laptops, 7ish Windows machines, way too many Windows servers and way too many Apple servers running so that little ones can grow up to hopefully fix our enormous debt issue in this country :-) (that one was free)
You might actually be interested in this post if you:
- Want a little insight into what I think about at work during the day,
- Are actually running an OS X Server 10.6 of your own for whatever reason or
- Just like to read the internet
So this week I decided to try out using the Software Update service as part of OS X Server 10.6 to see if I could effectively push out updates to our many laptops we have.
As a sidenote I have the only machine running Lion and it’s for development only so keeping Lion machines up-to-date along Snow Leopard along Leopard along…ahh forget it already. We got some old machines, alright.
At first I got a little freaked out because only a couple updates came through on the server side and on the client side nothing was picking up any new updates. I knew that wasn’t right because for some reason no EVER updates their computers so there’s always tons of updates to do if you don’t automate the process for them.
I gave it a day and voilà! The updates were there. Fired up some client machines and like magic 2.51gbs downloaded in less than 10 minutes to the machine. That is why pushing software updates via your own server is a necessity. Pulling GBs of software updates down over the internet from Apple’s servers (which are mirrored all of the country and do make good use of CDNs) to all of our computers just cripples the network and will make it literally impossible to update.
Now, with ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) I can then select all the computers I want to update, hit this little guy:
and when you get this window:
go to Templates > Miscellaneous > You’re on your own here
I wouldn’t recommend pushing huge updates to all of your computers at the same time. For me I started out with just a handful as an experiment and it’s working great. I will continue to update them in groups of probably 5-10. Now that I’ve got this in place I’ll be automating the update process for these computers so that they stay up-to-date and I don’t have to push GBs of software updates.
