A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

This week's issue of the MacAdmins.news summary for Apple admins comes to you from MacSysAdmin in Göteborg Sweden!

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

macOS macOS Tahoe 26.0 (25G354): What's new, Developer Release Notes, Security, Enterprise, App Store (not yet?), User Guide, IPSW, PKG installer, Compatibility macOS Sequoia 15.7 (24G222): What's new, Security, PKG installer macOS Sonoma 14.8 (23J21): What's new, Security, PKG installer iOS and iPadOS iOS 26.0 About, Enterprise, …

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

Previous articles in this series: Installing Packages Inspecting Packages Building Simple Component Packages Books Update 2025 When you place a text file named PolicyBanner in the /Library/Security directory, macOS will display this file before the Login Window. The user will have to accept the banner before they can log in. Apple Support: About Policy Banners in macOS The PolicyBanner file can be plain or rich text (txt, rtf, or rtfd file extensions).

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

It's been a while since I wrote about my books. Life has been tugging me in different directions (in a good way, overall). Things are going well, overall, but there was always this nagging feeling that I really should do something about the books. They were getting a bit… well… old… If you follow this blog, you may have noticed a few posts about packaging recently:

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

Building packages can turn complex very quickly. We will start with a few simple examples first and build up from there. You should read the first two posts in this series, first: Installing Packages Inspecting Packages Boring Wallpaper For our first simple example, imagine your organization insists that every Mac use the same wallpaper (or desktop picture). The first step for an admin is to provide the image file on each Mac.

Summer Camp #4 and dot-six updates

What is a package? If you have been using a Mac, you will have encountered an installation package file or pkg. Package files are used to install software and configuration files on your Mac. Package files come in different flavors and formats, but they can be summarized to these relevant components: a payload installation scripts A package file may have only a payload, only scripts, or both.

I usually post this collection of links as part of the weekly MacAdmins.news summary, but that is currently on a slower bi-weekly "Summer Camp" schedule. So I am posting this here for a change and will link in the issue next week. The dot-six updates, as is common are mostly bug fixes and security patches. The enterprise notes have a bit of relevant information, especially…

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

The macOS installation process installs a pkg file with root credentials. Because of this high level of privileges, it is essential for a Mac system administrator or security expert to be able to inspect the files and scripts. macOS comes with several tools to work with package files. Most of them are command line tools. pkgutil lets you examine a pkg file and its contents before the actual installation.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

Setup Manager 1.3 We have released Setup Manager 1.3 today. You can see the release notes and download the pkg installer here. Most of the changes to Setup Manager in the update do not change the workflow directly. The focus for this update was to improve logging and information provided for trouble-shooting. With the 1.3 update, Setup Manager provides richer logging information.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.

A weekly summary of news, blog posts, updates and other links for Apple device management and security professionals, curated by Armin Briegel of Scripting OS X.