About 6 months ago I moved to a new company and, after having been a Windows Admin for basically the previous decade, I’m now a de facto Mac Admin, though I don’t consider myself an expert in macOS or iOS yet. I’m learning quickly, but I also feel like I may have some more conservative views for managing Macs that definitely spill over from my Windows & ConfigMgr days. When I was hired, I knew going in that my first major project would be migrating the entire company from one MDM (Meraki Systems Manger) to another as part of an effort to bring all endpoint management under in-house IT.

App deployment for any computer, Windows or Mac, can be challenging. Widely used apps like Google Chrome are well-developed with options to automate and configure using scripts, MDM config profiles, or even back one-liner terminal commands. When you encounter an app that has little-to-no documented parameters or configurations, it can be frustrating. I choose to look at it as a challenge. Using any tools or ideas available, it’s easy for me to become engrossed in finding an automatable solution.

A request came in from my System Admin group to push certain policies only to VMs hosted in Azure. Currently, they had a naming convention being used (well, supposed to be used) to simply prefix the hostname with AZ-, but they came across a couple Domain Controllers that hadn’t installed Updates in 7+ months, and of course the names didn’t follow the accepted standard. So I started looking for ways to identify Azure devices definitively and came across this Detect Windows Azure Virtual Machine post, which led to reading the Azure Metadata Service docs, and eventually got me to turn this into a Configuration Item / Configuration Baseline and subsequent Device Collections.

Like many, I was very excited that the new Configuration Manager 2006 release included a huge improvement for remote devices by adding a new VPN Boundary type. “Finally! I don’t have to constantly bug my Network Engineers as to which IP pools are being used for which VPN appliances.” Create A New Boundary In the Admin Console, navigate to the Administration Node and open up Hierarchy Configuration and right-click on Boundaries

The other day, I logged on to a jump server and, while investigating an unrelated issue, I noticed the BG Info background showed the Last Reboot as March 1st, 2020. “That can’t be right,” I thought. “We have weekly maintenance windows to reboot these servers.” As I opened an old stand-by function from my stash (originally posted here: https://gallery.technet.microsoft.com/scriptcenter/Get-RebootHistory-bc804819 in 2015) and ran it, I was a bit annoyed at how SLOW it was.