Month: June 2015

What’s New in Managing Apple Devices

If you manage iPads or Macs at any sort of scale, then do watch this video from WWDC: What’s New in Managing Apple Devices.

Here’s a summary of some of the cool stuff that made me particularly happy…

No Apple IDs to install apps

If an iPad is Supervised (set up with Apple Configurator or DEP), you will be able to push out apps via your MDM without the need for an Apple ID on the device.  Which is pretty cool!  The app gets assigned to the device rather than a person.  The installation, updating and management are all controlled by your MDM.

Push out iOS updates

In iOS9, you will be able to push out iOS updates.  This is good news for me, as I’m still trying to get teachers to update their iPads from iOS7!  Via an MDM, you will be able to schedule updates to happen, e.g. when the device is plugged in at night.

Fix wallpaper, passcode and device name

A new MDM restriction means you will be able to lock the wallpaper, prevent a user from adding a passcode and stop the device name being changed.  This is very handy for shared devices in a cart-based deployment.

New Apple Configurator 2

They’ve ditched having a database (that gets very big and is prone to corruption) and are instead keeping ‘tags’ stored on the devices themselves.  The demo looked quite nice and I can see it being handy for those synced-via-cable cart deployments.  Apparently, you can also enrol a device via DEP using Configurator too, meaning a lot less tapping on devices.

There were lots of other nice features, so do watch the video or read a summary here (Amsys) or here (Enterprise iOS).

I like the fact that Apple are no longer insisting that the best and only way to use iPads in a school is 1:1, but are rather accepting that having a shared cart of iPads might actually be ok and are providing tools to help manage iPads in that way.

It’s a shame I won’t get to play with this stuff until we’re substantially into the new academic year, but I guess that is the life of an educational technologist these days!

Getting Caching Server working on LGfL

Caching Server is a cool part of OS X Server: once you turn it on, it basically becomes a local cache of the App Store (Mac and iOS), keeping a copy of downloaded apps on your local network.  This results in faster app downloads, as they’re coming from within your network, and less use of your broadband connection.  Which is nice.

Unfortunately I’ve never been able to get it to work as my school is part of London Grid for Learning (LGfL).  LGfL is a broadband consortium, which allows schools to buy broadband at much cheaper rates because the LGfL trust has built a lovely big network (with the help of Virgin Media Business) just for schools in London. With an eye to safeguarding children, this network is built to be very safe and secure.  The upshot of this is that our little Mac server is buried deep within the network behind many firewalls and switches and routers and so on.  Which has meant that Caching Server hasn’t worked, as it needs to sit pretty close to the open Internet.

Until Yosemite that is.

We recently had our server updated to OS X 10.10, and with that comes some improvements to Caching Server.  One of these is the ability to set the public IP addresses/ranges that will use the Caching service, thus making it all work.

Here’s how:

  1. Open the Server app and click on ‘Caching’. Turn it on.
  2. Click on ‘edit’ next to where it says ‘Permissions’.
  3. On the drop-down menu next to ‘Serve clients with public addresses’, choose ‘on other networks’.
  4. Click the plus in the box below and add the public IP address of the server.  You can find this out by clicking the server name under ‘Server’ in the sidebar.
  5. Enter in the public IP address for all LGfL-connected, which is 5.150.101.173.  Apparently!
  6. You then need to set some client configuration on your DNS server.  Our DNS is on a Windows server, so I click ‘Client Configuration’, choose ‘Windows’ as the DNS type and then copy the command.  I then open up the Windows server, type ‘CMD’ into the search box to open the command line, then copy the command.

And that seems to do the trick!  Lovely.