I’ve had mixed feelings regarding Apple’s new client management tool, called Profile Manager. It’s supposed to combine managing iOS and Mac OS X in one neat interface complete with push notification. Allegedly, it’s supposed to replicate Apple’s OD/MCX setup for the Mac OS X environment. I’ve been toying with it on and off since v.1 which came with Mac OS X 10.7, Lion, Server.

I just got the new Mavericks (Mac OS 10.9 Server) version up and running, and I’m still disappointed in it. One of my issues is the Custom Settings area, where a plist can be uploaded so an app or other setting can be managed. Every time I try to upload a plist file, I get an cryptic error from the Server. My Google-fu has not turned up any solutions for this issue.

My other gripe is the obvious lack of the ability to further customize the default settings. Unless I’m missing something, in OD/MCX I was able to edit the plist file that was generated from one of the default settings. I made heavy use of that to further tweak the interface and look of the SINC Site Macintosh computers.

The push notification in Profile Manager is nice, although I still have to test that for the computers sitting in the un-routable network. However, that problem might go away soon.

Enter mcxToProfile. I was made aware of mcxToProfile some time ago, but since the advent of Mavericks, I’m forced to abandon OD/MCX and go the profile route. mcxToProfile to profile is a python script written by Tim Sutton.

• More about Tim can be found here: http://macops.ca/about/.
• mcxToProfile can be found here: https://github.com/timsutton/mcxToProfile.

For now, until I feel that Profile Manager has matured enough, I plan to extract my OD/MCX settings with mcxToProfile, which then makes a profile out of it. I will have to tweak the profiles a bit due to new settings or obsolete settings in Mac OS X 10.9. I then plan to develop a way of applying them to all the lab computers.

The easiest way is to create packages and deploy it via Munki. But, over the next week or so, I plan to see what’s my best option.