MacAdmins Conference 2017 at Penn State: Full Schedule

MacAdmins is the premier East Coast conference for anyone who deploys and manages Macs and iOS devices. In 2016 we featured 60 sessions and five workshops with top notch speakers in the macOS and iOS deployment community. MacAdmins offers an incredible level of expertise, value, entertainment, and a great opportunity to network with your fellow admins! Register Here Today!

9:00am EDT

A System Administrator's Fundamentals of Wi-Fi, or Arguing With Physics

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(This workshop will not be recorded.)

Tom Bridge and Chris Dawe use their continuing experience and training in the Wi-Fi world to build on their 2015 workshop exploring and understanding a network technology that has somehow managed to become both ubiquitous and despised. We will explore the jargon of radio frequency technology and Wi-Fi, describe basic Wi-Fi operations, talk about network design and security, and provide a troubleshooting toolkit.

Workshop Details
Lunch and Snack service will be provided during this workshop.

Speakers

Tom Bridge

Partner, Technolutionary LLC

Tom Bridge is a partner at Technolutionary LLC, providing IT support to dozens of Mac-focused businesses with more than 600 endpoints, from organizations as small as two to as large as two hundred. He is the producer of the Mac Admins Podcast. He lives in Brookland, District of Columbia... Read More →

Chris Dawe

Principal Systems Engineer, Wheelwrights

Seattle-based consultant Chris Dawe handles a wide variety of Apple-focused work, including system assessment, design, deployment, and support. When not working, Chris dabbles in American history, cooks when he can, and appreciates both whiskey and whisky. Chris lives with Emily and... Read More →

Tuesday July 11, 2017 9:00am - 4:30pm EDT
207

Core Fundamental

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-154
Tags Workshop

9:00am EDT

Mac Management: State of the Union, and Where Are We Going?

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(This workshop will not be recorded.)

Geared to new or new-to-the-platform Mac admins, this workshop will provide an overview of the most commonly-used tools (both commercial and open-source) for deploying and managing Macs, and their strengths and weaknesses. We'll also talk about how the Mac management landscape may be changing in the future, and have time for Q & A.

Workshop Details
Lunch and Snack service will be provided during this workshop.

Speakers

Patrick Fergus

Macintosh Desktop Technician, Meredith Corporation

Patrick is a Mac admin at Meredith Corporation, home of Better Homes and Gardens. When not staring at glowing rectangles, he'd rather be smoking pork shoulders and traveling with his family.

Robert Hammen

As a former IT manager, consultant, Apple Certified System Administrator, and Apple Certified Trainer, I've been managing Macs since before the days of OS X. For the last 3+ years I've been responsible for all of the Apple devices at a reusable rocket and spacecraft company.

Tuesday July 11, 2017 9:00am - 4:30pm EDT
Deans Hall 1

Core Fundamental

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-151
Tags Workshop

9:00am EDT

Raising the Bar for Learning with Technology

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(This session will not be recorded.)
How do we help our students learn today and prepare them for a rapidly changing world? A driving force behind this change is technology. It affects the way we communicate, the way we work, the way we live day to day. It also empowers every individualand every learnerto create amazing things and make a difference in the world. But first, we need to raise the bar for whats expected, and whats possible, for learning with technology.
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

Apple Inc

Apple Education, Apple Inc.

Apple revolutionized personal technology with the introduction of the Macintosh in 1984. Today, Apple leads the world in innovation with iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Apples four software platforms iOS, OS X, watchOS and tvOS provide seamless experiences across all... Read More →

Wednesday July 12, 2017 9:00am - 10:15am EDT
207

Core Fundamental

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-178

10:45am EDT

Past, present and future of Directory Services

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A classic directory system relies on LDAPv3, a revision of the most common directory protocol written in 1997. 20 years later, the world has changed. We now live in a world of mobility! End-users want to work from all around the world and third party services hosted on a cloud are more and more common. Even management has changed with end-points being managed by the MDM protocol, instead of directory based settings.
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

Yoann Gini

CEO, Abelionni

Yoann is CEO of Abelionni, a consulting working anywhere on the planet, on anything related to a SMB information system, highly experimented on scenario with intellectual property to defend. You might already have used one of his tools made for system administrators like the Admin... Read More →

Wednesday July 12, 2017 10:45am - 12:00pm EDT
207

Core Advanced

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-208

1:30pm EDT

Deploying Mac and iPad in Education

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(This session will not be recorded.)
Its never been easier to put iPad and Mac in the hands of students and teachers. Hear about the latest from Apple for education, including Apple School Manager and the Classroom app. Youll also learn how to automate device setup for iPad and Mac, manage devices over the air, and streamline content distribution.
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

Apple Inc

Apple Education, Apple Inc.

Wednesday July 12, 2017 1:30pm - 2:45pm EDT
207

Core Fundamental

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-179

1:30pm EDT

Storing our digital lives: Mac filesystems from MFS to APFS

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Examination of past, present and future filesystems used by Macs.
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

Rich Trouton

IT Technology Senior Consultant, SAP

Rich Trouton has been doing Macintosh system and server administration for over twenty years and has supported Macs in a number of enterprise environments. His current position is at SAP, where he works with the rest of the Apple@SAP team to support SAP's Apple community.

Wednesday July 12, 2017 1:30pm - 2:45pm EDT
Deans Hall 1

Core Intermediate

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-174

3:15pm EDT

Intro to the OS X Command Line

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This will be for the beginner and cover the basics, while also mentioning a few important concepts like dealing with spaces, paths and pipes.
Commands: man, pwd, ls, cd, mkdir, touch, mv, cp, open, etc...
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

William Easton

Technical Consultant (BigFix), Strawgate LLC

I am the principal developer for the open-source BigFix C3 Content Libraries providing high quality inventory, patch, power management, and security tooling to Mac Organizations throughout the world for free. C3 for IBM BigFix is the largest third-party source of free macOS content... Read More →

James Stewart

Software Developer, BigFix

Systems Administrator, Software Developer, and BigFix Expert. I work on automating automation. https://github.com/jgstew

Wednesday July 12, 2017 3:15pm - 4:30pm EDT
207

Core Fundamental

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-166

9:00am EDT

Starting Source Control: Using Git For Literally Everything

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Learn to use source control as a concept, with git as a tool. Incorporate source control into all of your daily work, and learn to automate and record all of your progress.
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

Nick McSpadden

Client Platform Engineer, Facebook

Client Platform Engineer at Facebook. Started in education with a small fleet of Macs and iPads, and now works in a large-scale environment. Everything should be automated!

Thursday July 13, 2017 9:00am - 10:15am EDT
208

Core Fundamental

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-210

1:30pm EDT

It's Incredible This Works At All

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Get your geek on with a technical exploration of the core technologies that enable our WiFi networks, including QAM levels, MIMO and CSMA/CA. If that sounds like alphabet soup, Don't Panic: you'll leave knowing what they mean, and how they team up to allow WiFi to do its magic.
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

Steve Yuroff

Network and System Administrator, Hiebing

Steve works as the lead of a 2 person IT team at a leading midwest marketing and creative agency, where they're responsible for 90 end user machines, servers of many platforms, the network, WiFi, remote workers, security, databases, firewalls, and everything else that might potentially... Read More →

Thursday July 13, 2017 1:30pm - 2:45pm EDT
Deans Hall 2

Core Intermediate

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-175

9:00am EDT

Peeling Back the Bark: Demystifying `log`

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How Apple's Unified Logging changes the way we create, discover, gather, and analyze logs in macOS.
See a full description about this session on our website

Speakers

Joseph Chilcote

Client Platform Engineer, Meta

I manage Macs at a large software company using open source tooling. @chilcote on slack

Friday July 14, 2017 9:00am - 10:15am EDT
Deans Hall 2

Core Intermediate

Feedback Link bit.ly/psumac2017-205