Herding Cats: Managing a Mobile UNIX Platform

Laptops running UNIX operating systems are gaining market share. This leads to more sysadmins being asked to support these systems.

This paper describes the major technical decisions reached to facilitate the pilot roll out of a mobile Mac OS X platform. We explain which choices we made and why. We also list the main problems we encountered and how they were tackled.

We show why in the environment of a customer support organization at Cisco, a file management tool with tripwire-like capabilities is needed. Radmind appears to be the only software base meeting these requirements. We show how the radmind suite can be extended and integrated to suit mobile clients in an enterprise environment.

We provide solutions to automate asset tracking and the maintenance of encrypted home directory disk images. We draw conclusions and list the lessons learnt.