In recent months we've started hearing about Macs from our customers. Macs are starting to appear in the corporate world in larger numbers, and no longer just in marketing and graphics departments. The folks up in Bellevue can't be happy about this! Consequently the Macs are becoming a more significant issue for IT departments. This doesn't surprise us in the Wooden Spaceship — we use a lot of Macs ourselves. For example, my development work is done entirely on a MacBook Pro.
Apple has managed to nearly double their market share in the past 18 months — an impressive achievement. Their current market share overall is about 9%. While I couldn't find any numbers for their penetration into the corporate marketplace, anecdotally it's lower than the overall market (consumers are leading) but growing at a similar pace. This is all consistent with what we've been hearing in the field: MacBooks, iMacs, and OS/X Servers are popping up in lots of places — including where Windows used to reign supreme…
Naturally, this has led to requests for full Mac support in Discovery — and with the new version, we're delivering it! The screenshot at right shows the CI form for a MacBook (my development system, in fact). The form for OS/X servers is very similar, but they are classified differently (into the table
cmdb_ci_osx_server
, instead of
cmdb_ci_computer
). As you can see, all the usual information about a computer is there, including the full set of related lists for disks, file systems, installed software, network interfaces, and running processes (some of these are below what's visible in the screenshot).
The requirements for discovering Macs are the same as for any other flavor of Unix or Linux: the Mac must be running SSH, and you must supply Discovery with credentials for a user on the Mac. To enable SSH on a Mac, go to
System Preferences → Sharing → Remote Login; this can be automated in several different ways. No special rights are required for the user that Discovery logs in as. Any model of a Mac can be discovered, including MacBooks, iMacs, Mac Minis, and Mac Pros (including OS/X Servers), so long as they're running OS/X 10.4 or higher.
How many of y'all are seeing an increasing number of Macs in
your environment? Why is the Mac being selected over a Windows box?
