Due to security concerns, remote access to these applications has been replaced. 1) On a Windows or Mac system, Use Internet Explorer, Safari, or a similar. Apple Remote Desktop is the best way to manage the Mac computers on your network. Distribute software, provide real-time online help to end users, create detailed software and hardware reports, and automate routine management tasks—all without leaving your desk.

In the past three blogs you have seen,. In this blog I want to show you that you are also able to enable remote administration, including VNC access and that you are able to manage or add users to a remote Mac OS X device. This can be handy if you need to manage a lot of Mac devices and if you do not want to configure them by hand.

Let’s see how this works, again the Mac community was very helpful in explaining how to for instance create a user via Shell Script. After trying to manage the com.apple.remotemanagement.plist file located in /library/Preferences I searched for an alternative option to enable remote management and remote control via VNC.

An alternative was in, located in a well hidden place /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/. With this command line utility you are able to configure the remote management preferences.

Go to Insert| Text Box and choose a simple preset.

So this is a great tool to misuse (again 😉 ) in for instance the Discovery Script of a Configuration Item. Check if Remote Management is Activated Now that we have configured Remote Management we also want to create an administrative user that can be used to remotely control and manage the Mac OS X device. Let’s say we want to create a user called remoteadmin. First we need to first create a discovery script that checks if there is a folder called remoteadmin exists in the /users/ folder.

If so the user is already in place and nothing needs to be done, if the user is not in place we need to create the user by remediating it via the remediation script. In the fourth line of the script we starting Sudo in Super User mode (sudo –su), to be able to run Sudo in this mode we need to supply a password which we temporary parsed to a file called pwd.txt. This can be every accessible folder on the Mac OS X device. With the we are able to with the appropriate permissions and settings.

In this example we will use the super-secret password P@ssw0rd. Peter is a Principal Consultant, Trainer and Enterprise Mobility (Configuration Manager/Microsoft Intune/Enterprise Mobility Suite) MVP with Daalmans Consulting with a primary focus on the Enterprise Client Management and Enterprise Mobility.

Writing blogs and sharing his knowlegde since 2010 on ConfigMgrBlog.com / PeterDaalmans.com. Also one of the founders and leads of the Windows Management User Group Netherlands. Peter tries to speak every year on several events like TechDays Netherlands, ExpertsLive, IT/Dev Connections, BriForum, Midwest Management Summit, TechEd Australia, TechEd New Zealand and in 2017 Peter had the honor to speak at Microsoft Ignite. Author of four books about Configurtion Manager and Microsoft Enterprise Mobility +Security.