MacStadium Blog

We get asked a lot about how to store secrets inside of Orka. It’s not always needed, but if you want to, we have a step-by-step guide for building your own custom solution.

In this post, we’ll take a look at using Buildkite to connect a GitHub account with Orka, and run a static CI/CD pipeline.

Jenkins is the most popular open-source CI/CD tool available - and we’ve got a plugin for it! Take a look at our step-by-step guide to getting the MacStadium Jenkins plugin for Orka up and running.

In part 2, learn to incorporate an additional Groovy Init Hook script that will install and configure the Orka plugin for Jenkins.

GitHub Actions, first released in 2019, is a free CI/CD system baked into GitHub. Grab your GitHub repo and see what you can do with GitHub Actions and your MacStadium hardware.

In our latest installment of the How to K8s series, we explore the concepts you’ll need to execute tasks via a look at dockerizing a Jenkins server so that it can create a user automatically upon startup in a container.

Last time, we dove into the ins and outs of Kubernetes Secrets, but in the latest How to K8s, we’ll cover creating a Secret via kubectl CLI.

What is a Kubernetes Secret and can you make sure that all your secrets are being kept? In this blog, we give you an overview of what Kubernetes Secrets are and how to make them.

Pods, ReplicaSets, and Deployments are definitely something new and returning users will need to have in their K8s playbook. Let us guide you on the K8s journey with our latest installment.

VNC, SSH, or VPN, you can interact with a Mac mini remotely in several different ways. In this how-to, we walk you through different ways you can access your Mac mini - including our recommendations.

In order to retain data beyond the life-cycle of a given Pod in Kubernetes, you’ll have to use a persistent volume. In this walkthrough, we’ll take you through the complexities of persistent volumes and claims.

Set sail with K8s with part four in the How to K8s series! Let us take you through how to pull, edit, and push a Docker image.

As Dev and Ops teams combine to DevOps teams, ephemeral builds become a bigger pain point - don’t worry, we’ll walk you through the how-tos with Orka.

In the second installment of How to K8s, we explore how to use a Kubernetes load balance service to expose a single IP.

When working with Kubernetes environments, you may find it useful to access a pod directly. You can do that by calling kubectl exec to get direct command line access.

Developers need remote access to their VMs and while SSH is great, sometimes you need a GUI. Orka provides VNC and ScreenShare ports out-of-the-box. Here's a quick guide.

Manipulating virtual machines has become a core skill for DevOps engineers. Orka allows for automated management of macOS VMs with simple commands.

The Orka demo gives you two hours of playtime to experience the power of Orka. Here's how to get the most out of your demo environment.

In Orka, macOS image management is amazingly simple because the architecture enforces best practices for network-based storage. Learn more about how it works.

Leveraging ephemeral builds as part of your CI pipeline greatly improves consistency, scalability, and ease of updating. In this post, learn how to connect your build server to shared storage.

If you haven’t yet heard much about YAML, it – very much like JSON or XML – is just a way of representing structured data. Learn more in this beginner's guide.

Is CI automation on your team's wishlist for 2020? Check out this piece for three must-have tools before getting started.

With one or more of our five storage solutions your team will be ready and able to focus on the work at hand. We break them down in this piece.

In this piece we highlight a few VM configuration settings that you may be overlooking. To optimize performance, these are things you want to take a look at.

Your company is growing and there are many factors contributing to the need for a more efficient CI infrastructure. Learn how MacStadium can aid in the transition to an infrastructure that can support a product at scale.

MacStadium has officially released Orka, our new virtualization layer for Mac build infrastructure based on Docker and Kubernetes technology. In this video, the MacStadium team shares why Orka was created, how Orka works, why building on Macs is different than other platforms, and much more.

We have recently expanded our Mac private cloud Site-to-Site Networking documentation to include specific setup instructions.

We've set out to discover best practices when virtualizing with vSphere and Jenkins when paired with MacStadium. Read what we consider to be the best way to produce ephemeral VMs.

CI/CD, regardless of the OS associated with it, is generally the same at a high level. However, there are some distinctions in the world of Mac CI/CD including Mac-specific tools and best practices.

In the latest in a series of helpful posts for new MacStadium adopters, get tips for using HashiCorp's Terraform with each of MacStadium's virtualization platforms.

MacStadium recently hosted a panel on CI best practices at AltConf. It was an interesting discussion as the companies participating in the panel represent very different development teams and CI practices.

In a series of blog posts, we will provide some pointers and a few examples for new MacStadium adopters to use as a guide. Let's start with Ansible...

Mobile DevOps has unique challenges especially when building for the Apple platform. In this post, we will cover the process of self-managed iOS builds and benefits of using ephemeral builds.

Provisioning your Mac cloud virtual machines for macOS and iOS CI just got easier. MacStadium engineers have put together some example Ansible scripts for provisioning your CI build environment.

We are excited to announce our new documentation website. Visit docs.macstadium.com for quick start guides, answers to your most frequently asked questions, best practices for different use cases, code examples, and much more!

So, what happens when the world starts upgrading Mac minis to the shiny new 2018 model? That old mini isn't dead yet! We've put together a list of ideas to repurpose your old mini and give it new life.

While we've been using and testing it for a while, we now officially support vSphere 6.7, which includes support for Apple File System (APFS) and macOS Mojave. Check out this guide to help you navigate the upgrade process.

Get up and running with your MacStadium VMware private cloud quickly and easily with our VMware Private Cloud Quick Start Guide.

MacStadium now offers the ability for customers to enable two-factor authentication when logging into the portal, providing an additional layer of security when accessing your customer environment.

As projects grow, build times can become problematic. However, there are several tweaks you can make to Xcode that can decrease the amount of time it takes for builds to complete without any extra work.

When you say to yourself, "I'd love to try a Mac server but I just don't know what I'd do with it," take a look at this list. It's a mix of Mac apps, open source projects, and iOS tools.

Text replacement snippets are a useful tool that can be used on macOS and iOS. You create shortcut text that, when typed, expands to something longer.

High Sierra is almost among us. Here are a few things you should consider as you decide to upgrade to macOS 10.13.

There is a new terminal server option for Mac. It is called NuoRDS. It is simple to install, has a number of options and is quite well developed.

The venerable Panic Inc announced Transmit 5 today, and update to a very popular file transfer app that just gets better and better.

Monitoring network performance of hosted servers is essential to managing the capabilities of the software running on your Mac servers at MacStadium.

As iOS becomes more powerful, and screens get larger and larger, many people are traveling with just an iPhone or iPad.

What if you could use Apple's iCloud to store a local copy of your code and have it available on any of your Apple devices as well? This is certainly possible.

Over the last year, MacStadium has seen tremendous growth by offering Mac servers for development and continuous integration.

Today, we're releasing a new dedicated Help portal with built-in search for our customers and others new to Mac hosting.

We have a lot of customers who use their Mac mini as a VPN server. This works great when you need an IP address in the US, or a secure internet connection on the road.

While there are many brave souls who updated to macOS 10.12 Sierra immediately, we're sure many of you were waiting for the all clear.

This update brings all sorts of upgrades and features, but there is one particular that is quite useful if you are running a Mac server to host your mail, notes, calendars and other features in macOS Server.

This tutorial will introduce you to Apple’s very own MDM solution, called Profile Manager. Profile Manager provides an impressive feature set, is easy to use, rather stable and — above all — very affordable.

Resilio Sync is a power application that lets you run your own file syncing server. It has many of the powerful features found in Dropbox, but it runs on your own hardware.

A few customers have asked about this now that we’re provisioning more Mac servers with ESXi 6.0 U2. Rather than have you wait for a support ticket, you can take care of it yourself with the following guide.

Thanks to one of our customers, we recently discovered an issue with the VMware ESXi host client that has the potential to affect many MacStadium users.

"Why do I have constant issues connecting to my colocated Mac running OS X?" This question doesn't come up often, but it’s worth sharing the most likely answer and how to fix the issue permanently.

Let’s look at how time zones came about, how technology handles time zones, and ways to avoid time zone issues in software development and infrastructure management.

In this article, we'll go over the basic components of a Mac server and the purpose each component plays in making the server work. With this knowledge, the hardware can help you create the next app of the year.

This post is part of our beginner's guide to hosting, Mac servers, and virtualization. Follow along on Twitter or with RSS. Your team has released a brand new app and it’s flooded with new users.

In early 2016, VMware began including the embedded HTML5 host client for managing ESXi in version 6.0 U2 from your web browser. It’s a great solution for users getting started with a dedicated Mac.

Science is difficult. Developing a strict testing system for a science experiment that is repeatable in other lab environments is even harder.

A couple days ago, Apple released its latest round of Mac mini hardware to the world. Today, we show you a complete step by step how-to tear-down the 2014 Mac mini from the outside-in.

Did you know you can easily change your remote desktop resolution to a variety of choices which will best suit your requirements? From 800x600 to 1080p and beyond, we have solutions that will enable them all!

The majority of our enterprise customers (and all customers using Mac private cloud environments) take advantage of one of the Cisco Firewall options that we offer here at MacStadium.

Utilizing a hosted Mac at MacStadium to run Plex media server is a great solution! Plex organizes video, music and photos from personal media libraries and streams them to smart TVs, streaming boxes and mobile devices.

Configuring a hosted Mac server at MacStadium to run a dedicated OwnCloud private cloud storage solution is a great solution for businesses of any size!

Part two of a 4-part series designed to get new subscribers educated, configured, tested, and ultimately up and running with their Mac servers at MacStadium.

This is a 4 part series designed to get new subscribers educated, configured, tested, and ultimately up and running with their Mac servers at MacStadium.

SSH allows you to connect securely to your server. In this screencast I walk you through connecting to your server using SSH.

SFTP is basically FTP through SSH which makes the communications secure back and forth.

With the move from 10.6 to 10.7 and 10.8, Apple has still made the Work Group Manager Application available to those who still like the old UI of the application.

Continued coverage of Work Group Manager. If you haven't viewed the previous screencast on Work Group Manager, you will want to view that one first before this one.

Because your server is in a hosted environment accessing your server remotely is a must if you are to manage it and get all you can out of it.

With so many people using mobile devices as their primary platform, it is important to have a way to share files with those mobile devices from your server.

One of the advantages of using the built in wiki is you can customize it to fit your needs. The wiki can be a great resource to collaborate with others and to share files.

With Wiki website, Apple gives you a prebuilt template for a wiki that you can use to host your own wiki, blogs, and other online features like an online calendar.

Profile Manager allows you to manage many of the details of setting up your devices so you only have to set it up once and then push those profiles to all your devices.

Once you have Profile Manager set up you can begin to create profiles that you can use to manage your clients and their devices.

Not only does Profile Manager allow you to enroll your Macs in the service, you can also enroll your iOS devices as well.

In order for your Mac's to be able to receive profiles they need to be enrolled in the Profile Manager Service.

Built into Mountain Lion Server is a Website Service that allows you to host multiple websites and does all of the routing internally to the proper address.

One of the benefits of hosting your own server at MacStadium is being able to host your own mail server. Built right into Mountain Lion Server is a Mail Server that can handle the email for your domain.

Back ups are something we all need to do and make sure all of our client machines are doing to protect our data. In addition to local back ups it is a good idea to have remote back ups as well.

FTP is a service that most people think about when they think about servers. FTP has been the way many people upload files to servers and while it is an older service it is something many still rely on today.

Secure connections are something most of us think about today especially on unsecured public wifi networks. A VPN connection can create an encrypted connection to keep all of your data safe.

With your hosted Mountain Lion Server you have a messages service built in that you can configure and control to suit whatever your needs are.

In Mountain Lion Server there is a built in contact service that allows you to set up your own private contacts cloud to keep your contact data in sync across your various devices.

Running a Mountain Lion Server calendar yourself adds privacy to your schedule and allows you to have complete control over who views and uses your calendar.

Once your shares are set up and you have all your file sharing permission set, you will want to start using those shares and get to them in the most convenient way possible.

File sharing is one of the basic services we all expect from a server. Having access to our files and folders from anywhere on whatever devices we are makes sure that we are never without the documents we need.

Once you have set up your Open Directory Master it is time to add network accounts to your server.

One of the benefits of OS X Server is the built in MDM (Mobile Device Management) service called Profile Manager.

An Open Directory allows for network accounts and is required for some of Mountain Lion's services like Profile Manager.

In this screencast I cover the DNS Service in Mountain Lion Server. DNS is the most critical service that must be functioning correctly if all the other services are going to work in OS X Server.

In this tutorial I cover how to set up SSL Certificates to use the services in Mountain Lion Server.

If you desire to 'lock down' your hosted Mac mini in MacStadium, there are a variety of solutions available...

In this screencast I cover the advanced OSX Firewall configuration using the 3rd party IceFloor Firewall utility and talk about the notion of 'port forwarding'.

Because all the ports on your Mac Mini are open in a hosted environment, it becomes more important to deploy a firewall to control who can have access to what services.