Does anybody use Munki for Self Service?

[jared_f]

Hi All,

As clear by the subject, does anyone use Munki as a Self Service for your Macs? Always looking for new tools and it really caught my eye. What are your experiences/issues?

Jared

[BlakeRichardson]

My team looked at it about 3-4 years ago, it was very buggy and difficult to get working. In the end we scrapped the project. We have also used Radmind but that was also scrapped as was far to difficult to maintain. 

At the moment we don't use anything as its mandatory that we upgrade everyones OS every 12 months. Any minor application updates the end user is able to deal with. 

Its not ideal but the best we have found so far. I am looking at System Manager as a way of doing this. 

[jared_f]

@BlakeRichardson I will keep that in mind during my testing. While Meraki SSP is great, it is clearly still in beta and not stable enough to push. 

[BlakeRichardson]

Keep in mind it was 3-4 years ago we looked at it, so I am sure its improved a lot since then. 

[sshort]

I've been using Munki for about 2 years, and it works well for our purposes. The main downside is the server is hosted on-prem, so initial user onboarding works well, and employees that are regularly in-office get updates as they're pushed out. The downside are remote employees will rarely get updates, even if they occasionally connect to VPN you're relying on the user maintaining a connection long enough for it to check in with the server and download over an often slower connection.

I would recommend using MunkiAdmin if you're just getting started with your own repo. The community provides great support via GitHub, and I've attended multiple conference sessions with Greg Neagle (the primary developer) that really helped me fine tune my Munki setup. Deploying Munki can sometimes be a chicken-and-egg problem (which you may have already discovered if you're playing around with it already).

That being said... my goal is to move over to Meraki app management. The ability to push/uninstall apps from a cloud portal is super beneficial in my office environment, as I can't always rely on someone coming to a physical building to get continuous Munki updates.