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Comment by walterbell | Hacker News Reader

Has anyone used Profile Manager for mobile device management of iPhones and iPads? Can you configure per-app VPNs, or otherwise isolate network traffic for business and personal apps? Does it allow central configuration of all policies available in Apple Configurator? It would be worth the purchase cost of a Mac Mini, if all my iDevices could be consistently managed by a non-cloud Apple computer.

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I use Profile Manager. I run OSX Server on a 2012 16GB/1TB macmini and it's been pretty good. It's stable - I think I've rebooted it once in about a year and a half. Anything you can do in configurator you can do with profile manager aside from a few things like setting the wallpaper.

For things like per-app-vpn you need to create custom payloads for each app: https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/featu...

Thanks for the helpful info. Can per-app-vpn (e.g. IKEv2) be configured for any app, or does it require special support from the app developer?

While searching for info about per-app VPNs, I found this guide for on-demand VPNs that are associated with specific web sites, https://www.derman.com/blogs/Setting-Up-iOS-OnDemand-VPN

Do you mind elaborating a bit?

Is this used in a business or family setting?

I could see this being useful for my family and their collection of iDevices.

Yes indeed. You can also setup VPN on demand too. Some of this though requires supervised enrollment via DEP or Apple configurator 2.

https://help.apple.com/profilemanager/mac/5.2/

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