Optical Sharing

I recently needed to temporarily enable optical disk sharing on a couple of machines at a number of different sites (don’t ask why, long story). There were enough to where I wanted to do it sending a script. But where is this stuff stored? Snapshot says: in com.apple.NetworkBrowser.plist. Which keys? diff says: EnableODiskBrowsing and ODSSupported, both boolean. Resulting command to enable sharing out my DVD drive:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Not the kind of thing I wanted to leave running, so to then disable it again:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool NO

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool NO

Game Day is Finally Here!

For those of us who like football (and specifically college football), we’ve been waiting all year for this. Many of us have watched with great embarrassment as our teams collectively made some of the worse off-field blunders since the beginning of time (which is for me is since 1892 when the University of Georgia played their first football game). But now we’re ready to put all the locking of players in oubliettes, smacking around players, coaches suing coaches, coaches suing schools, court battles over whether or not coaches can sue schools, coaches driving hammered and both coaches and players beating people up behind us, pin our ears back and play some good, old fashioned football (or at least watch it if we’re out of our playing years).

But that’s us, the ones that like football. What about the majority of my readers? Those of you who have been with me since the beginning will remember a time when I posted a lot about Georgia football. For those of you who had no clue what I was talking about when I referenced football, I have a weekly column I’m going to do for the next few months. Many of you work for higher education environments. And this time of the year can be very trying if you don’t follow the team, or even college football. Others get stuck at the water cooler, looking at your feet as the people who you have absolutely no trouble talking to the rest of the year get lost in a religious fervor known as football.

So I’m going to give you some tasty morsels, even if you have no idea what a spiral is, who “Bear” is or why I consider Tim Tebow to have been the spawn of satan (and he was, I assure you). If you choose to read these articles then “you gonna’ get a’ edumacation, son.”

The quote of the week is “anything is possible.” This week is, for many big schools, an easy week. Florida, the number 4 team in the country plays Miami of Ohio. The only team with anything to loose here is Florida. You see, they will win that game. But if something weird happens (about as possible as a kext loading up properly on a Windows 7 computer), and somehow they manage to not win it big, then they will drop in the rankings. And in the power elite of college football, the rankings are almost everything. Also, if Florida looses, their  coach will have a heart attack (Urban Meyer, as much as I despise Florida is a great football coach who has a poorly programmed heart) and they will go back to the mediocrity they knew when Ron Zook was their coach (he couldn’t even coach a team of salesmen at Fry’s – sorry Illini, it’s true, I mean really, the veer option?!?!).

But even though San Jose State shouldn’t be able to beat #1 Alabama and Western Kentucky shouldn’t have a shot against #8 Nebraska, there seems to be a surprise every year, like when Appalachian State defeated the mighty Michigan Wolverines. And one team that shouldn’t be able to win this week is likely to do so. Therefore, if some team called Samford that no one has ever heard of manages to eek a historic victory out against a team like #20 Florida State and this comes up at the water cooler, just say “anything is possible.” After all, whether they’re being payed or not (can you imaging writing code for free?), they’re still just a bunch of kids…

And if on Friday you see people going through a manic episode as their anticipation is getting the best of them (you know, like you and I might have over the new iOS), just ask “where are they ranked pre-season?” and you will immediately be back into the water cooler talk (despite having no clue what it all means)!

Finally, if you would actually like to watch some games, then the Utah vs Pittsburgh game is sure to be a good one, as is the TCU vs Oregon State (DO NOT BET $ ON THAT GAME) game and the LSU vs North Carolina game. For that last game, given that North Carolina has some issues, I wouldn’t plan on rooting for them. They’re likely to have some star players out and LSU is likely to capitalize on that (plus LSU could probably pwn a fully weaponized UNC anyway, even if Butch Davis has a better coach than LSU does). The best game of the weekend though, might just be Boise State vs. Virginia Tech. These are two top 10 teams, both incredibly well coached and both playing to remain in contention for the national title. Expect some pretty good football here!

Extra Credit: If (you live on the west coast or in Utah) and (Utah manages to beat Pittsburg) then (say “Utah sure is acting like a Pac 10 team so far!”)

Disclaimer: If I have angered you with a comment I made about your team here, then please smile in anticipation of the USC rant that is building up inside me and compare to that at a later date.

Automating iPhone & iPad Deployment

The iPhone Configuration Utility is used to “image” iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. The reason I quoted image was because you aren’t laying bits down as you would in a traditional imaging scenario. Instead, you are sending a profile and possibly some applications to the device. This is done through a configuration profile, which is a property list, prefixed with a .mobileconfig extension.

The iPhone Configuration Utility stores its data in the ~/Library/MobileDevice directory. Here, you will find two directories:

• Devices – Contains the Device data for each device that has been docked to the iPhone Configuration Utility.
• Configuration Profiles – Contains the profiles that you will assign to devices in the form of .mobileconfig plists.

Both of these can be managed from the command line and therefore generated en masse. First, let’s look at creating Devices. If you go into the Devices directory you will see a .deviceinfo file for each device that you have interacted with through iPhone Configuration Utility, prefixed by the UDID of the device. Here, you can view one as a standard property list, which appears in a very simplistic fashion as follows:

<?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC “-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN” “http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd”>

<plist version=”1.0″>

<dict>

<key>UniqueChipID</key>

<integer>0</integer>

<key>applicationDictionaries</key>

<array/>

<key>configurationProfiles</key>

<array/>

<key>deviceActivationState</key>

<string>WildcardActivated</string>

<key>deviceBuildVersion</key>

<string>7E18</string>

<key>deviceCapacityKey</key>

<integer>15333203968</integer>

<key>deviceIdentifier</key>

<string>12a0b688649cfe0ce5df2ab8b4f9eaaee0d000fc</string>

<key>deviceLastConnected</key>

<date>2010-05-27T00:17:17Z</date>

<key>deviceName</key>

<string>Charles Edge’s iPhone</string>

<key>devicePhoneNumber</key>

<string>1 (310) 555-1212</string>

<key>deviceProductVersion</key>

<string>3.1.3</string>

<key>deviceSerialNumber</key>

<string>12345678901</string>

<key>deviceType</key>

<string>iPhone</string>

<key>provisioningProfiles</key>

<array/>

</dict>

</plist>

To find a UDID, you can plug a device into iTunes, select the device from the Devices list and then click on the Summary tab. Here, you can click on the bold Software Version to see the Build version, the bold Phone Number to see the IMEI (first click) or ICCID (second click) and the bolded Serial Number to see the Identifier (or UDID).

The serial number can also be obtained from a bar code on the box that came with the device, although the UDID cannot at this time. The serial though can then be brought into a database that has both, to correlate them (assuming you are programmatically going to wrangle this data at a later time) and assign profiles based on, for example, Open Directory or Active Directory group membership of the primary user.

Free Junos

For some time, Juniper has been agressively trying to win converts from Cisco. Not only in terms of sales, but also the hearts and minds of the engineers who influence purchasing decisions. Aggressively going after engineers has meant that for years, Juniper has made their certifications essentially free for those of us who were certified with Cisco. But now, they’re starting to cast their net a little wider and go after getting anyone and everyone certified for free, provided of course that you can pass the test.

Juniper’s Junos is being offered for free for a limited time. If you’re interested in beefing up your security and/or networking skills, this might not be a bad certification to look at (can’t beat the price and all):
http://f.netline.junipermarketing.com/juniper006e

Connect to Server Name

When connecting to a server from Mac OS X, what name will your system use when you bring up the Connect to Server dialog box? By default it shows the full name of the user authenticated to a client computer. But, not everyone wants this behavior. Therefore, you can change it by altering the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization.plist file.

The first thing you can do is add a key called UseDefaultName, which will tell the system to use a static value to populate the user field. That static value is then put into a string for Default Name. To make the UseDefaultName field true:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseDefaultName -bool YES

To then set the string for that default name field:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization DefaultName “Charles”

Or if you wanted nothing to default into the field, you’d leave it static but give it nothing to put into the field (you do still need the key there though, so don’t skip this step):

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization DefaultName “”

To have the field populated with the short name instead of long name, you would change UseDefaultName back to NO (after all, it isn’t a static setting, the short name):

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseDefaultName -bool NO

And you would then add a key for UseShortName and set it to true:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.ap
ple.NetworkAuthorization UseShortName -bool YES

Or, if you wanted to To change everything back, just delete the keys we created earlier:

defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseDefaultName

defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization UseShortName

defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization DefaultName

Scrubbing Assets from Podcast Producer

At some point, you may find that you would like to remove all episodes from Podcast Producer that were brought in using a specific workflow, or based on a specific keyword, a string in the title, a date, or the user that created the episodes. All of these attributes are trapped in the db.sqlite3 database for Podcast Producer. This database is stored in the Server directory of your shared library. Within this database there is a table called episodes. Using that table you can locate all episodes that match the given pattern. To query, you will use the sqlite3 command and identify the database path. A very basic incantation of this command would be to show all of the data for a given table, which in our example would be “episodes”:

sqlite3 /Volumes/xsanVolume/Library/PodcastProducer/Shared/Server/db.sqlite3 ‘SELECT * FROM episodes’

You could then expand this to limit results based on a pattern match. Here, we will have sqlite3 return the uuid for episodes that have a workflow_uuid of AAAAAAAA-BBBB-CCCC-DDDD-EEEEEEEEEEEE:

sqlite3 /Volumes/xsanVolume/Library/PodcastProducer/Shared/Server/db.sqlite3 ‘SELECT uuid FROM episodes WHERE workflow_uuid=”AAAAAAAA-BBBB-CCCC-DDDD-EEEEEEEEEEEE”‘

We could also change it up slightly and look for episodes that were created by a user with a shortname of cedge:

sqlite3 /Volumes/xsanVolume/Library/PodcastProducer/Shared/Server/db.sqlite3 ‘SELECT uuid FROM episodes WHERE author_shortname=”cedge”‘

The sqlite3 commands will return a set of uuids. Once you have a list of uuids, you can go into the Content directory in your shared library and you will see each listed there based on the date they were created (inside of their date folders). Date is also a field in the sqlite3 database, but given the ease of recursively performing tasks I’m not sure it will be required. The uuids will have a .prb extension and you can then piped paths with the added extension out of your command, into an array or use them for some other action, thus allowing for archiving, removing and even performing further tasks to the assets that live within the actual bundle, including hooking into transmogrifier to link to Final Cut Server.

Removing Feeds from Podcast Producer

Podcast Producer works by publishing video to an RSS feed known as the Podcast Library. There are feeds for workflows, Users, Keywords, Days (the podcasts are stored in day folders within Podcast Producer) and custom feeds. When you’re first getting started with and testing Podcast Producer you are likely to create a lot of test podcasts and feeds. Content is stored in the day folders in the Podcast Producer shared file system, and can be removed based on those days. To see the root of the shared file system (and therefore find the Content folder), you can use the following command (where VOLUMENAME is the name of the volume hosting:

serveradmin settings pcast:shared_filesystem

Within the Shared folder you will see Content and within Content you will see a directory for each day that an episode was created. Within the day folders you will see a long string (which is the generated ID of the episode) followed by a prb file extension. I call the prb a podcast resource bundle, although I’m not sure that’s official. Inside that bundle are all of the assets for the episode that the bundle represents, including property lists used to associate the corresponding podcast episode with various sorts of metadata and membership.

Removing the bundle for each episode alone does not remove it from the list in a feed. Therefore, to avoid broken links for episodes, you will then need to run

pcastconfig –sync_library

But if you leave the feed in place you can still see the feed itself, and even if you remove a workflow you will still see its corresponding feed listed in the Workflow Feeds, which can be pretty confusing. Feeds are defined in a pwf bundle, which I call a Podcast Workflow bundle. These can be found in the Server directory of your shared file system, within the Workflows directory. Here, you will see a number of long strings (the trend continues as these are the generated ID of the workflows) followed by the pwf extension indicating they are bundles.

These will correspond to the output of the following serveradmin command to show you which workflow is associated with which ID.

serveradmin settings pcast:workflows:_array_id:*:name

Or for a more robust albeit less human readable output, you can look at using the podcast command (a front end for many common Podcast Producer tasks) along with the –listfeeds option:

podcast –listfeeds

The feeds should not be removed directly from the file system. Instead, remove them using the –removefeed option, available with the podcast command. The following would remove a feed with an ID of AAAAAAAA-BBBB-CCCC-DDDD-EEEEEEEEEEEE:

podcast –removefeed –feed_uuid AAAAAAAA-BBBB-CCCC-DDDD-EEEEEEEEEEEE

Still working on a way to get all assets in a feed/workflow to tar or rm. I’m trying to use a curl against the atom feed at feed://SERVERNAME:8171/podcastproducer/atom_feeds/$FEEDGUID, where the $FEEDGUID is the output from –listfeeds.

New Krypted.com

I just can’t help myself. Every now and then I get a bug up my butt to go messing around with Krypted.com. In this case, I was tired of looking at some broken elements from the page and the front end of the site in general (just felt like something I might have built in college). I also needed to upgrade the site to the latest and greatest WordPress and some of the plug-ins that I was using were broken in 3. And thus, the lightest version of the site that I think has ever gone up. The posts are all still there, so no change to the content, but a lot of stuff was removed and the site in general (I think) looks and navigates much better.

Hope you like, and thank you for continuing to come to the site and read my random meanderings!

Managing Active Directory from iPhone

AD HelpDesk is a tool that can be used to manage certain aspects of Active Directory user accounts. Using AD HelpDesk, you can configure an iOS based device to connect to Active Directory using an administrative account (or an account that has been delegated administrative access).

Using the tool, you can then find a user. Using the user pane, you can unlock accounts, reset their passwords, force the resetting of the password on the next authentication event and optionally send a user their new password via SMS (a really cool little feature, IMO).

There are a lot of useful ways to fit this tool into your service desk or network administration toolbox. Most notably, if you have field services engineers, they can reset passwords easily without needing to take computers with them to visit end users. Or, provided you have VPN access into your environment, you could also reset a password for the executive that calls the emergency line while you’re at the water park with the kids.

Overall, nice niche tool that does exactly what the description on the App store claims!

Note: In the interest of full disclosure, the developer essentially supplied me with a free copy of the application; however, as always if I didn’t think it worked well I wouldn’t be posting it either way.

Minnebar-b-que

Regrettably, I’m on my way to the airport, but if you’re in Minneapolis today and looking for something fun to do, check out Minnebar-b-que down in Maple Grove. There is sure to be plenty of brats, some beer and maybe a tablet PC or 4:

http://anyvite.com/4atmfqaioc