• Business,  Xsan

    Brocade buying Foundry

    $3 Billion dollars is a lot of money, but I can’t think of a company more worth it.  Foundry makes amazing Ethernet switches.  Brocade makes good Fibre Channel switches and SAN products.  Foundry routers are not a shabby lot either.  It will be interesting to see whether Brocade uses this to go head to head against Cisco.   Juniper has been trying to go head-to-head with Cisco for awhile.  Now, with a new Brocade + Foundry and Juniper, Cisco will need to stay sharp or see serious parts of its business get eroded away.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Mac OS X: launch daemons vs launch agents

    There are two types of services that launchd manages: launch daemons can run without a user logged in. Launch daemons cannot display information using the GUI. Launch daemon configuration plist files are stored in the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons folder (for those provided by Apple et al) and /Library/LaunchDaemons (for the rest).  Launch agents run on behalf of a user and therefore need the user to be logged in to run.  Launch agents can display information through the window server. As with launch daemons, launch agent configuration plist files are stored in the /System/Library/LaunchAgents and /Library/LaunchAgents. User launch agents are installed in the ~/Library/LaunchAgents folder.

  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Pushing Out Policies Using Open Directory

    Now if you’re looking to push policies out from a centralized directory service that is not Active Directory then you will have slightly more work to do.  You will be using the poledit.exe utility rather than gpedit.msc.  The poledit.exe tool is stored on a Windows 2000 Server CD.  If you install the Admin Tools using the driveletteri386adminpak.msi installer then you will be able to build a policy file in adm format that can then be distributed.  When you open the Poledit.exe application you will click on File-> New New Policy.  From here you will see Default User and Default computer (much as with it’s successor gpedit.msc).  Options in poledit.exe for…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Setting up Admin Users of Windows XP through Open Directory PDC

    If you want the “admin” group to map to the NT “Directory Admins” group, the best way is to use dscl(1) to set the SMBSID or SMBRID attributes on the “admin” group record to 500.  If there is no SMBRID attribute then open the appropriate group, enable inspector and create an attribute called SMBRID.  You can give it a value that corresponds to the table below: http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=200608252114039&query=PDC%2Bgroups PS – Thanks Joel!

  • WordPress

    WordPress: AdSense Integration

    So there are a ton of modules out there for Joomla!, Mambo, WordPress and even Moodle that allow you to integrate AdSense into your site.  However, most of them are about as much a pain as just pasting the code into somewhere that it will fit.  For example, if you are using WordPress and you go into your Theme Editor then you, let’s say, edit the theme for Sidebar then you can just paste the code from your Google AdSense portal into a new <div> </div> section, or into an existing one.  It can take forever to figure out how to install, manage and use the various Google AdSense managers…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X: Bluetooth

    Ever wonder what the process is that manages Bluetooth on your machine? Well, it’s blued.  Now, I’ve had the occasion where I wanted to outright disable blued, so I’ve actually renamed it or removed it from my system image. But what if you want to set any preferences for Bluetooth? Well, those are stored in the com.apple.Bluetooth.*.plist file. The * here is due to the fact that it’s based on your machine, thus a ByHost Preference. The location is /var/root/Library/Preferences/ByHost. So if you take that preference file and copy it to another machine it won’t actually work. The other machine will create another as it has a different machine address.…

  • sites

    phpdoc and POD

    When you’re doing documentation for code it helps if the app you’re using to document your code is easy to use and tailored for use with your programming language.  For this purpose Plain Old Documentation, or pod.  Perlpod, one of the more widely used implementations was ported and used to write Programming Perl, with O’Reilly and Higher-Order Perl.  But what if you’re writing code in other languages?  Well, Javadoc is a popular documentation tool for Java.  Then there’s phpDocumentator, is a popular documentation tool for PHP.  All are easy to implement and open source, so give them a whirl if it’s the kind of thing that tickles your fancy.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  VMware

    Mac OS X: Running Non-Server OSen on VMware

    Beware: if you proceed with this you will violate the EULA of Mac OS X. In fact, reading this article may very well violate said EULA. In fact, reading this warning may… Catch my drift? So Mac OS X is not supported in VMware beta 2. Well, like many things that doesn’t mean that you can’t make it work. To get Mac OS X (not Mac OS X Server) to install into a VMware Fusion beta 2 VM use the following command, create an ISO with the name Mac OS X Install DVD that is a duplicate of the installer DVD and mount it: touch “/Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Library/CoreServices/ServerVersion.plist”…

  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X: Change Spaces Behavior in Dock using MCX

    Using Open Directory you can push out a key to stop the automatic Spaces switch when a different application in a different Space steals focus.  To do so, first open Workgroup Manager and click on the group in question.  Then click on Preferences and then the Details tab.  Next, click on the + sign and browse to /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app.  Next click on Dock and click on the pencil.  Here drop down the Often disclosure triangle and click on the New Key button.  From here, name the key workspaces-auto-swoosh and set the Type to Boolean and the Value to True.