I pretty much leave my computer on and open all the time. And more than likely there’s about 20 websites open in a browser (no, I’m not going to get into any arguments about what browser I should be using so suffice it to say “a browser”), spread across a number of windows, tabs, etc. Occasionally I get a pop-up from someone wanting to chat with me through Facebook, whether I’m sitting at my computer or not. Since there have been a few times when that happened and I wasn’t around, I felt like I was being somewhat rude. So, I went ahead and went looking for a way to…
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Office 12.1.7 for Mac Update Seems Way Too Big
The Office 12.1.7 update is out and available for download. Because this is a security fix, you should definitely run this update. Provided you use Microsoft Auto-Update you should be able to install it automatically; otherwise, Microsoft describes the update and has a download available in their KnowledgeBase. It’s a rather large update, at about 268MB. I made a snapshot and looked at what it does, and like many updates from Microsoft before it, it changes so many files it’s difficult to tell exactly (including all of the .app bundles). Per Microsoft: This update fixes vulnerabilities in Office 2008 that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of your…
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Finding Disk Speeds on a NetApp
On a NetApp you can determine the disk speeds for drives in your Filer using the following command: storage show disk –a This will show all of the disks. Each disk has a unique identifier within the NetApp, indicated by a numeric sequence typically starting with a 2a, 2b, 3a, 3b, etc. You can obtain detailed information about each disk by showing disk with the unique identifier in the command. You can also see a listing of disks by volume using the following command (they will appear in the RPM column): vol status -r This will show a variety of statistics, including the disk type, speed, etc. The vol command…
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Mac OS X Server: CalDav Log Fun
The selected logfile does not exist. Ran into an interesting little problem again, where the iCal Server doesn’t create its log directory when you enable it. Not sure why this happens, but the first thing to do when you see this error is verify that the /var/log/caldavd directory is present on the system. If not: mkdir /var/log/caldavd Then, restart the service and see if access.log and error.log are created in this folder. If not: touch /var/log/caldavd/access.log touch /var/log/caldavd/error.log And for good measure: chmod 640 access.log chmod 640 error.log How did I know where those logs go? serveradmin settings calendar:ErrorLogFile; serveradmin settings calendar:AccessLogFile It’s therefore possible to actually decide you’d rather…
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Design Considerations: Exchange 2007 and the Mac
In Exchange 2007, the Client Access Server (CAS) role accepts connections from clients in order to allow them access to the Exchange Server infrastructure (mailboxes, public folders, GAL, etc). CAS accepts connections from: POP3 and/or IMAP4 clients Outlook Web Access (OWA) and/or OWA Light clients Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) clients Entourage falls into this category, and so when you are deploying Exchange 2007 alongside Entourage you will point your clients at your host running CAS. This is a change from previous versions, where you could enable IIS on any host and point clients there; however, it is similar in that CAS is very similar to the front end functionality that this…
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Keystrokes For Windows/Windows Server Explorer
There’s nothing that makes you faster with navigating around any GUI-based OSen than keystrokes. Navigate around the system, browse web pages and even swap between command windows at blazing speeds. You’ll get faster but you’ll seem exponentially faster to those trying to watch you work. I’ve done posts on Mac OS X and Safari. Now, here’s one for navigating around Windows with the same speed with which you navigate OS X. If I skipped something feel free to let me know and I’ll add it; there are a plethora of options and these are the ones off the top of my head… While I was shooting for Windows Explorer, most…
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VMware ESX 3.5 Security Patch
A security patch was released a few days ago from VMware for ESX 3.5: VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-200904201-SG: Updates VMX RPM Issues fixed in this patch (and their relevant symptoms, if applicable) include: A critical vulnerability in the virtual machine display function might allow a guest operating system to run code on the host. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CVE-2009-1244 to this issue.
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Using Dates in Shell Scripts
At a terminal prompt, it is really straight forward to grab the date, simply use the date command, with no arguments and you will get something similar to the following, including the day, date, time (with seconds), time zone and year: Tue Apr 15 00:40:07 CDT 2009 In a script this can choose fairly challenging, especially in cases where you just need the date stamp without the time and time zone, etc. Here we’re going to grab the current system date from ESX, OS X or Linux (or whatever OSen really) and then use a variable, currentdate, to put that date, formatted into a pretty standard format, YYYYMMDD: currentdate=`date ”+%c%m%d”…
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Configuring the ESX Firewall
The ESX firewall can be managed from the command line. If you login over SSH you can then use the following command to view (query) all of the active firewall entries (for those BSD/OS X folks, this command is similar to the ipfw command): esxcfg-firewall –q So we’re going to step through opening ports 3389 and 25 UDP and TCP into and out of our VM. We’re going to continue using the esxcfg-firewall command, as it’s the primary interface into the ESX servers/clusters firewall engine. We’re also going to use the -o option to open the port and then follow that up with a comma delimited set of parameters for…
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Mac: Disable AutoUpdate
Here’s a quick command line you can send out to disable the Microsoft Office auto-update functionality. This is particularly useful in environments where you are freezing systems and then pushing out all updates, rather than allowing hosts to automatically install updates: defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate HowToCheck -string “Manual” Note: Autoupdate has now been updated to version 2, so the string for more modern versions of Office is now: defaults write com.microsoft.autoupdate2 HowToCheck -string “Manual” Thanks to @seankaiser for the update!