If you’re planning or preparing for an upgrade to Snow Leopard then there is likely to still be a little software not yet ready. There is a nice little compatibility matrix for software here: http://snowleopard.wikidot.com/
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Slides from MacSysAdmin Talk on Enterprise Backup
In case you were unable to make it to Sweden for the talk, here are the slides from the MacSysAdmin talk on Enterprise Backup. Hope the format suits ya’. If not, ummm… Sorry – or not…
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All 3 Snow Leopard Titles Now on Amazon
All 3 of the Snow Leopard titles I’m working on, editing or in one case done with for Apress are now posted to Amazon and can be purchased.
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Moving the Journal @afp548
I did a little article for afp548 that was posted while I was out of town. It’s on moving the journal of an HFS+ file system to offload the performance hit. Not terribly complicated but hopefully useful. Anyway, check it out here.
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A Stranger In A Strange Land…
Pickled herring, salted licorice, sports I don’t comprehend and a language I don’t speak. At the outset, Sweden seemed like a place that I just wasn’t going to fit in. But certain foods can become an acquired taste (if you stay away from Burger King and McDonalds) and oddly enough, the people out here speak English better than I do. But best of all there is a Mac Systems Administrative community here in Northern Europe that comes together at MacSysAdmin; one that is filled with the same challenges that we all face. It’s a community, like many around the world, filled with a quest for more knowledge on the platform…
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Backup Planning
The two attached files are a sample checklist and a sample backup calculator to be used in conjunction with the talk I’m giving at MacSysAdmin, which has been moved up to 10:45 in the morning today.
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Windows Server 2008 R2
Can you say virtualization? How about “better together”? Do you care about Hyper-V or Windows 7 integration right now? If the answer to either question is yes (and in my experience that’s not always actually the case) then you will want to check out R2. One of the biggest new features in R2 is one that VMware has had for about 5 or so years in Live Migration, the ability to move a virtual machine, while it’s running (assuming the application in use supports the ability to do so and that you’re using Clustered Shared Volumes). This includes failover in Cluster Node Connectivity Fault Tolerance. SC VMM, or System Center Virtual Machine…
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TLS + eDirectory
In order to bind a Mac OS X Server to eDirectory it’s more than likely going to give you fits if you don’t first augment the /etc/openldap/ldap.conf file. This is going to disable the TLS requirement. Before you do, if you can get TLS working with eDirectory then there’s likely no need to do the following but given that it is problematic if you’re having trouble, try this. To disable TLS, simply open it up and change the last line, for TLS_REQCERT to never and then killall DirectoryServices. You should then be able to bind to eDirectory (or another LDAP service) effectively. For further information on eDirectory integration, check out…
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Adding Color to & Customizing the Shell Prompt
As promised in the article on colorizing the terminal, let’s look at how to customize your bash prompt. First note that text as well as the following can be used in your string. a – ASCII bell d – date e – ASCII escape h – LocalHostName H – HostName j – number of jobs managed by shell l – basename of terminal device name n – insert a newline r – insert a carriage return @ – time in 12-hour HH:MM format A – time in 24-hour HH:MM format t – time in 12-hour HH:MM:SS format T – time in 24-hour HH:MM:SS format u – current user v –…
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Invoke ScreenSaver in Mac OS X with a Script
While troubleshooting some issues with a Screen Saver that just wouldn’t fire up. Even when you told the ScreenSaver to open (timed or via Expose) it wouldn’t work. Given the security implications for the given environment having a Screen Saver invoked automatically and manually are both requirements. So I found how to open it from the shell. From the /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS working directory simply do: ./ScreenSaverEngine The Screen Saver opened from the shell so I figured I would try it from an AppleScript, so isolated the application id to com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine and launched it manually: osascript -e ‘tell application id “com.apple.ScreenSaver.Engine” to launch’ This didn’t work. Replaced the ScreenSaver.Framework (located in /System/Library/Frameworks) with…