LeftHand Storage uses the cliq command line for configuring their devices. cliq isn’t necessarily interactive and so we end up needing to specify the username, password and IP of the device with each command (although you can setup a key as well if you’re going to be doing automated tasks). One task that I’ve found to be pretty common is to use cliq to enable Chap authentication for volumes. To do so you’ll use the assignVolumeChap verb. Along with the assignVolumeChap verb you will need a number of options, each with an = for the payload of the option and delimited with a space between them. When using the assignVolumeChap…
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Scripting the Force Log Out
Scripting a log out event seems like the kind of thing that would be pretty simple, and if you use the AppleScript later it does appear simple, unless you want to force the event to occur immediately. Why would we want to do such a thing? Most commonly there are two requests. One is to invoke the script with the screen saver to meet some form of policy that requires a log out after a certain amount of time whether the user has saved their data or not (seems a big mean, but it’s not unheard of). The second is to invoke the script as part of a deployment or…
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Scripting Fast User Switching
Fast User Switching allows a user of Mac OS X to switch accounts without logging out of the account they are currently in. There are a number of uses for this, from troubleshooting to managing workflow. The back end functionality comes from the CGSession binary located in /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources. There are a couple of options you can use with CGSession, -switchToUserID and -suspend. /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu Extras/User.menu/Contents/Resources/CGSession -switchToUserID 1022 If an account has no password then the switch should occur automatically. If there is password then you can simply bring up a login window using the following command (you can also switch to a given user id but it will ask you for…
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Finding Stolen Machinery
I got this press release and thought it was pretty interesting. It’s just a cut/paste, and hasn’t been edited: BREAKING NEWS – New York City – MacPhoneHome finds another stolen computer! Late on a recent Sunday night, a Columbia University student was crossing Morningside Park returning to the Columbia University campus. He was accosted by four knife wielding thugs who beat him and robbed his MacBook Pro laptop, iPhone and wallet. The student advised Columbia University security personnel that since his laptop was partitioned with both a Windows and Mac Partition, he had installed both PC PhoneHome and MacPhoneHome tracking and recovery software on his computer which is available by…