• Business,  Mac OS X Server

    Active Announcement in the Morning!

    For those who haven’t yet seen it, or who almost forgot due to crossing too many time zones, Active Storage, the makers of the Active RAID will be announcing their new product tomorrow morning. From what you see on the web site it looks to be some sort of rack mount device. Given their fantastic development work in the past, it’s sure to be a good addition to the bat-belts of the MacIT crowd. 9am Eastern, see ya’ there! http://www.activestorage.com

  • Xsan

    The Qlogic Command Line

    For many environments, a Qlogic switch can be as simple as plugging it into the wall to get working. The web interface is a great tool and appropriate for many a configuration, but the interactive shell environment on the switches gives a few more options. Let’s first get logged into the switch. The switch will have an IP address, so telnet into that address (I’ll use the my IP rather than the default IP of 10.0.0.1 that the switches ship with): telnet 192.168.210.87 Once you provide a password you’ll be placed into an Interactive Command Line Interface SHell environment, which Qlogic calls CLISH. Establishing connection…   Please wait. ***************************************************** *…

  • Uncategorized

    iPad Deployment

    If you are like me then while the rumor mills were bugging you, you were focused on intel about mass deployment. Todays announcement of the iPad was a huge tell about much of what administrators will need to know, but obviously not all – only time will tell with some things. Little can be easier than deploying a MacBook (or a thousand) if you have the right tools at your disposal. Not so with an iPhone. It comes down to that pesky configuration utility and docking the thing to get the xml file onto it (or visiting a site from a browser). As we’ve seen, for 1 or 2 devices the…

  • iPhone

    iPhone Life Article

    An excerpt-turned-article of mine just appeared in iPhone Life Magazine. IT’s called The Inevitability of the iPhone in the Enterprise: http://www.iphonelife.com/issues/2011March-April/InevitabilityIPhoneEnterprise Hope you enjoy!

  • Articles and Books

    Law Firms and iPads

    Josh Barrett, of tabletlegal.com posted a mini-review of my latest book, the Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator’s Guide. It’s an interesting look at iPads making their way into law firms despite the often reluctant IT admins who have to support them. Big thanks to Josh for a favorable review!

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    The Mac OS X App Store & Managed Environments

    The Mac OS X App Store was released earlier this month as a part of the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update. The App Store, with over 1,000 applications (including a couple of server tools), allowing people to download and install applications on Mac OS X computers without needing to understand how to click through the screens of a standard package installer, drag applications from disk images into the /Applications folder or basically how to do practically anything except for click and provide a valid credit card number. As with the App Store that debuted with the iPhone, the App Store for Mac OS X is clearly aimed at residential customers,…

  • VMware

    Registering VMs w/ VMware ESX & ESXi

    To register a virtual machine using VMware’s ESX and ESXi is a pretty straight forward process. You will use the vmware-cmd and vmware-cmd.pl respectively. On ESX, simply issues the vmware-cmd followed by the path to your vmx file and then the register verb. For example, if the path to the vmx were /VMs/XP/xp.vmx then you would use the following command to register that virtual machine to ESX: vmware-cmd /VMs/XP/xp.vmx register ESXi (and vSphere) are just a bit more complex (what, bein’ perl and all). You will need to define the -H for the host, the -U for username and the -P for password as well. The path to the vmx…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Screen Sharing Through Absolute Manage

    Awhile back I did a short article that looked at using the vnc:// handler to programatically interface with the Screen Sharing application and a follow up article on invoking RDP via CoRD from the command line. Well, if you are an Absolute Manage user, you can also remotely control client computers through the admin without passing username and password information (trust stems from the agent and server relationship). This is a pretty neat feature. Absolute Manage has registered the lanrevagent:// handler at installation time (Admin). The syntax for invoking lanrevagent is similar to a REST interface, except here you define the command, followed by what exactly to run that command…