• Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment,  Unix

    Interpreting Python

    Once upon a time I had to learn to script in bash. I’m still learning, as with most people, but I’m feeling pretty comfortable. I often have people ask me what is the easiest way to learn scripting and I find myself telling people to use the history command. Much of what people need beyond simply looking at their bash history involves variable substitution, loops and regular expressions. Tackled separately this makes a palatable experience. So then what makes object-oriented or interpretive languages such as perl or python so much more difficult? Is it the lack of a bash history? Let’s try and exercise and see about that. Open a…

  • cloud

    Hosting Web Sites in Amazon Web Services

    Amazon S3 now allows administrators to host simple web sites. Previously, you could host images, videos and other files using S3 buckets, but now you can host full sites. To do so you will need only configure a webroot and some error documents. To get started: Log into the Amazon S3 Management Console Right-click on an Amazon S3 bucket Open the Properties panel Configure your webroot Click on the Website tab Configure error documents in the Website tab Click Save Pretty easy, right? But what if you need to configure the php.ini file or add MIME types, etc. Notice that at the start of this I said “simple.” I’m sure more…

  • Windows Server,  Xsan

    Installing Windows Clients for Xsan & StorNext

    There are a lot of environments that attach Windows client computers to an Xsan or StorNext filesystem. In the past I’ve looked at using different versions of StorNext to communicate with Xsan, but in this article we’re actually going to take a look at Quantum’s StorNext FX2 client software. Before getting started, you’ll want to have the StorNext media, have the serial number added to the metadata controllers, have the HBA (fibre channel card) installed, have the fibre patched into the HBA, have the IP addresses for the metadata controllers documented and have a copy of the .auth_secret file obtainable from the metadata controllers once they’ve been properly licensed. To…

  • iPhone,  Mass Deployment

    Securing iOS Based Devices Paper

    The CIRCL (Computer Incident Response Center Luxembourg) has cited my Enterprise iOS book in a paper title Security of iOS Based Devices. It’s only a few pages so a pretty quick read. But what is interesting about it is that in the second edition of the book I’ve already started to replace the Applications chapter (which I wasn’t really happy with in the first place) with a chapter on securing the devices. These days, with a two year old around, I’ve been thinking about adding something on physical security, but I think that might just be superfluous (and ever changing)…  Also, in preparation for 2nd edition, I would like to…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Deleting a Podcast in Podcast Producer

    In an earlier post I looked at querying feeds and removing objects from Podcast Producer in a somewhat broad manner. To delete a single podcast (not a feed), you need to first find the ID for the podcast, then delete the corresponding podcast bundle (pdb). Removing assets is one of the only processes with regards to Podcast Producer that isn’t intuitive, and it’s just waiting for someone to wrap these steps into a nice pretty GUI… To find the ID of the podcast, first let’s query the sql database for the title: sqlite3 /Volumes/pcp/PodcastProducer/Server/db.sqlite3 'SELECT * FROM episodes' | grep "TITLE" Note the date and the ID (the big long…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Binding Redhat to Open Directory

    I’ve done a number of articles on using Linux to provide services such as OpenLDAP for Mac OS X, but never on using the LDAP implementation in Mac OS X Server to provide authentication services for Linux. Well, it isn’t that difficult to do, but it is worth pointing out how to do it. To get started, we’re going to use Red Hat. You’ll want to have a known IP address for Open Directory and if SSL is required you’ll want to install the certificate on the Red Hat box before moving forward. There are two tools that can be used to hook Red Hat into an LDAP environment. The…

  • Mac OS X,  Ubuntu

    Quick & Dirty sed Find/Replace

    I find a very common task that I need to do is find a string in a file and replace it with another string. Or better, find all instances of a given string and replace them with a new string. I figure others will need to do this as well. This is also an interesting example of how Mac OS X is not “the same” as Linux. The sed command can be used to quickly perform a find and replace inside of a file. The following example will use the -i option to do so in-place, defining no extensions to -i using the double quotes (“”), then using the /s…

  • Active Directory,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Article in MacTech

    For those who don’t yet get a subscription to MacTech Magazine, I’ve been a long time lurker and suggest you do the same. I recently submitted an article to them for the Enterprise Desktop Alliance and it will be in the February issue. There’s also one appearing in the March issue. They’re both fairly long and cover the topic of moving specific services off of Mac OS X Server and onto the Windows platform. I don’t recommend that any organization go out and start ripping out all their Mac OS X Servers because Apple dropped the Xserve. But I am a guy who really likes having a lot of options…

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

    Samba and streams

    Seems like the answer to a lot of Samba problems are to toggle streams on or off according to what kind of problems are being encountered. So I thought I’d do a couple of quick .command files that can be sent to clients to do it. This way, they can be sent to users having problems to test enabling or disabling the option. Click to download