• Business,  iPhone

    iPhone, NFC & A Few Hundred Billion Dollars

    Many of us now use our phone to check our email more often than we use our computer. Our phones go everywhere with us (although please hang up when you’re in the can as few things are more disgusting than listening to someone talk to their mom when they’re droppin’ the kids off at the pool in the stall next to you or hearing someone you’re talking to dropping’ a deuce in the pooper on the other end of the line). Many no longer have land lines and some have even dumped desktop and laptop computers in favor of smart-phone or tablet based digital lives. Few skipped the computer altogether…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    mDNSResponder, mDNS and dns-sd

    The process that makes Bonjour work is mDNSResponder, located in /usr/sbin. /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist invokes mDNSResponder on boot. One of the easiest ways to troubleshoot issues you think are related to Bonjour is to temporarily disable the mDNSResponder: launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist To enable it: launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist In addition to basic starting and stopping of the mDNSResponder, when troubleshooting any service, one should always look at logs. Log events are logged to the standard syslog facility and so are available via Console. These are locate at /var/log/system.log. Searching for mDNSResponder errors in system.log can also be done from the command line using: cat /var/log/system.log | grep mDNSResponder Or interactively so…

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

    Disabling Periodic Scripts

    Mac OS X does a little housecleaning in batch processes that run daily, weekly and monthly. These are kicked off by LaunchDaemons that reside in /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and are called com.apple.periodic.daily.plist, com.apple.periodic.weekly.plist and com.apple.periodic.monthly.plist. These need to run and so should not be disabled outright. However, they can disabled temporarily, as when you need a somewhat process intensive script to run for a few days. Therefore, we need a way to disable these and re-enable them. One could just move those files, but there’s actually a more graceful way. Running defaults read against one of the property lists can be done as follows: defaults read /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.periodic-daily We could use defaults to…

  • Mac OS X,  Unix,  Windows XP

    Subversion Cheat Sheet

    I’ve done a few articles in the past on different tasks in svn and git, but I have a little cheat sheet of sorts I’ve been using for awhile for Subversion on Mac OS X and thought I would share it. Before you get started, check your version. I use 2.0 but I seem to remember all of these are about the same as they were previously: svn --version To get started, Subversion uses a repository to store projects. Each client needs a repository and these should be on direct attached drives. The repository hosts a Berkeley database a folder per project you check out, or import. To create a…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Arbitrary Registered URIs

    Zack Smith did a post on his website about using TextMate’s URI links (at http://www.wallcity.org/2011/03/textmate-uri-links ). This prompted me to feel like checking to see which arbitrary strings would be followed from within the major browsers of Mac OS X. See for yourself: file:///Applications/iTunes.app/Contents/MacOS help://test vnc://127.0.0.1 ftp://127.0.0.1 smb://127.0.0.1 smb://127.0.0.1/myshare/my%20file.txt afp://127.0.0.1 afp://127.0.0.1/myshare/mydmg.dmg nfs://127.0.0.1 Note: The following command still stops HelpViewer.app from opening AppleScript: defaults write /System/Library/CoreServices/HelpViewer.app/Contents/Info NSAppleScriptEnabled -bool no

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

    Article in March 2011 MacTech

    This month, for MacTech Magazine, I wrote an article called “Implementing File & Print Services on Windows Servers for Mac OS X Clients.” The article, written with the Enterprise Desktop Alliance, focuses again on replacing Xserve hardware in rack dense environments with services running on Windows. In this article I focused on ExtremeZ-IP and using Centrify to publish shares as automounts. It’s another step in a step-by-step technical approach at deploying Mac OS X clients in Windows environments. Hope you enjoy!

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  public speaking

    MacSysAdmin 2011

    For those of you who need to get out and do something interesting this upcoming October, check out the European Macintosh System Administrators Meeting 2011 (aka MacSysAdmin 2011). It will be October 5-7th and it’s sure to be a blast as in years past. This year, myself and Zack Smith from 318 will both be speaking, as well as Arek Dreyer, Ed Marczak, Nigel Kersten, Duncan McCracken, Greg Neagle, Rick Wylie, Andrina Kelly, Alan Gordon and most notably, Andy Ihnatko! It’s a pretty awesome lineup and my favorite part about MacSysAdmin is always the fact that the attendees are amongst the highest caliber of system admins I have the chance…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure,  Windows Server

    Using the ExtremeZ-IP Command Line

    When you are configuring ExtremeZ-IP as a print server, you will need to set up and configure each printer. However, if you already have setup and configured printer queues for the Windows server, you can import existing queues into ExtremeZ-IP. This can be done programatically via the ExtremeZ-IP EZIPUTIL command line tool. EZIPUTIL has a number of options, whereby the SERVER option is used to configure global settings for ExtremeZ-IP, VOLUME is used to create, edit and delete print queues and PRINT is used to manage shared print queues. Each of the options also has a number of switches for the feature(s) that are being managed. These are structured as…