• iPhone

    iPhone Field Test Mode

    iPhone can open a Field Test app. When in Field Test Mode, the device provides a lot of information not otherwise shown. For example, the IP address (no, not the one for Wi-Fi) can be located, neighboring cells can be shown, etc. To open the Field Test app, tapĀ *3001#12345#* and then tap the Call button.  

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

    Mass Deploying Time Machine in Mac OS X Lion

    A lot of environments want to use Time Machine at scale. But prior to Lion there hasn’t been a simple way to do so. Apple has introduced a new weapon in the war to backup client computers in the new command tmutil that was introduced in OS X Lion. The tmutil command allows administrators to enable Time Machine, make snapshots, kick off backups, delete snapshots, perform restores, configure options within Time Machine and, with a little scripting, build a centralized dashboard, pulling in Time Machine statistics from clients. Enabling Time Machine The first thing to know is that pretty much everything you do in Time Machine is going to require…

  • Mac OS X

    Backgrounds for Terminal Screens

    Terminal screens can use backgrounds in OS X Lion. To configure these settings, open Terminal and choose Preferences from the Terminal menu. Then click on the Window tab. Use the Image drop down to select Choose. This brings up a browse dialog box that you can use to choose an image. Browse to the image and then click on Open. Choose images that are pretty much all dark or all light as your font should be the opposite color.

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

    The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant

    In OS X Lion, Apple has released a tool calledĀ Lion Recovery, that lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc. But a lot of administrators and other users have had concerns over how to build a custom recovery disk so they can have physical media handy to perform such restores. Today, Apple has released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, which allows administrators to build such physical media. Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will install a recovery partition on a USB-attached volume (you can always clone from USB later if you really want it to be a SCSI or Fibre Channel volume). This partition doesn’t…

  • Mac OS X

    Fixing Color Problems with Ubuntu

    The Terminal application defaults have a problem passing colors with Ubuntu and other types of Linux machines with properly formed .bashrc files. This is because those systems do not know how to interpret the Lion xterm-color256 terminal declaration. The fix is to change this setting to xterm-color. This needs to be done for each Terminal default. Click on each (Basic, Grass, Homebrew, etc) and then click on the Advanced tab. From there, just set the Declare terminal as: to xterm-color and close. This can also be done through the command line. These settings are stored in the com.apple.Terminal.plist per user, in their ~/Library/Preferences. The key for each is in TerminalType,…

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

    LoginWindow: PolicyBanners and Backgrounds

    The Login Window in OS X is the screen you see while you’re typing in a username and password. There are a number of customizations used in some environments to make the system easier for users to use, or to make it more specific to a given user environment. One such is customizing the Login Window’s background, which can be done by replacing this file with one that you would like to use: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/LoginUIKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LoginUICore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/appleLinen.png You can also configure a message to be shown to users. This message, often referred to as an Acceptable Use Policy, can be used as a policy banner that users must accept in order to log…

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

    FTP On Lion Server

    Much has been made about the demise of FTP on OS X Server. Well, while it may be badly burned, it’s not dead yet. Let’s look at enabling FTP first on the server and then per share. Enable FTP on the Server The first thing to do on a server that you want to expose through FTP is enable tnftpd. To do so, open Workgroup Manager or Server and create a group that has user who you want to provide FTP services to. In this example we are going to assume a dedicated FTP server and open access to everyone, but feel free to swap out your group name for…