• iPhone

    iPhone 4: Where is My FaceTime?

    I am almost embarrassed how long this took me to figure out. FaceTime was missing on my iPhone 4. Apparently, if you upgrade from 3 to 4 it doesn’t automatically show up. Instead you need to go to Settings and then tap on the Phone settings. Right there, staring back at you is a screen that says FaceTime and it gives you the ability to turn it ON or OFF. Tap ON and it should reappear in your apps (required me to reboot to show up).

  • Windows Server

    Extending 2003 AD Schemas to Support Attributes for TPM and BitLocker

    Microsoft has published a number of scripts used to backup TPM (Trusted Platform Module) and BitLocker information for Windows clients. Windows Server 2008 and 2008R2 have support for the attributes required to centrally manage Microsoft’s BitLocker and TPM. Windows Server 2003 has the ability to run these (they require some searchFlags be set to confidential, so pre-2003 Active Directory cannot support these attributes). To extend the schema is pretty easy. To do so, use an administrative account for the forest (the administrator account for the first domain in the forest is a common one to use). Then log into the server running the schema operations FSMO role for the forest…

  • Windows XP

    Disable autotuning in Windows

    Microsoft has a great feature called autotuning. Autotuning though can be problematic when it comes to network connections with Microsoft Outlook, Internet Explorer 7, RDC and even some file sharing protocols over the WAN. This is mostly because not all firewalls support TCP Window Scaling for non-HTTP-based protocols. If you’re running into problems where these applications give you errors like “Outlook is trying to retrieve data from the Microsoft Exchange Server Exchange_Server_FQDN” then you can try disabling autotuning to see if that is your problem (usually this involves wan connections, btw). To disable autotuning, use netsh to set tcp for autotuninglevel to disabled: netsh interface tcp set global autotuninglevel=disabled To…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Server.app and Open Directory Rebuilds in Lion

    Server.app in Lion is a pretty good app for most tasks. But I find myself frequently doing things that I don’t think developers intended me to do. One such item is setting up and tearing down Open Directory to test various iterations of enabling a master. I frequently use slapconfig to destroyldapserver: slapconfig -destroyldapserver Doing so almost immediately allows me to demote an Open Directory master to a stand-alone server and then repromote the server to a master or replica for testing purposes. If you do this, then Open Directory  cannot be set back up using Server.app. The fix is to use Server Admin to repromote your server back to…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Customizing Teamserver (Blogs, Wikis, Collabd) in Lion Server

    I’ve done a few articles over the years on customizing the team server in OS X Server. This is one of those places where Lion really changes things. Once upon a time you could just swap out the graphics and have a fairly custom-looking wiki or implementation. In Lion, Apple has really simplified and stripped down the Lion elements in the interface for the server. There is less Apple branding and more functionality than ever. Gone is the time Apple spent building templates, but in the place of all those templates is a much more integrated and functional collaboration server. Added are features dedicated to navigation (e.g. the ribbon was…

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

    Disabling Bluetooth Discoverable Mode

    Awhile back I did a little article on Bluetooth. I also did an article on disabling menu items such as Bluetooth, using Managed Preferences. But I hadn’t looked at granular controls of Bluetooth settings. Luckily, a user submission on the topic just came in and Ted Kidd from Michigan (thanks, Ted!). Ted has provided a script for disabling Bluetooth’s Discoverable mode. His submission: I’ve found that more than a fair share of preferences are stored for each specific user on a computer. I’ve also found that some preferences are stored in a “ByHost” folder in /Users//Library/Preferences. Anything stored in the ByHost folder has the hardware UUID in the plist file…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Disabling and Redirecting CalDAV (aka Lion and Apache2)

    Lion Server moves a few things around. Not only in regards to a little window dressing in the GUI apps, but also under the hood. One such example is the /ical extension often used to direct users to iCal’s little section of the web portal in OS X Server, no longer around in Lion. One could just redirect requests for /ical to /webcal as was done previously. But what if you wanted to actually redirect the CalDAV traffic to look at a directory other than /calendars on the web server (e.g. maybe your site already uses /calendars). To do so, check out /etc/apache2/servermgr_web_apache2_config.plist. About half way down are the proxies…

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

    MacTech In-Depth: Mobile Device Management

    As many of you are aware, I will be speaking at the MacTech Conference in November. Krytped.com is also a sponsor of MacTech and I personally very much find everything they’re doing over there with these events to be great stuff. And now there’s more coming out of their incubator. MacTech has announced a great new series called MacTech In-Depth. This takes the existing format for the MacTech Conference and MacTech BootCamps that have gone on the road and brings a much more in-depth (as the name implies) approach, looking at a single topic for a full day. The first topic that is getting tackled is Mobile Device Management, in…

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

    Scripting Launchpad

    LaunchPad is the OS X Lion version of the old Launcher, or the iOS home screen, according to how you look at these things. A few notes on issues I’ve seen with LaunchPad. First, I’ve had to nuke LaunchPad and have it rebuild. To do so, delete the database. rm ~/Library/Application Support/Dock/*.db You might also need to kill the dock: killall Dock In a deployment scenario, I’ve started doing both as post flight tasks. Getting to the point where you’re granularly adding and removing items is done by editing the .db file in ~/Library/Application Support/Dock. In here is a generatedID followed by .db that makes up a SQLite database. This database…

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

    Controlling Saved Application States

    When Lion was new, I put up a post about clearing out information on saved applications states. Saved application states are a new feature in Lion that remembers the screens that were open and where each was when you quit applications. The reason for that post was that those states were causing a few minor issues with applications. There are a few applications that the saving of application states is really awesome for. I think it will mostly be different for each persons workflow. Personally I like saving the state of Terminal, Safari and a few others. However, the state of some others can be a bit annoying for me.…