Living in Los Angeles for over a decade, I’ve seen a lot of head shots. And driving around in practically every city in the country I’ve seen the ugly mug of more real estate agents than I can count on many a bench, bus and billboard. I’ve seen artists put samples of their work on business cards, black and white pictures of animals on books and even the picture of technical authors on the inside jacket of books (for the record my picture has never been in one of my books, although Apress has tried to get me to give them one a few times now). If you’re applying for…
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What Mac App Store ID is Bessie Using in Lion?
Users can log into the Mac App Store using their personal Apple ID. Users can also log into the Mac App Store with an AppleID that is linked to a company owned email address instead. The AppleID itself should be a company owned asset so that if/when users leave the organization, the organizations till owns the software that they purchase. Whether purchasing software through a volume purchasing program or directly, those dollars are wasted if the user is purchasing software through a personal AppleID. Therefore, you need a way to look at what AppleID that a user is using and to make sure that the organization has a way to…
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MacTech, Slides and Conference Goodness
MacTech Day 1 My MacTech experience started last night. I flew into Los Angeles and was picked up at the airport by my coworker, Zack Smith. Given that I lived in Santa Monica for over a decade, I drove the Mini Cooper that 318 bought recently from LAX to Studio City. On the way, I got to get caught up with Zack’s stories from a month of vacation (living vicariously through others definitely has its moments). We got to the Universal City Sheraton in less than an hour during rush hour. Given the 405 being all messed up, we dodged a few bullets and cut through South Central Los Angeles…
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Managing Lion Server's Adaptive Firewall From the Command Line
Previously, I had done an article on using the adaptive firewall in Mac OS x Server. But I hadn’t looked at controlling it from the command line yet. In Lion Server, the firewall automatically blocks incoming connections that it considers to be dangerous. For example, if a client attempts too many incorrect logins then a firewall rule restricts that user from attempting to communicate with the server for 15 minutes. If you’re troubleshooting and you accidentally tripped up one of these rules then it can be a bit frustrating. Which is why Apple gives us afctl, a tool that interacts with the adaptive firewall. The most basic task you can…
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Backing Up Windows Server 2008 and Active Directory with CrashPlan
I was sitting at the JAMF National User Conference today and I couldn’t help but notice that CrashPlan is a sponsor. It got me to thinking about something someone said last week at the MacTech conference about the fact that CrashPlan was great for clients but that it would need lots of agents for backing up Servers. So at 318, we’ve developed a tool for doing a lot of the service configuration backup in a Mac OS X Server environment, in the form of sabackup and our Open Directory Archiver package. This tends to get most everything we need to backup for the Apple platform. But what about Windows Servers……
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Dealing With Profile Manager Conflicts in Lion
Changing OS X Settings for Profiles bound to clients results in Managed Client changes (mcxread shows them) and inserts the info into Managed Client in this order: User Computer Computer Group Everyone User Group The data in the managed client attributes is replaced completely and not per-key. Installing profiles from the command line provides more information as to what is going on behind the scenes. Having said this, in some cases I can get a Provisioning Profile Validation: failed to read CMS (-25257) error when attempting to install the same profile a second time. In other cases it just fails if I try to run verbosely (in those cases it…