• Business,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  public speaking,  Time Machine

    My New Book on Time Machine Now Available

    I have published a new book on Time Machine (Time Capsule, deployment/Managed Prefs and Time Machine Server as well). I wrote it months and months ago and it finally ended up getting posted (publishing is a weird world like that sometimes). It is available for Kindle (Amazon) for now and should be up on the iBooks store as soon as the good people from iTunes Connect get back from their holiday break. To quote the Amazon excerpt: Time Machine is Apple’s built-in backup solution that comes bundled with Mac OS X. In this book, we will explore Time Machine, looking at how to enable Time Machine, configure what to back…

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

    Setting Up Promise for Direct Attached Storage

    With the advent of the latest Promise Arrays, I’m starting to see more and more environments stacking a boat load of shelves of storage on top of one another (e.g. for CrashPlan). As such, it occurs to me that I haven’t really covered the initial configuration of a Promise here. The way I like to set them up is using configuration scripts. I’ve been using different iterations of the same scripts for a long time. This script is meant to automatically format 1 E and 7 Js of Promise storage and setup the LUNs named EData1, EData2, J1Data1 and J1Data2, J2Data1, J2Data2, etc. These LUNs and their controller configuration is…

  • Mac OS X

    Opening a Terminal Window From, Well, Terminal

    Terminal is a great application. And we usually use Terminal for editing scripts and invoking things. But what about invoking Terminal from, well, Terminal. For starters, let’s look at opening a Terminal session to the root of the boot volume (aka /): open -a Terminal / The -a option, when used with the open command, allows you to define which application that the item defined in the following position will open in. For example, you could open an XML file in Xcode open -a Xcode /usr/share/postgresql/pg_hba.conf.sample You could then open Terminal by passing other commands into the command. For example, to open a new Terminal window to the current working…

  • Mac OS X

    Disable New Window Animations in Lion

    New windows in Lion have an animation, by default. With older systems, this can cause issues in other applications and disabling the feature (as cool as it may be) can help to remediate that problem. To do so: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool NO To then turn them back on: defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSAutomaticWindowAnimationsEnabled -bool YES

  • iPhone

    Running iPad Apps on Apple TV

    In what in my opinion is likely to be a preamble to hacking what an eventual Apple TV would look like, enterprising hax0rs have put together windowing managers and are now running iOS apps using a custom springboard for the Apple TV. Pretty awesome stuff IMHO!

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

    10 Tips on Policy Enforcement and Tracking for Mac OS X

    Large deployments of Mac OS X based systems are becoming more and more prevalent. In some ways, this is due to one to one programs and more frequent enterprise deployments of Mac OS X. As such, people are more and more looking to manage systems. And any time you have systems being managed, those using managed systems start looking to break the management of the computers. Therefore, a new topic comes up: trying to discern when a system has broken out of the management framework. For example, how do you know when users have broken your firmware password? How do you know when they’ve circumvented your managed preferences framework to…