• public speaking

    MacTech Is Coming To You!

    MacTech Boot Camp is Coming to Your Area, and https://krypted.com/ is a Sponsor. MacTech Boot Camp is a one-day event for consultants that support small-to-medium sized businesses, home office, and consumers.  MacTech has put together this single-track seminar specifically geared to serve the needs of consultants and techs wanting to serve their base better, and build their consulting business.  The curriculum is set by MacTech nationally and delivered by a combination of speakers from around the country, and from the region. Packed schedule.  Expert speakers.  Lunch is event included.   Useful for those new to the Apple market, new to consulting, as well as experienced consultants, it’s the ultimate regional event…

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

    Upgrading Open Directory From Snow Leopard Server to Lion Server

    I don’t believe in upgrading major operating systems for servers in place. There, I said it. If I’m doing an upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion, I’m about 99.9% of the time going to do so with a clean install. Before I do so, I’m going to export all the data from my old server and when I’m done with the fresh, clean, loving installation, I’m going to import that data back into my server. Actually, before I import the data, I’m going to install all of the point releases, application updates and security patches. That’s my process for production servers. Open Directory isn’t very different. I Archive and Restore…

  • iPhone

    5 Free Network Troubleshooting Tools for iPhone and iPod Touch (and iPad of course)

    There are a number of ways to troubleshoot network connections on (or using) an iOS device. These can be common troubleshooting steps that you might run from the command line or a third party app on a desktop computer or they could be specific to testing the network environment for an iOS device. Some of these apps are even free. Ping Lite One of the most common tasks that most administrators routinely do to test both DNS resolution and connectivity is pinging something. Ping Lite comes with a function to show your IP, a ping tool, a tool to ping the subnet, the ability to run trace routes and for…

  • Mac OS X

    Good Morning, Ruby

    Create a file called goodmorning.rb and paste the following into it: #!/usr/bin/env ruby puts 'Good Morning' Make the file executable for your user. Then run the file (let’s just say it’s on the desktop of a user named admin): /Users/admin/Desktop/goodmorning.rb That’s all for this morning…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Restarting PresSTORE Services

    A number of PresSTORE backup servers also provide other services in the environments they are installed in. Therefore, restarting PresSTORE services without restarting the host that runs the PresSTORE services can be done via the command line so that you don’t have to restart the server that is doing backups. To stop the PresSTORE server agent, use the stop-server command stored in /usr/local/aw: sudo /usr/local/aw/stop-server To the restart the server, use the start-server command, stored in the same location: /usr/local/aw/start-server The restart can also be done as a different user by invoking the -u operator followed by (and therefore defining) a user. The server occasionally stops itself for internal housecleaning,…

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

    Backing Up and Reindexing The Profile Manager Database in Lion Server

    A common task when scaling databases is to reindex tables within the database. This process makes lookups faster and databases run butter. Reindexing becomes a pretty easy step before or after backing up the database as a general housekeeping step. To backup the database, you’ll use the pg_dump command, defining the user with -U and then the database with -d. In the case of Profile Manager, the database is device_management. Given that data is distributed across a lot of tables in the device_management database, the below script will backup the device_management database and then reindex each of the tables. If you follow previous articles to enable the Postgres user, you…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Time Machine

    Using ServerBackup to Backup Lion Servers

    ServerBackup is a new command included in Lion Server, located in the /usr/sbin/ServerBackup directory. The ServerBackup command is used to backup the server settings for services running on a Lion Server. The command is pretty easy and straight forward to use, but does require you to be using Time Machine in order to actually run. In the most basic form, ServerBackup is invoked to run a backup using the backup command. Commands are prefixed with a -cmd followed by the actual command. As you might be able to guess, the commandlet to fire off a backup is backup. The backup command requires a -source option which will almost always be…