I had a pretty strange issue recently with how QuickBooks works with Samba. The fix was to disable ACLs for SMB. While this seems like a silly issue for silly software, it’s worth noting the fix. Before doing so, it’s worth mentioning that defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server AclsEnabled -bool NO If yore having saving issues from QuickBooks and this doesn’t fix your issue I’d immediately switch back: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server AclsEnabled -bool YES
-
-
Powershell Goodies From Vexasoft
There are a number of features that make mass deployment of Mac OS X pretty easy. Some of these would be great to have in Windows. These range from systemconfiguration to networksetup and the ability to look at packages that have been installed and review their bills of material. Well, the good people at Vexasoft have built a number of Powershell libraries that, while they aren’t named as such, do a number of the features that these commands do, just for Windows clients via Powershell. And the best part is, a number of them are free. Let’s look at what some of these commands do: First, there are the cmdlets…
-
Change the IP/Host Name on ESX iSCSI Initiators
Setting up iSCSI to work with ESX is usually a pretty straight forward affair. But like with many things, change can be hard. But sometimes things get moved to different subnets or storage gets replaced. To configure a vSphere client to connect, select a virtual machine and then click on it and click on the Configuration tab. From there, click on Storage Adapters using the Hardware panel. From the Hardware Panel, click on an initiator and then click on Properties and then click on Configure. Then provide the new name or IP. Make sure that the name is unique and then if needed provide an iSCSI alias. Then change the IP settings…
-
Troubleshooting Mac OS X Kernels w/ dmesg
The first thing that loads in OS X is the kernel. The kernel is how users interface with hardware and sets the stage for interaction by probing for each driver that needs to be loaded and tracking what is found. The presence of everything about the system is tracked when the kernel loads as well as pertinent boot parameters. Even if you’re booting in verbose mode, most of this probably happens too fast to notice. You might be able to pause it, but you’re still trying to react to things too quickly in many cases. That’s where the dmesg command comes into play, which lets you review and control the…
-
The App Store Element Inspector
I had been trying to work on a command line interface for the App Store for awhile. I learned a lot while doing so, but was never actually able to do more than associate AppleIDs here and there. One of the things I was able to use during my attempts (other than a disassembler) was the Element Inspector for the App Store. The Element Inspector allows you to view the raw source code of the pages being displayed in the App Store. This thing could be pretty handy if you were interested in embedding aspects of the App Store in other items, such as apps or a command line tool…
-
Getting The Address Book Debug Menu
A number of Apple applications have debug menus. In these menus are advanced options, or options used for troubleshooting that don’t need to be presented to users in everyday use of the tools. Address Book has such a menu. To see it, write a boolean ABShowDebugMenu key into the com.apple.addressbook defaults domain as true: defaults write com.apple.addressbook ABShowDebugMenu -bool YES Once run, a number of new features will be available, allowing you to, amongst other things, browse an Address Book Archive, open Time Machine from within the Address Book application (allowing you to restore specific contacts), export detailed database information and disable global searching. This still isn’t the kind of…
-
How To Gain About Half An Inch In Safari
No, this isn’t spam about some weird pump imported from Botswana (although if you need one, just let me know and I’ll grab some messages from my spam filter in Google Apps for ya’). Instead, we’re talking about getting rid of two icons in imaging that can recoup about a half an inch from the Safari bookmarks bar. I’m talking about the reading list and the top sites icons: To disable the reading glasses and the grid from here, use the defaults command and write an empty payload into the ProxiesInBookmarksBar key in com.apple.Safari, as follows: defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar '()' Or to just disable one of them, write the…
-
Missing Server.app Settings for AFP
Earlier, I wrote an article on enabling some of the settings in SMB that are now unavailable in the GUI, but were still available from the command line. I have now decided to go ahead an document some of the ones for AFP that have been removed during the transition to the Server app. The first to mention is maximum connections. There are a number of reasons that throttling maximum afp connections can be handy. The serveradmin afp setting for it is maxConnections, which by default is set to -1, indicating unlimited. To set this to 500, one would run: serveradmin settings afp:maxConnections = 500 The second setting to mention…
-
Limiting The Number of Windows Users in Lion Server (aka How-to of hidden serveradmin settings)
Lion Server doesn’t have an option in the GUI for throttling the maximum number of users that can connect to the server via SMB. Nor does it have said option in the serveradmin interface. If you run the following, you would have previously seen the required setting: serveradmin settings smb The required setting (if controlled via serveradmin) is MaxClients= followed by the number of clients that you want to be the max: serveradmin settings smb:MaxClients=10 This is pretty easy stuff, but I have a point that goes beyond limiting the number of users. Not all of the settings that can be run through serveradmin are actually in the preferences any…
-
Allow Diskless NetBoot From the Command Line
Client systems don’t have to have drives. Nor should they, in certain circumstances. Therefore, diskless NetBoot has been a part of OS X since the early beginnings. And it’s great provided you have the Server Admin application handy. But if you want to enable/control diskless NetBoot without Server Admin then you’re going to need to use the command line. Each of your NetBoot images will be stored in an array, which can be seen by running the serveradmin command, along with the settings option and then the net boot service, as follows: serveradmin settings netboot Locate the netBootImagesRecordsArray, which shows the images that are served up on the server. Find…