• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Flush Hostnames For CrashPlan On OS X

    CrashPlan caches resolutions between hostnames and IP addresses. Recently I ran into an issue where a CrashPlan server was moved and we needed to decrease that cache time. In /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist I found the Java attribute for sun.net.inetaddr.ttl. The default setting for this is 300 seconds. It can be reduced by altering the Dnetworkaddress.cache.ttl string in the ProgramArguments array. To alter the setting, open /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.crashplan.engine.plist in a standard text editor. Once opened, find Dnetworkaddress.cache.ttl and reduce the ttl value. Once complete, unload/reload: launchctl unload com.crashplan.engine launchctl load com.crashplan.engine

  • public speaking

    Tickets for WWDC Going On Sale Today

    Last year tickets for WWDC sold out about as quick as a Justin Bieber concert with Taylor Swift and Bruno Mars opening up. And this year, I see no reason to expect any less, despite the wonky logo on the website. For more, check out the WWDC site at: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc

  • Mac OS X,  public speaking

    MacSysAdmin 2013

    Hooray for Sweden! I am very happy to make the trip to Gothenburg, Sweden again this year for MacSysAdmin 2013. This year, I’ll be presenting on something near and dear to my own heart: technical writing. The other presenters that I’ve seen there have all done great jobs, including Arek Dreyer, Rick Wylie, Alan Gordon, Andrina Kelly, Greg Neagle, Gary Larizza, Ed Marczak, Duncan McCracken and Zack Smith. I’m also excited by the new additions: Kevin White and Rich Trouton who I’ve seen do presentations very well on multiple occasions and Daniel Svensson, Nurani Nimpuno and Jody Rodgers who I haven’t seen give presentations but am excited to see. I…

  • Kerio,  Mac OS X Server

    Can't Undo Deletes in Kerio

    When you setup a Kerio server, by default there’s a feature called AutoExpunge. This feature keeps mail clients from showing a message with a strikethrough through it when a message is marked for deletion. Once items are processed the message is moved to deleted and the strikethrough message is removed from the folder it was deleted from. Many users can get confused by this, so Kerio built a feature called AutoExpunge. That AutoExpunge feature instead of striking through messages just tosses them. That causes you to be unable to undo a delete. To disable AutoExpunge, stop Kerio Mail Server and then look for AutoExpungeOnDelete option in /usr/local/Kerio/mailserver/mailserver.cfg (I like to back…

  • Xsan

    Holy Cow, Batman, My Xsan Volume Is Invisible!

    No one could see the Xsan volume. Logged into Xsan Admin, the volume was unmounted for everyone. Mounted the volume and Xsan Admin said it mounted for everyone. No errors in the logs. In a nice place mentally, I stepped away from my desk. The phone rings, no one has access to the volume. Crap, what now? Log in, shows mounted. Log into a client, well, isn’t there. The other volumes are on the desktop. Go to /Volumes and it doesn’t appear there. Go to /Volumes/VOLUMENAME and viola, it’s there. But in the sidebar it’s hidden?!?!?! There aren’t any options in the volume.cfg file in /Library/Preferences/Xsan that deal with this…

  • Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware

    Some Basic Xen Commands

    The most important command for managing pretty much anything in Linux is vi. So if you only learn one command, learn that one. But if you want to learn another, the second most important command for managing Xen is then xm (well, once you’ve apt-gotten or yummied up the installation that is). The xm command has a number of easy verbs, each used for managing the Xen environment. xm info – Shows information about the Xen host xm list – Shows information about doms (states include r for running, b for blocked, c for crashed, p for paused and the worse, d for dying). xm network-list – Shows virtual interfaces…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  VMware

    How to move a physical machine / server to a VMware VM

    A special thanks for this post from Alan Gordon: In recent months I have had a lot of questions regarding to to migrate physical serves to VM’s. And while VMware provides an excellent tool (VMware converter) for migrating physical machines / server , this tool does unfortunately  not support OS X as a source…..VMware hint hint !! So what are your options? Fortunately VMware has ported their vmware-vdiskmanager tool and vmware-rawdiskCreator tool to OS X as part of their VMware Fusion package ! These two tools provide a very easy way to convert the hard drives of a physical machine to the needed virtual disk format (vmdk). In the following I…