• iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    iCloud, Location Services, iOS 7 and Organization Owned Devices

    When Apple showed off the latest and greatest options for managing and tracking iOS devices remotely using iCloud accounts, many an Enterprise and School District said “wait, what?” The reason is that if an iOS device is running Find My iPhone and a device is stolen the device cannot be activated again without logging into the iCloud account that Find My iPhone was installed with. This could represent an issue if an employee is fired or if students turn in their iPads after a year of running Find My iPad. Imagine asking an employee you just fired or a student you just expelled to enter their iCloud password so you…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Accepting Always-On FaceTime Calls

    I’ve been experimenting with using FaceTime as an always-on video conferencing system. However things like network interruptions happen. Therefore, it’s never a bad idea to plan for that and allow either end of a call to initiate a new call without someone on the other end hitting accept. To do so, we can just send a boolean AutoAcceptInvites key to com.apple.FaceTime: defaults write com.apple.FaceTime AutoAcceptInvites -bool true After restarting FaceTime, incoming calls will automatically answer. Since we might take a machine and do something differently, we might need to disable this again. To disable this feature: defaults write com.apple.FaceTime AutoAcceptInvites -bool false

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

    Show File Extensions

    In OS X, we don’t see file extensions by default. However, in a number of environments it’s very useful to have them. To see them in the Finder, send a boolean AppleShowAllExtensions key to the NSGlobalDomain as True, then restart the Finder. defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool true; killall Finder To change back to not seeing extensions: defaults write NSGlobalDomain AppleShowAllExtensions -bool false; killall Finder

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Network Infrastructure

    The Cumulus Command Line Interface

    Cumulus comes with a number of commands installed in /usr/local/Cumulus_Workgroup_Server. The assets can be in a shared directory location, such as an NFS mount mapped to /cumulus or /Volumes/Cumulus. But in the /usr/local/Cumulus_Workgroup_Server directory there are a number of commands that can be pretty useful. For example, the stop-admin, stop-cumulus, start-cumulus and start-admin commands can be used to restart the Cumulus using a simple ARD template: /usr/local/Cumulus_Workgroup_Server/stop-admin.sh /usr/local/Cumulus_Workgroup_Server/stop-cumulus.sh sleep 30 /usr/local/Cumulus_Workgroup_Server/start-cumulus.sh /usr/local/Cumulus_Workgroup_Server/start-admin.sh There are others, such as status.sh, which shows size of repository, PIDs, and the time running. The repair.sh can be used to repair the database and remove-admin.sh and remove-cumulus.sh can uninstall the admin console and cumulus servers respectively…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Xsan

    Promise X30 Ethernet Setup Woes

    The Promise Vtrak requires 3 IP addresses. There are two controllers and each has an IP for maintenance. There’s also a 3rd, virtual IP. When you initially setup the devices, they pull a DHCP or APIPA address and then you typically use Bonjour to log into the WebPAM for the first time. Once in, you configure the addresses and then viola, you’re good. However, what if something happens? What if you configure the virtual IPs and something happens before you get the maintenance IPs configured. Or what if you never set the maintenance IPs in the first place and always relied on the virtual? Well, the Vtrak used to come…

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

    Use A Serial Interface with Promise Arrays

    Many of us use a Keyspan Serial adapter to manage devices with serial ports on them. Those who find you need to console into devices but hate the fact that you have to either use Zterm (which is no longer maintained) or boot a Windows Virtual Machine will find an application called goSerial pretty handy. GoSerial makes a Keyspan serial to usb adaptor, connected with a null modem cable, useful. You will be in CLI heaven in moments. goSerial can be downloaded here. You can also use the screen command. The screen command will open a virtual terminal and provide the functionality of an old DEC VT100 terminal. Screen is…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Scripting Notification Alerts to Notification Center in Mountain Lion

    The terminal-notifier command is a tool used for sending messages and actions to the Notification Center. It’s a gem, so to set it up we’ll first run the gem command to install it by name: gem install terminal-notifier Once installed, run the command along with the -message option followed by a quoted message: terminal-notifier -message "Hello world" This produces a message from Notification Center as follows: The title on the screen though, says Terminal. We want to change the title to something else. To do so, add the -title option. Adding the -title option along with a quoted title then displays a title in the top of the notification. You…

  • Mac OS X

    Units

    Go figure, there’s a command that can convert some units to other units. The units command is able to take a number of one type of units and then convert them to another. For example, to convert a mile to feet: units "1 mile" feet Or to convert 2 hours to seconds: units "2 hours" seconds For a full listing of the formats supported, check out /usr/share/misc/units.lib.

  • Mac OS X

    iconutil

    Sometimes you just have to convert an iconset file to an icns file. And who knew, Apple was kind enough to give us a command to do just that in OS X! To use the iconutil command, run it with the -c option which indicates that the file will be converted. The -o indicates the file to convert a file to. Let’s use the myfile.iconset as the source file and then mynewfile.icns as the target file. The command would be as follows: iconutil -c myfile.iconset -o mynewfile.icns

  • personal

    On Handling Criticism

    As someone who is (however misguided) considered a leader in my industry, I need to start holding myself to a higher standard. If I leave myself open to critique  I need to learn from the experience. I have struggled over the past day with this concept because I said something on a stage, in front of a couple hundred people, that was inappropriate. Others did the same (and  worse) I thought to myself; however, am I not supposed to be a leader in my company and in my community? Yes. Do I want people to judge either based on an off-the-cuff remark made by me alone? No. Would I ever…