Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category

Optical Sharing

I recently needed to temporarily enable optical disk sharing on a couple of machines at a number of different sites (don’t ask why, long story). There were enough to where I wanted to do it sending a script. But where is this stuff stored? Snapshot says: in com.apple.NetworkBrowser.plist. Which keys? diff says: EnableODiskBrowsing and ODSSupported, [...]

Posted on September 3, 2010 at 6:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Mass Deployment

Connect to Server Name

When connecting to a server from Mac OS X, what name will your system use when you bring up the Connect to Server dialog box? By default it shows the full name of the user authenticated to a client computer. But, not everyone wants this behavior. Therefore, you can change it by altering the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.NetworkAuthorization.plist [...]

Posted on August 27, 2010 at 6:00 am by admin · Permalink · 3 Comments
In: Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mass Deployment

Headless VMware Fusion

You can run VMware Fusion 2 in what is commonly referred to as headless mode. This option is not yet available in Fusion 3, but is handy when you do not want to authenticate at the loginwindow of Mac OS X in order to run virtual machines using the vmware-vmx process. To enable headless mode, [...]

Posted on August 21, 2010 at 6:00 am by admin · Permalink · 4 Comments
In: Mac OS X, VMware · Tagged with: , , , ,

LANDesk Client In Image

LANDesk stores its data files in the /Library/Application Support/LANDesk/data directory. However, there is a uuid file for LANDesk that, if you put the LANDesk client in your image will need to be deleted. The uuid is in the /Library/Preferences/com.landesk.uuid.plist property list. If you rm this file as a postflight imaging task then your client can [...]

Posted on August 20, 2010 at 6:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Mass Deployment · Tagged with: , , ,

Managing SyncPlans from the PresSTORE CLI

PresSTORE has a Synchronize module, that can be used to copy data from one location to another. This is done by the use of synchronization plans, or sync plans for short. Each plan is given a name and has a number of attributes associated with it, such as whether it is enabled or disabled. PresSTORE [...]

Posted on August 19, 2010 at 6:46 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Mac Security, Unix · Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

LoginHook Bonjour

Want users to be able to use Bonjour at home without having their systems registering with Bonjour when they’re on your network? Many environments have taken to wholesale disabling Bonjour. This can be done by augmenting the LaunchDaemon that invokes Bonjour, com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist that is located at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons. You add a -NoMulticastAdvertisements to the ProgramArguments array. [...]

Running TFTP on Mac OS X

TFTP, or Trivial File Transfer Protocol is a protocol that can be used for quickly shuttling files about. While similar to FTP, TFTP has no username and password (in most cases) and should not be running when you do not need it. It’s still in use today for a number of appliances such as routers [...]

Posted on August 12, 2010 at 9:18 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server · Tagged with: , , , , , , ,

Import ARD Information Using jamf

It’s pretty common to use keys for ARD for shuttling data back and forth. In an environment where you’re using one tool to image computers and another tool to then perform patch management, the Computer Information fields in ARD are a place where you can keep this information and not run the risk of it [...]

Posted on August 11, 2010 at 6:00 am by admin · Permalink · Leave a comment
In: Mac OS X, Mass Deployment · Tagged with: , , , , ,

DeployStudio From the Command Line

Recently I did a little article on importing computers into DeployStudio lists. I got an overwhelming number of email requests to go a step further and look at importing computers into DeployStudio from the command line. I’m guessing lots of people want to bolt some middleware onto their mass deployment tools (can’t say I blame [...]

Importing Computers Into DeployStudio

DeployStudio has the ability to import a csv file that is populated with the MAC address and a few specific settings. This allows you to prepopulate the database with the names that you want each machine to have. If you purchase a lot of machines from Apple then you can get a list of MAC [...]

Posted on August 3, 2010 at 7:42 pm by admin · Permalink · 5 Comments
In: Mac OS X, Mass Deployment · Tagged with: , , , , , , , , ,