Tag Archives: Command line

Mac OS X Mac Security

Using sysdiagnose to Capture Performance Data In OS X

May 13, 2013 – 6:00 am

“My computer sometimes just runs slow,” “the fan on my laptop won’t turn off sometimes,” and “my network connection keeps dropping.” These are amongst the most annoying off problems to solve for our users because they are intermittent. And to exacerbate things, many of these users have these problems at home or at remote locations, making it difficult for systems administrators to see them.
Screen Shot 2013-05-10 at 11.31.17 AM
There is something I use in these cases, though, that has helped isolate these problems from time to time. Simply tell users to Control-Option-Command-Shift-Period when they have these problems. Doing so will run the sysdiagnose command and then open a Finder window with the output of the command. Sysdiagnose takes a quick snapshot of many common logs and performance data, zips it up and opens a Finder window, pointing to where it is (/var/tmp with the filename containing a date stamp of when the command was run). This file contains output from allmemory, lsof, top, netstat, sysctl, spindump, fs_usage, system_profiler, mount, airport, odutil and many others. Each is in its own log and easy to navigate.

small payday loans

When running /usr/sbin/sysdiagnose from the command line there are a couple of options. My favorite is -f (which I think must be short for favorite) which allows me to write to my file to a directory I specify rather than some random object in a tmp directory. You can also get even more output using -t. Verbose logging is obtained using -h and passing a pid will also provide information about the pid. So let’s say that process 10883 is giving me some problems. I could run the following to get some good output on my desktop:

sysdiagnose -h -t -f ~/Desktop

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

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Mac OS X Server Mac Security Mass Deployment Xsan

Using The serverinfo Command To Get, Well, Server Info In Mountain Lion Server

August 25, 2012 – 5:00 am

OS X Mountain Lion Server comes with the /usr/sbin/serverinfo command. The serverinfo command can be pretty useful when you’re looking to programmatically obtain information about the very basic state of an OS X Server.

The first option indicates whether the Server app has been downloaded from the app store, which is the –software option:

serverinfo --software

When used, this option reports the following if the Server.app can be found:

This system has server software installed.

Or if the software cannot be found, the following is indicated:

This system does NOT have server software installed.

The –productname option can be used to determine the name of the software app:

serverinfo --productname

If you change the name of the app from Server then the serverinfo won’t work any longer, so the output should always be the following:

Server

The –shortversion command returns the version of the Server app being used:

serverinfo --shortversion

The output will not indicate a build number, but instead the version of the app on the computer the command is run on:

2.0.23

To see the build, use the –buildversion option:

serverinfo --buildversion

The output shows the build of server, which doesn’t necessarily match the OS X build number:

12S307

Just because the Server app has been downloaded doesn’t mean the Server setup assistant has been run. To see if it has, use the –configured option:

serverinfo --configured

The output indicates whether the system is running as a server or just has the app installed (e.g. if you’re using it to connect to another server:

This system has server software configured.

You can also output all of the information into a single, easy to script against property list using the –plist option:

serverinfo --plist

The output is a list of each of the other options used:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>IsOSXServerVolume</key>
<true/>
<key>IsOSXServerVolumeConfigured</key>
<true/>
<key>IsServerHardware</key>
<false/>
<key>LocalizedServerProductName</key>
<string>Server</string>
<key>ServerBuildVersion</key>
<string>12S307</string>
<key>ServerPerformanceModeEnabled</key>
<true/>
<key>ServerVersion</key>
<string>2.0.23</string>
</dict>
</plist>

The Server Root can reside in a number of places. To see the path (useful when scripting commands that are relative to the ServerRoot:

serverinfo --prefix

By default, the output is as follows:

/Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot

You can also see whether the system is running on actual hardware desgnated by Apple for servers using the –hardware option:

serverinfo --hardware

The output simply indicates if the hardware shipped with OS X Server on it from Apple:

This system is NOT running on server hardware.

The –perfmode option indicates whether or not the performance mode has been enabled, dedicating resources to binaries within the Server app:

serverinfo --perfmode

If the performance mode has not been enabled then the output will be as such:

Server performance mode is NOT enabled.

To enable performance mode, you can also use serverinfo. This is the only task that the command does that can make any changes to the system and as such is the only time you need to elevate privileges:

sudo serverinfo --setperfmode 1

Finally, set the boolean value to 0 to disable.

sudo serverinfo --setperfmode 0

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Mac OS X Mac OS X Server Mac Security Mass Deployment

Setting Up File Services in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Server

August 8, 2012 – 5:10 am

File Services are perhaps the most important aspect of any server because file servers are often the first server an organization purchases. There are a number of protocols built into OS X Mountain Lion Server dedicated to serving files, including AFP, SMB and WebDAV. These services, combined comprise the File Sharing service in OS X Mountain Lion Server.

File servers have shares. In OS X Mountain Lion Server we refer to these as Share Points. By default:

  • File Sharing has some built-in Share Points that not all environments will require.
  • Each of these shares is also served by AFP and SMB, something else you might not want (many purely Mac environments might not even need SMB). Or if you have iOS devices, you may only require WebDAV sharing.
  • Each share has permissions that Apple provides which will work for some but not all.

In short, the default configuration probably isn’t going to work for everyone. Therefore, before we do anything else, let’s edit the shares to make them secure. The first step is to create all of your users and groups (or at least the ones that will get permissions to the shares). This is done in Server app using the Users and Groups entries in the List Pane. Once users and groups are created, open the Server app and then click on the File Sharing service in the SERVICES list in the List Pane. Here, you will see a list of the shares on the server.

In our example configuration we’re going to disable the Groups share. To do so, click on Groups one time and then click on the minus button on the screen.

As mentioned, shares can be shared out using different protocols. Next, we’re going to disable SMB for Public. To do so, double-click on Public and then uncheck the SMB protocol checkbox for the share.

When you’ve disabled SMB, click on the Done button to save the changes to the server. Next, we’re going to create a new share for iPads to be able to put their work, above and beyond the WebDAV instance automatically used by the Wiki service. To create the share, first we’re going to create a directory for the share to live in on the computer, in this case in the /Shared Items/iPads directory. Then from the File Sharing pane in Server app, click on the plus sign (“+”).

At the browse dialog, browse to the location of your iPad directory and then click on the Choose button.

At the File Sharing pane, double-click on the new iPads share.

At the screen for the iPads share, feel free to edit the name of the share (how it appears to users) as it by default uses the name of the directory for the name of the share. Then, it’s time to configure who has access to what on the share. Here, use the plus sign (“+”) in the Access section of the pane to add groups that should be able to have permission to access the share. Also, change the groups in the list that should have access by double-clicking on the name of the group and providing a new group name or clicking on the plus sign to add a user or group.

The permissions available in this screen for users that are added are Read & Write, Read Only/Read and Write. POSIX permissions (the bottom three entries) also have the option for No Access, but ACLs (the top entries comprise an Access Control List) don’t need such an option as if there is no ACE (Access Control Entry) for the object then No Access is assumed.

If more granular permissions are required then click on the name of the server in the Server app (the top item in the List Pane) and click on the Storage tab. Here, browse to the directory and click on Edit Permissions.

As can be seen, there are a number of other options that more granularly allow you to control permissions to files and directories in this view.

Once you have provided all of the appropriate users access to the share, go back to the settings for the share and scroll to the bottom of the screen.

Here, you have the option to set which protocols the share is accessible through (AFP, SMB & WebDAV) as well as make the share accessible to guests (only do this if the share should be publicly accessible) and make the share an option for home folders. Click Done once you’ve configured the share appropriately.

Once a share has been made an option for home folders it appears in both Workgroup Manager and the Server app as an available Home Folder location for users in that directory service.

Once you have created all the appropriate shares, deleted all the shares you no longer need and configured the appropriate permissions for the share, click on the ON button to start the File Sharing service.

The File Sharing service can also be controlled from the command line. Mac OS X Server provides the sharing command. You can create, delete and augment information for share points using sharing.

To create a share point for AFP you can use the following command:

sharing -a -A

So let’s say you have a directory at /Shares/Public and you want to create a share point called PUBLIC. You can use the following command:

sharing -a /Shares/Public -A PUBLIC

Now, the -a here will create the share for AFP but what if you want to create a share for other protocols? Well, -F does FTP and -S does SMB. Once created you can disable the share using the following command:

sharing -r PUBLIC

To then get a listing of shares you can use the following command:

sharing -l

You can use the sharing command to enable FTP for various share points. To do so, enable FTP using the Server app and then use the instructions at this site to manage FTP on shares: http://krypted.com/mac-os-x/ftp-on-lion-server.

You can also use the serveradmin command to manage file shares as well as the sharing service. To see settings for file shares, use the serveradmin command along with the settings option and then define the sharing service:

sudo serveradmin settings sharing

To see settings for the services use the serveradmin command with the settings option followed by the services: afp and smb:

sudo serveradmin settings afp

To see a run-down of some of the options for afp, see this article I did previously. Additionally, for a run-down of smb options, see this one.

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Mac OS X

Showing iTunes Track & Song Titles In The Dock

July 29, 2012 – 12:00 pm

When I’m writing, I like to listen to music in the background. When writing, I also like to have everything minimized so I can quickly grab a screenshot of the desktop where needed. This means that when I run into a track that doesn’t work with whatever I’m writing that I would need to unminimize iTunes, click the next button and then re-minimize iTunes. Awhile back I found a better way but can’t remember where for attribution. So, part of my default user template and imaging framework now includes setting the iTunes Dock icon to show the track that I’m playing so I can easily go to the next song, filing away the current song to remove from whatever playlist at a later date in case I’ve forgotten who the artist was. By default the iTunes Dock icon doesn’t show the current playing track. To tell it to:

defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool TRUE

Then killall Dock:

killall Dock

Now when you click on iTunes in the dock and hold the mouse down, you’ll see the following:

If you later decide you don’t like this:

defaults write com.apple.dock itunes-notifications -bool FALSE

And then killall Dock:

killall Dock

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Mac OS X Server

Changes in Mountain Lion Server

July 26, 2012 – 5:00 am

Mountain Lion Server is now available on the OS X App Store and as with the last few updates there are some things missing that you might be expecting and depending on. First up, three major services are gone: Podcast Producer, RADIUS and dhcp. You can still do dhcp as you always did with OS X client as those features work on OS X Server, but the more granular controls available in OS X Server are now gone. The biggest impact of dhcp is probably in testing NetBoot services when there are network issues and you need to prove to network admins that it’s the network and not your server…

I had written an article before about FTP still being in OS X Server from the command line, but now it’s back in the GUI, which should make many an administrator happy. NAT is also gone from the GUI, but natd and natutil are still available from the command line. Might as well just use the Sharing System Preference pane for such things though… Server Admin is now gone (long live Server Admin!) and Workgroup Manager is now a download to be performed and installed following installation. Support for Managed Preferences is gone, even though most manifests technically still work.

Many services also got some pretty nice updates. These include:

  • Calendar – There are a few updates on the client side, but not on the server side. Most notably, the option to publish calendars is now gone. If you used that, it’s time to get used to manually exporting, copying to a share and then distributing links. This is going to likely cause more use of the Calendar server itself, to some degree. Also, it’s not iCal or iCal Server, it’s now Calendar and Calendar server. Seems to me that this isn’t obviously an Apple-centric naming structure as with most other things they do, but sometimes you’re gonna’ have that…
  • Contacts – Nope, it’s not called Address Book server, it’s the Contacts service. Same with the client side application.
  • DNS – DNS management is moved into the Server application. You can also now restrict who you do lookups for in the GUI. Under the hood very little changes.
  • File Sharing – Nothing really changes with file sharing, except the wiki integration described in the Wiki section in a little bit.
  • Firewall – The firewall option is gone, as is the ipfilter at the command line, but pf is easy to configure from the command line.
  • FTP – It’s a quick and easy single share solution from the GUI. Using the sharing command there’s still tons available to administrators.
  • Mail – Authentication mechanisms and domains are in the GUI, but very little changes otherwise.
  • Messages – The service name has changed from iChat to Messages in the GUI but is still jabber from the command line. The big change with this service is that the client side is now able to leverage iCloud to instant message mobile devices as well. Therefore, the text messaging component is client-side and has no impact on the jabber service itself.
  • NetInstall – The “NetInstall” service is NetBoot. It can host NetRestore or NetInstall images, but the heavy lifting for that stuff is done in System Image Utility. And the output of the SIU commands are now more scriptable through the automator command line interface. The NetInstall screen is now in Server app and is a good port from Server Admin in that it’s similar in look and feel to the NetBoot screen in Server Admin. A feature that isn’t in the GUI is diskless NetBoot, which is fine because I documented how to do it when I realized it would be an issue for a few customers.
  • Open Directory – Given that Server Admin is gone, something had to happen with Open Directory. The Open Directory screens have been moved to Server app where it’s fast to setup and tear down Open Directory. Open Directory based Users and Groups are also created through the Server App, although Workgroup Manager can be downloaded and used still. Immediately following upgrades, the add and remove users buttons are gone for previously stand-alone hosts. Also the Manage Network Accounts option is now gone from Server app, replaced with the traditional ON button supplied by Apple for other services.
  • Profile Manager – This deserves its own post, which is in the queue, but suffice it to say that while you can’t tell when looking in Server app, there are a number of upgrades to Profile Manager.
  • Software Update – Management of the service is moved from Server Admin to Server app. There are now fewer options in the GUI, but the same in the command line. Cascading is a little different.
  • Time Machine – Time Machine server is the same… The versions option from the Time Machine Server preference pane is gone and the layout is a little changed, but the server component is identical in functionality as well as look and feel.
  • VPN – Unless you add another supported VPN protocol there’s not much to do after fixing most issues in 10.7.4. Except fixing the last issue with search bases, seemingly resolved as it’s working for me pretty well.
  • Websites – There are more options in the GUI for new sites. The default site appears twice (once for 80 and once for 443), but there are more options, such as the Web App functionality that comes with a default Python “Hello World” app. Also the server is still called web from the serveradmin command line, but is now called Websites through the GUI.
  • Wiki – The wiki has themes again, although they’re just color schemes. And you can create your own custom banners and upload, which brings back two of the most common feature requests from people that hack the look and feel of the wiki in versions previous to Lion. But the most substantial aspect of the Wiki to change to me is the document management options, available to users in WebDAV or through the portal. This allows for a very mobile-friendly file management tool. Blogs and wikis for the most part stay the same and have a very clean upgrade process from Lion. The command line tools also feature some new options for indexing, etc., which many will find helpful.
  • Xsan – cvadmin, cvlabel, cvversions, etc are now stored in /System/Library/Filesystems/acfs.fs/Contents/bin/ and Xsan has its own entry in the Server app. Despite hearing people question its future, I’ve never seen as many questions flying around about how to do things with Xsan than I do now. Storage sales are up, monkey chatter on the web is up, deployments are being booked and Xsan looks here to stay. The Server app only really shows you a status of things, but the Xsan Admin app is now embedded in the Server app and available through the Server app Tools directory.

Configuring Websites in Server app

The Alerts options are much more robust in Mountain Lion than they were previously. You  can now get alerts on a myriad of things, incuding certs, disks, space, storage quotas, virus detection, network changes and software updates.

Configuring Alerts in Mountain Lion Server

The Server commands also moved and in fact the whole file and folder structure mostly fit nicely inside of the Server app. There are certain things that haven’t been dealt with in this regard such as NetBoot’s library, but for the most part Apple is getting Server to the point where it’s very self-contained. The ramification of which is that upgrades for future releases (and from Lion to Mountain Lion for that matter) are much simpler. Simply downloading a new version informs administrators that the app has been replaced and is good to go, service data in tact. In real world, this has been a little hit or miss but should prove to make our lives much easier in the future.

Reducing scope, aligning with better development practices and all the work to merge all of the remaining services into Server app are huge undertakings. I would fully expect no further support or updates to Workgroup Manager, no more testing of managed preferences in deference to profiles and a few other culture shifts that still need to shake themselves out. Most of us are going to seem underwhelmed (if that’s a word, no it’s not ’cause I looked it up -> awesome video below –> ’cause affection has 2 fs, especially when you’re dealin’ with me). But here’s the thing, with an incremental update, you’re not going to get massive changes. Instead we will get slow and steady updates hopefully continuing to build faster towards a better end goal. What’s important is that the foundation is actually better now, given changes to other parts of OS X and so Server is likely now better positioned than ever for great new features in subsequent releases.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that Xgrid is gone. I guess no one really noticed anyway…

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Mac OS X

Disable Rubber Band Scrolling In Lion & Up

June 24, 2012 – 7:11 am

10.7 and up have a little feature called elastic scrolling. When you get to the top of a page and you keep scrolling you see the linen background. There is a NAS devices whose web portals seems to be pretty shady overall, but specifically seems to lock up when this rubber band effect kicks in. So to disable:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -bool FALSE

To disable the disable, or re-enable the effect:

defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -bool TRUE

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Mac OS X

Selecting Text in QuickLook

June 23, 2012 – 6:57 am

You’re searching for some content on your desktop and opening pages file after pages file and pdf after pdf in QuickLook. Finally you find that one juicy morsel. It’s a short script you just need to copy into your clipboard. But you can’t. The gods of technology are aligned against you, to make you hit command-O and then after waiting for the entire 3 seconds it takes Preview to open, you have to search within the document for that information. Holy crap, you just lost at least 5 to 8 seconds of your day. I guess now you have to cancel vacation or let your spouse know you’ll be home late late.

But you don’t have to miss the train. I have a step in my imaging workflow that you’re going to love. One of those little gems I put in my default user and had almost started thinking was the default until I realized it was part of my imaging workflow during ML upgrades. Gain back at least 10 seconds a day with this handy little option: enable text selection in QuickLook. Basically, if you click on text in QuickLook nothing happens, double-click the file to open. If you write the QLEnableTextSelection key into com.apple.finder (.plist) then log out, reboot or kill the Finder, you can click on text and it actually highlights (cue angelic chorus):

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool TRUE

And to kill the finder:

killall Finder

To undo:

defaults write com.apple.finder QLEnableTextSelection -bool FALSE

Now take that extra hour a year I gave ya’ and sumbit an article to this site using the Submit button in the toolbar!

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Mac OS X Mac OS X Server Mac Security Mass Deployment

Automating Profile Manager Enrollment Through DeployStudio

April 4, 2012 – 5:00 am

When planning to migrate from managed preferences to profiles, one of the important aspects to consider is automated enrollment. One of the more important aspects of automating a traditional managed preferences environment is to automate the binding to directory services. You do not bind to Profile Manager; however, you do enroll devices. Much like binding computers to Lion Server’s Open Directory (by default), certificates and host names are important aspects of the enrollment process.

Much as with local managed preferences, management via profiles can be done through the command line and without any involvement from a centralized source. I had written an article awhile back on using profiles from the command line.

You can also instead enroll devices into Profile Manager. Previously, I had looked at configuring Profile Manager. Manual enrollment in Profile Manager is the same as enrollment from iOS. But instead of using Apple Configurator to automate enrollment, you’ll use your existing imaging solution for automated enrollment of Mac OS X based clients. Therefore, we’ll use DeployStudio as an example for automating enrollment at imaging time.

To get started, you’ll need a functional DeployStudio configuration. You’ll also need a functional Profile Manager configuration. From within Profile Manager, click on the plus sign (“+”) in the lower left corner of DeployStudio and click on Enrollment Profile. Then click on the New Enrollment Profile entry that was created and click on the Download button to download the profile onto the server (when it attempts to install, simply click cancel to cache it to your ~/Downloads directory).

Click in the drop-down menu in the upper right hand corner of the screen and then click on Download Trust Profile. This will download the Trust Profile for the MDM solution to the client (when it attempts to install, simply click cancel to cache it to your ~/Downloads directory).

Next, drag the cached profiles into the ConfigurationProfiles directory of the DeployStudio repository. Now that you have the profiles that will be required for automated enrollment, open DeployStudio Admin (if it was open before, close it and then re-open it once you have copied the profiles to the DeployStudio repository). From within DeployStudio, we will create a new workflow, here called “Deploy Lion with Enrollment”. We will then choose to restore a target volume and automate the task.

Next, click on the plus sign (“+”) to add a new workflow item, sliding the task selection screen out automatically.

Next, drag the Automatic Enrollment Task item into the workflow. Once present, choose Previous task target from the Target Volume field. Next, choose the enrollment profile in the Enrollment profile field. Also choose the Trust profile that you just downloaded from the Trust profile field. Finally, check the Automate box and save your workflow.

Finally, we’ll add a Configure task to set the hostname (note that your workflows may already be far more flushed out than mine here. Click on Save and then test the workflow.

Once booted, if you are automatically enrolled then the process was a success. You should be able to see the device in Profile Manager.

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Mac OS X

Opening a Terminal Window From, Well, Terminal

December 21, 2011 – 9:00 am

Terminal is a great application. And we usually use Terminal for editing scripts and invoking things. But what about invoking Terminal from, well, Terminal. For starters, let’s look at opening a Terminal session to the root of the boot volume (aka /):

open -a Terminal /

The -a option, when used with the open command, allows you to define which application that the item defined in the following position will open in. For example, you could open an XML file in Xcode

open -a Xcode /usr/share/postgresql/pg_hba.conf.sample

You could then open Terminal by passing other commands into the command. For example, to open a new Terminal window to the current working directory:

open -a Terminal `pwd`

Of course, you could accomplish the same thing with:

open -a Terminal .

Or pass the output of other commands through the open command. For example, the following command opens a new file in TextEdit that contains the output of an ls command:

ls | open -f

Adding -g to any of this leaves the new window in the background rather than bringing it to the foreground, which is the default behavior. Finally, open can also be used to open URLs, but I’ve covered that sort of use for open in the past.

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cloud Mass Deployment Ubuntu Unix

Scripting in Google ChromeOS

September 8, 2011 – 6:00 am

I recently got my hands on one of those Google ChromeBooks (Cr-48). Interesting to have an operating system that is just a web browser. But, as anyone likely reading this article already knows, the graphical interface is the web browser and the operating system is still Linux. But what version? Well, let’s go on a journey together.

First, you need ChromeOS. If you’ve got a ChromeBook this is a pretty easy thing to get. If not, check http://getchrome.eu/download.php for a USB or optical download that can be run live (or even in a virtual machine). Or, if you know that you’re going to be using a virtual machine, consider a pre-built system from hexxeh at http://chromeos.hexxeh.net/vanilla.php. I have found the VMware builds to be a bit persnickety about the wireless on a Mac, whereas the VirtualBox builds ran perfectly. I split my time between the two anyway, so I’ve just (for now) been rocking VirtualBox for ChromeOS. When you load it for the first time it asks for a Google account. Provide that, select your network adapter, choose from one of the semi-lame account images ( for the record, I like the mad scientist one) and you’re off to the races.

Next, we need a shell. When you first log in, you see a web page that shows you all of the Chromium apps you have installed. By default, you’ll see File manager and Web Store. If you’ve used the OS X App Store then the Chrome Web Store is going to look pretty darn familiar. My favorite for now is Chrome Sniffer. But all of these kinda’ get away from where we’re trying to go: get a scripting environment for Chrome OS.

Chrome comes with 2 types of shell environments. The first is crosh. To bring up a crosh environment, use Control-Alt-t. This keystroke invokes the crosh shell. Here, type help to see a list of the commands available. Notice that cd, chmod, etc don’t work. Instead, there are a bunch of commands that a basic user environment might need for troubleshooting primarily network connections. “But this is Linux” you ask? Yup.

At the help output you’ll notice shell. Type shell and then hit enter. The prompt will change from crosh> to chronos@localhost. Now you can cd and perform other basic commands to your hearts delight. But you’re probably going to need to elevate privileges for the remainder of this exersize. So let’s type sudo bash and just get there for now. If you’re using a ChromeBook, the root password might be root, or if you’re using a downloaded vm from hexxeh then it might be facepunch (great password, btw).

Provided the password worked, the prompt should turn red. Now, if you’re using a hexxeh build then the file system is going to be read-only. You won’t be able to change the root password nor build scripts. But otherwise, you should be able to use passwd to change the password:

passwd chronos

Once you’ve got slightly more secure shell environment (by virtue of not using the default root password), it is time to do a little exploring. Notice that in /bin, you see sh, bash, rbash and the standard fare of Linux commands (chmod, chown, cp, attr, etc. Notice that you don’t see tcsh, csh or ksh. So bash commands from other platforms can come in, but YMMV with tcsh, etc. Running ps will give you some idea of what’s going on process-wise under the hood:

ps aux

From encrypts to crypto to the wpa supplicant, there’s plenty to get lost in exploring here, but as the title of the article suggests, we’re here to write a script. And where better to start than hello world. So let’s mkdir a /scripts directory:

mkdir /scripts

Then let’s touch a script in there called helloworld.sh:

touch /scripts/helloworld.sh

Then let’s give it the classic echo by opening it in a text editor (use vi as nano and pico aren’t there) and typing:

echo "Hello Cruel World"

Now close, save and then run it:

/scripts/helloworld.sh

And you’ve done it. Use the exit command twice to get back to crosh and another time to close the command line screen. You now have a script running on ChromeOS. Next up, it’s time to start looking at deployment. This starts with knowing what you’re looking at. To see the kernel version:

uname -r

Or better:

cat /proc/version

Google has been kind enough to build in similar sandboxing to that in Mac OS X, but the concept that you can’t run local applications is a bit mistaken. Sure, the user interface is a web browser, but under the hood you can still do much of what most deployment engineers will need to do.

If these devices are to be deployed en masse at companies and schools, scripts that setup users, bind to LDAP (GCC isn’t built-in, so it might be a bit of a pain to get there), join networks and the such will need to be forthcoming. These don’t often come from the vendor of an operating system, but from the community that ends up supporting and owning the support. While the LDAP functionality could come from Google Apps accounts that are integrated with LDAP, the ability to have a “One touch deploy” is a necessity for any OS at scale, and until I start digging around for a few specific commands/frameworks and doing some deployment scripts to use them, right now I’m at about a 6 touch deploy… But all in good time!

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