• SQL

    Your First SQL Statement

    Databases and Tables A SQL database is an organized collection of data. Or at least that’s what they taught me in college. In real life, it’s only as organized as the people putting data into the database. Databases contain schemas, tables, stored procedures, reports, views and other objects. Most databases will contain multiple tables. Tables contain rows that have data in them. I like to think of a database kinda’ like an Excel spreadsheet. Each tab on a spreadsheet is similar to a table; each row is similar to a row in a database and each column in the spreadsheet is somewhat similar to a column, or attribute. The headers…

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

    Add Another Partition To Your Mac

    By default, most computers come with one partition and one volume on that partition. Well, in OS X there’s also a recovery partition, but that’s hidden so we’ll pretend like there’s just one. You can create additional volumes, which are useful for a number of different scenarios. The operation of creating partitions usually involves resizing a partition. That can be somewhat dangerous, so make sure to backup your Mac before doing so. To create an additional partition (and by default an HFS+ filesystem on that partition), first open Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities. Note that by default, the boot volume is highlighted. You can’t create a partition inside a volume or…

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

    Configure Xsan Clients With OS X Server 5 For El Capitan And Yosemite

    Yosemite brought Xsan 4, which included a whole new way to add clients to an Xsan. Xsan Admin is gone. From now on, instead of scanning the network using Xsan Admin. we’ll be adding clients using a Configuration Profile. This is actually a much more similar process to adding Xsan clients to a StorNext environment than it is to adding clients to Metadata Controllers running Xsan 3 and below. But instead of making a fsnameservers file, we’re plugging that information into a profile, which will do that work on the client on our behalf. To make the Xsan configuration profile, we’re going to use Profile Manager. With OS X Server 5, this trend…

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

    Setup The DNS Service In OS X Yosemite Server

    Under the hood, OS X Server has a number of substantial changes; however, at first the Server app appears to have had very few changes. The changes in the Server app were far more substantial in the Yosemite version of OS X Server. All of the options from Yosemite are still there and using the new command line interface for managing the service, there are far more options than ever before. The DNS service in OS X Server, as with previous versions, is based on bind 9 (BIND 9.9.2-P2 to be exact). This is very much compatible with practically every DNS server in the world, including those hosted on Windows,…

  • Windows Server

    Shadow Copy from the Command Line

    I was recently building some scripts to alternate shadow copy storage locations (long story). In so doing, I found that pretty much anything I would normally do in the GUI is exposed at the command prompt using the vssadmin command. The first and one of the most important things that you can do is list settings. This includes the following: providers – lists components that can create and maintain shadow copies shadows – lists shadow copies shadowstorage – lists storage that can be used for shadow copies volumes – lists volumes that have shadow copy enabled writers – lists registered components of applications that store persistent information on a volume…