• Uncategorized

    Get Your CustomerID From G Suite

    There are a few ways to grab your CustomerID from G Suite. This is important when configuring SSO or when interfacing with G Suite programmatically (through their lovely API). The first and easiest way is to look at the web interface. This isn’t the most intuitive. To find the key, open Google Admin and then browse to Security in the menu in the upper left-hand corner, clicking on Dashboard. Click on Single Sign On and then scroll down until you see EntityID. The EntityID is going to be everything after the = such as C034minsz9330 as follows You can also find it by visiting the GooglePlay at https://play.google.com/work/adminsettings?pli=1 where it’s…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Unix

    Pull iTunes App Categories via Bash

    I love bash one-liners. Here’s one it took me a bit to get just right that will pull the Category of an app based on the URL of the app. curl -s 'https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/self-service-mobile/id718509958?mt=8' | grep -Eo '"applicationCategory":.*?[^\\]",' If you don’t already have the URL for an app, it can be obtained via a lookup using curl https://itunes.apple.com/lookup?id=718509958 If you’ll be performing these kinds of operations en masse from within server-side scripting, Apple has a number of programs, including the Affiliate Program, which allow you to do so more gracefully. But as a quick and dirty part of a script, this could solve a need. More importantly, hey, parse some json…

  • Apple Configurator,  Apps,  iPhone,  Mac OS X

    Get The Title Of An App From Apple App Store URLs

    When you’re building and manipulating apps in the Apple App Stores, it helps to be able to pull and parse pieces of data. Here, we’ll look at two strategies that you can use to do so. It’s worth noting that the purpose of this was to use the URL of an app from an MDM and then be able to script updating metadata about the app, given that vendors often change names of the display name of an app (e.g. Yelp is actually called “Yelp: Discover Local Favorites on the App Store”). First, we’ll grab a URL. This one is for Self Service: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/self-service-mobile/id718509958?mt=8 If you don’t know the URL…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Cookie Management With Curl

    To tell curl that you can read and write cookies, first we’ll start the engine using an empty cookie jar, using the -b option, which always reads cookies into memory: curl -b newcookiejar https://krypted.com If your site can set cookies you can then read them with the -L option curl -L -b newcookiejar https://krypted.com The response should be similar to the following: Reading cookies from file Curl also supports reading cookies in from the Netscape cookie format, used by defining a cookies.txt file instead: curl -L -b cookies.txt https://krypted.com If the server updates the cookies in a response, curl would update that cookie in memory but unless you write something…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Decrease Time Delays When Scripting Safari

    When you’re regression testing, you frequently just don’t want any delays for scripts unless you intentionally sleep your scripts. By default Safari has an internal delay that I’d totally forgotten about. So if your GUI scripts (yes, I know, yuck) are taking too long to run, check this out and see if it helps: defaults write com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay 0 With a script I was recently working on, this made the thing take about an hour less. Might help for your stuffs, might not. If not, to undo: defaults delete com.apple.Safari WebKitInitialTimedLayoutDelay Enjoy.

  • cloud,  FileMaker,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure,  Time Machine,  Xsan

    Obtain Information From Watchman Monitoring Using a Script

    Watchman Monitoring is a tool used to monitor computers. I’ve noticed recently that there’s a lot of traffic on the Watchman Monitoring email list that shows people want a great little (and by little I mean inexpensive from a compute time standpoint) monitoring tool to become a RMM (Remote Management and Monitoring) tool. The difference here is in “Management.” Many of us actually don’t want a monitoring tool to become a management tool unless we are very deliberate about what we do with it. For example, that script that takes a machine name of ‘rm -Rf /’ that some ironic hipster of a user decided to name their hard drive…

  • cloud,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Using the CrashPlan Pro REST API

    CrashPlan Pro Server is a pretty cool tool with a lot of great features that can be used to back up client computers. There are a lot of things that CrashPlan Pro is good at out of the box, but there are also a lot of other things that CrashPlan Pro wasn’t intended for that it could be good at, given a little additional flexibility. The REST API that CrashPlan Pro uses provides a little flexibility and as with most APIs I would expect it to provide even more as time goes on. I often hear people run away screaming when REST comes up, thinking they’re going to have to…

  • Mac OS X

    Git on Mac OS X

    The latest Git works swimmingly on the Mac. To download it you can curl it from the repository: curl http://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.6.5.3.tar.gz -O Next, extract the files: tar xzvf git-1.6.5.3.tar.gz Once extracted, cd into the directory that you extracted the files into and then run a make configure with the git-1.6.5.3 directory as your working directory. make configure If you cannot run make becuase you don’t have a compiler, make sure that you have installed the developer tools on your computer. Once you have run the make, run the configure, specifying the directory you would like to install into. In this case I’ll be deploying into /usr/local/git: ./configure –prefix=/usr/local/git NO_MSGFMT=yes make prefix=/usr/local/git…