• Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Disabling Bonjour

    Love it or not, some environments insist on disabling Bonjour, Apple’s implementation of Multicast DNS. Despite the fact that mDNS has been around since 2000 and is widely used by Microsoft, we still look to disable this from time to time. As Arek Dreyer mentioned last week at MacSysAdmin in Gothenburg, Sweden, you can’t just disable the mDNSResponder LaunchDaemon or you will bork DNS (my word I think, not his). Instead, to disable Bonjour you would add the -NoMulticastAdvertisements option into the ProgramArguments array in the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist file. This can be done manually, or it can be automated with the following command: defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder ProgramArguments -array “/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder” “-launchd” “-NoMulticastAdvertisements”…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Xsan

    Xsan + serialnumberd Troubleshooting

    With Mac OS X 10.5.8 and 10.6.x, Mac OS X Server, Xsan, Final Cut Server and a number of other serialized products were switched to a whole new solution for managing serial numbers: a newly redone serialnumberd. If you run otool against serialnumberd in 10.5.7 and below you’ll notice no dependencies; it stood alone so to speak. If you run otool against the latest and greatest then you’ll notice that it has a number of dependencies that run the gambit of otherwise unthinkable services. This caused minor growing pains during the summer with multihomed network connections, maximum number of clients and other aspects of servers with certain solutions, but that…

  • Mac OS X Server

    What is MySQL?

    MySQL is a relational database management system. MySQL is a daemon, mysqld, that can listen for network traffic on port 3306. That daemon runs a database (or a number of databases in most cases) that warehouse data for other applications to utilize.