• iPhone,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment

    Talking A Look Under Apple Configurator's Hood

    Apple Configurator has now been in my grubby hands long enough for me to start looking at it a little deeper than I did in the introductory article I did awhile back. Architecturally, Apple Configurator keeps its data in ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator. Here, you’ll find a directory called IPSWs, another called Resources, file called AppleConfigurator.storedata and another called Users.storedata. The IPSWs directory is where operating system versions, per model of iOS are stored. These look something like iPad2,1_5.1_9B176_Restore.ipsw, which is iOS 5.1 for a standard iPad 2. iPad 1, the retina display iPad, as well as each iPod Touch and iPhone 4 each have their own entry as well. The IPSWs…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Automating Locations with networksetup

    The new location options in networksetup are pretty interesting and while I’ve mentioned them in writings in the past I thought I would explore scripting against them, as they do reflect an interesting new challenge, mostly if you’re looking to script against non-booted volumes. To script against a booted volume is fairly straight forward. You have the -listlocations, -getcurrentlocation, -createlocation, -deletelocation and -switchlocation options which lists all locations, lists the current location, creates a location, deletes a location and potentially switches a location. To get started, first look at what locations your system has: networksetup -listlocations If you are on a freshly installed system you should see Automatic as your…

  • Mac OS X

    Moving that iPhoto Library

    There are a number of reasons you might choose to change the location of your iPhoto library.  Maybe you want to store pictures on a firewire drive, or maybe you want to store them on an iSCSI LUN, which I described how to work with recently. Either way, there are two ways I typically see people go about changing the location that iPhoto uses to store data. The first is to actually create a symbolic link from ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library to the directory you would like to use. The second, which is a better option is to go ahead and edit the location that the iPhoto preferences set as the path…