• Final Cut Server,  Mac OS X

    Completely Reinstall Final Cut In OS X

    I’ve seen a few instances where an upgrade caused Final Cut to run kinda’ strangely. To resolve, I’ve just been doing a quick reinstall of Final Cut. To do so: First move the Final Cut application to the trash (it’s in the /Applications folder). From your home folder, go to ~/Library/Application Support and move the Final Cut folder in there into the trash. From Library/Preferences in your home folder, put com.apple.FinalCut.plist, com.apple.FinalCut.LSSharedFileList and com.apple.FinalCut.UserDestinations.plist in the trash. Finally, trash com.apple.FinalCut directory from ~/Library/Caches. Once done, go back to the Mac App Store and reinstall Final Cut and open it. Those folders you just tossed out will get re-created. Your toolbars and other customizations…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Yosemite Server Guide/Page Live

    A blog is a great way to communicate information. But pedagogy, yo… Blogs are not great ways to teach in a guided manner. But they can be. So with a little Table of Contents, or a Guide of sorts, you can easily communicate in a fashion similar to a book. And this makes the third annual OS X Server Guide that I’m publishing in this manner; the guides for Mavericks and Mountain Lion are  still available. I doubt I’ll ever actually bother to take them down. I’ve been working on getting the annual guide up for a few weeks and while there are still some posts remaining, but it’s basically done (some articles…

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

    Add Your VPP Token To Profile Manager Running on Yosemite (OS X Server)

    Apple began rolling out new features with the new Volume Purchasing Program (VPP) program last year. There are lots of good things to know, here. First, the old way should still work. You’re not loosing the stuff you already invested in such as Configurator with those codes you might have used last year with supervision. However, you will need an MDM solution (Profile Manager, Casper, Absolute, FileWave, etc) to use the new tools. Also, the new token options are for one to one (1:1) environments. This isn’t for multi-tenant environments. You can only use these codes and options for iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 and 10.10. Also, if you install…

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

    Configure Profile Manager On Yosemite Server (Yosemite running the Server app)

    Profile Manager first appeared in OS X Lion Server as the Apple-provided tool for managing Apple devices, including Mobile Device Management (MDM) for iOS based devices as well as Profile management for OS X based computers, including MacBooks, MacBook Airs, Mac Minis, Mac Pros and iMacs running Mac OS X 10.7 and up. In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple added a number of new features to Profile Manager and revved the software to Profile Manager 2.0, most notably adding the ability to push certain types of apps to mobile devices. In Mavericks Server (Server 3), Apple provides new options and streamlined a bunch of things, most notably App Store and…

  • Mac OS X

    Licensing The Xcode Command Line Tools

    Tools that leverage the Xcode Command Line Tools might have a problem if you install the tools without agreeing to the license. Here, you can see IntelliJ complaining about just that: To agree to the license agreement, you can use xcrun along with the cc verb: sudo xcrun cc This is an interactive command line environment so in order to script it you’d need to use expect to feed in the correct parameters.

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

    Mac Network Commands Cheat Sheet

    After writing up the presentation for MacSysAdmin in Sweden, I decided to go ahead and throw these into a quick cheat sheet for anyone who’d like to have them all in one place. Good luck out there, and stay salty. Get an ip address for en0: ipconfig getifaddr en0 Same thing, but setting and echoing a variable: ip=`ipconfig getifaddr en0` ; echo $ip View the subnet mask of en0: ipconfig getoption en0 subnet_mask View the dns server for en0: ipconfig getoption en0 domain_name_server Get information about how en0 got its dhcp on: ipconfig getpacket en1 View some network info: ifconfig en0 Set en0 to have an ip address of 10.10.10.10…

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

    Install Xcode Command Line Tools On A Fresh Mac Image

    I didn’t figure this out myself but can’t remember the source to attribute. Anyway, I image a lot of systems in my home lab for testing. Many tools I use (e.g. ant, metasploit, etc) need the Xcode Command Line Tools. The easy way to install these is to run xcode-select sung the –install option, as follows: /usr/bin/xcode-select --install

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Network Infrastructure

    Bringing stroke Back

    Stroke got moved, so dug this up and am reprinting with the latest and greatest location. Network Utility has a port scanner – it’s built in and really easy to use. Sure, stroke isn’t nmap, but it’s not trying to be… Since Network Utility is distributed with every copy of Mac OS X it stands to reason that every copy of Mac OS X has the ability to scan a port without using a GUI tool.  Enter one of the best named tools in Mac OS X, stroke.  Stroke is the command line back-end to the Port Scan tab of Network Utility.  To use stroke, you will need to cd into the…

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

    Disable Swap Files In OS X

    Every now and then I need to reclaim that space in /var/vm or I need to stop a process from paging to swap files while I’m troubleshooting something else. I in no way endorse disabling swap files (which basically kills using swap files as a part of your overall virtual memory) for extended periods of time. However, it has saved me in the case of stability concerns long enough to get a system patched or something like that. To disable OS X swap files, all you need to do is stop the com.apple.dynamic_pager daemon and restart. Use launchctl to stop: sudo launchctl unload -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist Once restarted, you may need…