Spotlight just kinda’ works. Except when it doesn’t. Which is luckily pretty rare, for the use cases that Spotlight was designed for. But when it doesn’t work, you have a few tools that I’ve highlighted over the years to help you out, including articles on shared volumes, manually indexing, disabling Spotlight, and a few others. But what if you need to go in more depth to isolate an issue? For this, Apple has provided us with a tool called mddiagnose, in /usr/bin. In the following command, we’ll run an mddiagnose to dump a bunch of system statistics that we can then look at. Here, we’ll do that to a folder…
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Change Banner Times For Notifications In OS X
You know how in Notification Center, how you see a banner for awhile? You can customize how long that lasts. To do so, use defaults to write a bannerTime key into com.apple.notificationcenterui. They should be an integer that shows the number of seconds for the banner to display, For example, to set the banner to 10 seconds: defaults write com.apple.notificationcenterui bannerTime 10 Or 2 seconds: defaults write com.apple.notificationcenterui bannerTime 2 Once you set the time, log out and log back in (or reboot) for the change to take effect. Enjoy
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Device Management Requirements for Financial Services In Small Businesses
Financial services is an interesting business when it comes to what you need to do to meet your regulatory requirements. With so much data and the services that enable you to access data moving to the cloud, it can be hard to keep up with how solutions meet any regulatory requirements you might have. At the end of the day, you’re primarily concerned about customer data leaking out of your environment and making sure that you can report on every single thing that happened in an environment. Whatever help we can provide in this article, make sure that you vet anything against what the individuals that review your regulatory requirements say. Click Here…
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Automating The Server.app Setup Using A Script
There are a couple of parts to this article. The first is to describe the server command, stored in /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/usr/sbin/server. The description of the command by Brad Chapman was so eloquently put on this JAMF Nation post that I’m just gonna’ paste it in here: So … I just installed Server 5.0.x tonight on my Mac Mini running Yosemite (10.10.5). There was a question that came up during JNUC about upgrading Server and having a way to accept the license agreement without going through the GUI. So for shits and giggles I tried: server setup It’s not documented. And lo and behold, I got the prompt to accept the license agreement just…
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Using the Caching Service Command Line Interface
The Caching Server in OS X Server 5 is pretty simple, right? You open up the server app and then click on the On button and you’re… off… to… the… races… Yup. There are also a few options that you can configure using the Server app. You can configure which IP addresses (or networks) are able to access your server. You can configure where the cache is stored. You can configure the amount of Cached used. And you can clear out that cache. Boom. Including the ON button, you’ve only got 5 things you can do here. Pretty easy. To script kicking off the service as just a proxy that…
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The Second Edition of the Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide Now Available for Pre-Order!
The latest and greatest of the Enterprise Mac Admin’s Guide is now available for Pre-Order at http://www.amazon.com/Enterprise-Mac-Administrators-Guide-Second/dp/1484217055/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1445529968. This is an interesting update. If you happened to see the previous edition, I’d described more about Casper than most of the other third party products on the market. In this edition, there’s still an equal amount of information on Casper, but now there’s also more information on FileWave, and a whole chapter on the open source toolchain of products, including Munki and AutoPKG. The main reason I decided to update this title was actually the change from focusing on directory services (which still has plenty of page count) to focusing on profile management.…
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The Third Edition of Enterprise Mac Security Now Available For Pre-Order!
The third edition of the Enterprise Mac OS X Security book is now available for pre-order on Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/148421711X! Another title with Apress, for this edition I welcome Dan O’Donnell as a coauthor and in addition to modernizing everything, added a lot more on FileVault, signing, iCloud and Apple services. I don’t know how long the editorial process for this book will take, but it’s listed on Amazon with a ship date of December 3rd!
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Upgrade OS X to El Capitan
Installing OS X has never been easier than in Yosemite. In this article, we’ll look at upgrading a Mac from OS X 10.10 (Yosemite) to OS X 10.11 (El Capitan) to . The first thing you should do is clone your system. The second thing you should do is make sure you have a good backup. The third thing you should do is make sure you can swap back to the clone should you need to do so and that your data will remain functional on the backup. Once you’re sure that you have a fallback plan, let’s get started by downloading OS X El Capitan from the App Store. Once downloaded, you’ll…
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Encrypting OS X Server 5 Volumes In El Capitan
Encrypting a volume in OS X couldn’t be easier. In this article, we will look at three ways to encrypt OS X El Capitan volumes in OS X Server 5. The reason there are three ways is that booted volumes and non-booted volumes have different methods for enabling encryption. Encrypting Attached Storage For non-boot volumes, just control-click or right-click on them and then click on Encrypt “VOLUMENAME” where the name of the volume is in quotes. When prompted, provide an encryption password for the volume, verify that password and if you so choose, provide a hint. Once the encryption process has begun, the entry previously clicked on says Encrypting “VOLUMENAME” where…
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Xcode Server On OS X Server 5
OS X and iOS developers need a continuous integration system. This automates the build, analysis, and testing solution for software development using Xcode. OS X Server has an Xcode service, capable of integrating your developer account with git, providing many of the options required to build a continuous integration system. Before you configure the Xcode service that can take committed code and then test and build your software, you’ll need an Apple developer account. The Xcode service then links git to a developer account and runs automations, referred to as bots, in Xcode. Therefore, you’ll also need to have Xcode installed on the computer running the Xcode service. Bots are then managed and reported on using a…