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

    Automated Regression Testing Mac OS X Clients Using Sikuli

    Imaging can be a complicated task. Many imaging environments have a lot of scripts, packages, base images and other aspects of automation. The more of these that you have, the more potential combinations you have for the state of a system once they’ve been run. This gets complicated when you want to make sure that each possible combination of images will have a consistent result when installed. For example, take something simple, like a property list. Each possible combination of packages, scripts images and even managed preferences might have a different impact on that poor property list. A simple defaults command can often give administrators the ability to see what…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Defaults & symbolichotkeys in Mac OS X

    Front Row is awesome. Hot keys are awesome. Typos are not. While zipping along, typing my fool heart out, I tend to fat finger about enough to drop my words per minute in half at times. Occasionally, my typos will land me in an annoying spot, with some application opening: often that application is Front Row. Which led me to unmapping the hot key. But then of course, since I reimage my machines a lot, I wanted to put that into my image… Hot keys are stored in com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist, in a users ~/Library/Preferences. You could setup a system with the exact key mappings that you wish to have, use managed…

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

    New PlistCheck Application

    PlistCheck is a very small, very fast application that checks preferences (aka – property lists) to make sure that they are properly formatted. There are a few other tools out there that do this and it’s easier to just use the command line, but if you are not command line savvy (or working with someone who isn’t) then you can use this tool to check property lists (preferences) rather than using the command line to do so. Click here to Download PlistCheck PlistCheck will be made available on the Apps page as well.