• Xsan

    Holy Cow, Batman, My Xsan Volume Is Invisible!

    No one could see the Xsan volume. Logged into Xsan Admin, the volume was unmounted for everyone. Mounted the volume and Xsan Admin said it mounted for everyone. No errors in the logs. In a nice place mentally, I stepped away from my desk. The phone rings, no one has access to the volume. Crap, what now? Log in, shows mounted. Log into a client, well, isn’t there. The other volumes are on the desktop. Go to /Volumes and it doesn’t appear there. Go to /Volumes/VOLUMENAME and viola, it’s there. But in the sidebar it’s hidden?!?!?! There aren’t any options in the volume.cfg file in /Library/Preferences/Xsan that deal with this…

  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Hiding a Partition in Mac OS X

    Utility or restore partitions are often meant to be hidden for users. The setfile command can be used to change attributes of files and volumes in Mac OS X, including the hidden attribute. To hide a volume called Restore you can use the following command: setfile -a V /Volumes/Restore

  • Mac OS X

    Adding and Removing Bundle Flags

    The Mac OS X Developer Tools come with an application called SetFile, which can be leveraged to change the bundle flag attribute. For example to add a bundle flag to a sparse bundle that is missing one you could use the following (assuming the name is FILENAME): SetFile -a B ~/Desktop/FILENAME.sparsebundle To then remove the bundle flag: SetFile -a b ~/Desktop/FILENAME.sparsebundle

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

    Touching Date Changes

    No, I’m not getting all teary-eyed about something…  Instead I’m thinking about changing the modification date stamp on a file.  Let’s take a fairly innocuous and hidden file, such as the the COOKIES file located in the /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc directory.  Since I’ve already tried the recipe, I’m going to go ahead and replace the contents of this file with the contents of the mutex script posted a few days ago. This leaves the date the file was created altered as can be seen by doing an ls -al on the file: -rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 4968 Apr 21 22:04 /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc/COOKIES We’re going to go a step further and use stat on the file to…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X: SetFile

    A couple of months ago I wrote about Using SetFile to Make Files Invisible. But today I’m going to discuss using it to change a few other attributes of a file. The options for SetFile include: SetFile -a can change attributes of a file, such as visibility, locked status, etc. SetFile -c can change the creator of the file SetFile -d can change the creation date of the file SetFile -m can change the modification date of the file SetFile -t can change the file type So let’s look at using some of these other options. First let’s take a file called logo.png on my Desktop (~/Desktop) and let’s change…