Mobile Home Directory synchronizing in OS X Server environments is used to synchronize the home folder of clients with a copy that lives on the server, so users can roam between computers with their desktop, documents and preferences following them from machine to machine. Server Side File Tracking creates and keeps a copy of the sync database on client machines and servers, comparing the two databases when synchronizing rather than scanning directories for all the synced files each time a synchronization occurs. In environments with synchronizing Mobile Home Directories, Server Side File Tracking (SSFT) can help reduce the amount of time required for syncs. Server Side File Tracking is disabled…
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Enabling ARD, SSH & SNMP On Mountain Lion Server Using serveradmin
The traditional way to enable Apple Remote Desktop is using the kickstart command. But there’s a simpler way in OS X Mountain Lion Server. To do so, use the serveradmin command. To enable ARD using the serveradmin command, use the settings option, with info:enableARD to set the payload to yes: sudo serveradmin settings info:enableARD = yes Once run, open System Preferences and click on Sharing. The Remote Management box is then checked and the local administrative user has access to ARD into the host. The Server app will also have the “Enable screen sharing and remote management” option checked. There are also a few other commands that can be used…
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One Teletype to Bind Them (Or, Clustered SSH for OS X)
When working at scale, and particularly with hosts that need to have the same configuration or you want to perform the same queries on, the issue becomes how do I ‘reach out and touch’ my fleet? Without centralized infrastructure backed by a messaging broker or a heavier process that leaves hooks in systems and/or requires its own domain specific language, sometimes you can get by with… plain ol’ ssh. Apple Remote Desktop can take us a lot of the way there, and one of the announced features of Mountain Lion is that screen sharing gets another piece of ARD’s pie, the ability to drag-and-drop files to transfer them to the…
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Sync'ing iTunes Libraries
I recently spent a few days trimming down the amount of space consumed by my home folder. In so doing I discovered a number of things I could be doing better with regards to utilization of my drive space. So I decided to offload most of my media (photos, movies, etc) off my laptop and onto my Mac Mini server. I also decided that one thing I’d like to live on both is iTunes. Note: Before you do anything in this article you should verify you have a good back up. Also, both machines will end up needing to be Authorized for your iTunes account. There are a lot of…
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Running SSH on 1st Revision AppleTVs
Sometimes it can be really useful to have an SSH connection into your AppleTV. If I need to explain why then you probably won’t want to do it. Unless of course, you’re just after getting something like Boxee running, which we’ll look at as well. Before we get into doing anything to your AppleTV, when we’re done I do not know how Apple will feel about your warranty moving forward, so do this stuff at your own risk (but that’s pretty much true for many articles on this site)… So first up, let’s install SSH. To get started, plug in a jump drive you don’t mind reformatting. Then run the…
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iPhone Worm is Crap
Sorry, I can’t help it. That whole “iPhone Security Problems” thread I’ve seen on a few sites recently due to that worm. Oh, then there was a second worm that did the same thing. Really? Did these awesome security gurus realize that the device has to be jailbroken? Oh and they have to still have the default password used for SSH? I would hope that if you know enough to jailbreak the device without bricking it that you know enough to change the default SSH password. Interestingly enough though, an estimated 6 to 8 percent of iPhones are jail-broken… If there have been 21 million sold, that provides an attack…
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Using SSH to access GUI tools
ssh -X serveraddress gui-tool
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Control SSH Access
Control access by editing the SSH configuration file and using the AllowUsers directive like so: AllowUsers cedge To add multiple entries, either separate users with a space: AllowUsers cedge kklein Or you can write an entirely new line: AllowUsers cedge AllowUsers kklein