• Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X: Fun with scutil

    August 13, 2008

    scutil is an app that can be used to get and set the ComputerName of your Mac.  The following command will return with the name of your computer. scutil –get ComputerName Now, if you want to change the name then you would use –set.  So if you wanted to set the name of your computer to kryptedmacbook you would use the following command: scutil –set kryptedmacbook Now, let’s say you’re writing a shell script and you want to put the computer name in a variable (let’s just call it computernm).  You could use the following line: computernm=`scutil –get ComputerName` Happy Scripting!

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Mac OS X Server 10.5: Using NATd to turn the Server into a Router

    August 12, 2008

    There are certain aspects of Mac OS X Server that it just isn’t that great at.  One of them is acting as a router.  It’s just a fact that an appliance by SonicWALL, Cisco, Watchguard and sometimes LinkSys will run circles around the speed and feature set of Mac OS X Server.  So with that in mind, let’s look at how you would go about configuring a basic port forward on OS X Server if you decided not to listen to me on this point…  😉 You can use the /etc/net/natd.plist.  The key you’ll want to edit is the redirect_port, one per port or a range of all in one key… …

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  • VMware

    Paul Maritz Speaks Out on VMware Issue

    August 11, 2008

    Paul Maritz explains how an update of VMware that expires was released and screwed up IT departments all day yest.  Although, if you think about it – this didn’t happen under his watch, or at least it wasn’t released under his watch.  But no worries, at least it’s fixed.  We were all worried there for awhile… http://blogs.vmware.com/console/2008/08/letter-from-vmw.html

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  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X 10.5: Compressing PDFs

    August 9, 2008

    So remember that feature in OS X that allowed you to compress your PDFs.  Well, it’s not really there any more.  But it can still be done, as a client of mine, Bill, pointed out to me: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/automator/compresspdfworkflow.html At the office, we’ve built another Automator workflow to allow you to go ahead and password protect PDFs.  So there’s a lot of flexibility here…

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  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server: Cascading Software Update Services

    August 7, 2008

    Software Update Services allow your server to cache updates from Apple and then redistribute them to clients within your organization.  Now, this is going to greatly cut down on the amount of bandwidth consumed when new software patches are released.  But if you have a large distributed organization you might want to have multiple Software Update Servers daisy-chained together in a cascade to download updates from each other and provide updates to sets of clients (maybe they’re geographically separated or you just have too many clients to provide updates to for just one server).  Cascading the Software Update Services would further conserve bandwidth in your environment if you have multiple Software Update…

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  • public speaking

    My Speech at BlackHat

    August 6, 2008

    This article came out just as Black Hat was starting: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2008/07/black_hat_talk_on_apple_encryp_1.html Then this article came out a few days later clearing a few things up: http://news.cnet.com/8300-1009_3-83.html?keyword=%22Charles+Edge%22

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  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X: SystemStarter

    August 5, 2008

    Ever wonder why those things you put into /System/Library/StartupItems and /Library/StartupItems start automatically?  SystemStarter. System starter automatically starts up items stored in /Library/StartupItems and /System/Library/StartupItems.  As Mac OS X continues to transition much of the previous functionality of other facilities such as the cron daemon into launchd, development has also reduced the reliance on SystemStarter since Mac OS X 10.3.  However, many third-party applications do still use StartupItems, Apple development prefers the launchd facility and will continue to rely more heavily on it in 10.6 and beyond.  

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