Once upon a time, in a land far, far away (Athens, Georgia), I worked in computer labs. And I don’t think we cleaned the keyboards but once in the year before I moved into more department-specific IT. But now I’m a parent. And I keep hearing that we need to wash the hands of our children, that we need to keep everything they come in contact with sanitized and that we need to be prepared to take 7 business days to stay with them if they get sick or if something happens at their school (not that mine is in school yet). It isn’t that they want to keep our…
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Colorizing the Terminal
It really helps me to see different types of entries in the Terminal listed with different colors. I don’t go for listing everything that you can list as a different color though, as it starts looking a bit like a circus in Terminal when I do. If you want to colorize your terminal in Mac OS X there are two main ways to do so; both will require altering your .bash_profile (or creating if it’s not already there). To get started, go to your home folder from within Terminal and open .bash_profile from your favorite text editor. If it doesn’t exist then the text editor should create a new file…
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mcxrefresh article over on afp548
A short contribution I made to afp548 on the new mcxrefresh command in Snow Leopard. Check it out here.
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Setting up iTunes Home Sharing
You can use Home Sharing on iTunes to build an iTunes Server! Feature request something enough and eventually it happens. Now that Apple has given us this great new feature how do you use it? First, authorize iTunes (if it isn’t already). To do so go to the computer that you will be sharing the library from, the Home Media Server if you will and click on the Store menu from within iTunes and then click on Authorize Computer. Next, enable Home Sharing. Click on the new Home Sharing icon in the iTunes side bar (under SHARED) and then provide the iTunes Account ID and password for the account you’ll…
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Drobo + 4 1.5TB Disks
Drobo + 4 1.5TB Disks = 6TB of storage for ~$730 Perfect for iSCSI targets and TimeMachine backups, not-so-much for editing uncompressed 1080p…
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Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 10.6.1 Now Available
Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server 10.6.1 are now available for download. Listed fixes for Mac OS X Server include: reliability of services using Grand Central Dispatch duplicate serial number alerts on servers with multiple network interfaces But more importantly are a number of minor GUI changes that have been resolved. If you’re an early adopter I would certainly run this as soon as possible. In addition, Server will have the following fixes, which are also included in Client: compatibility with some Sierra Wireless 3G modems an issue that might cause DVD playback to stop unexpectedly some printer compatibility drivers not appearing properly in the add printer browser…
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Spamming Web Logs
There are so many types of spam I’m starting to loose track… I check the logs for my web site occasionally. I don’t typically have time to look more than once a week and I don’t have any time to correlate the logs against the articles or do any kind of statistical analysis. I just post what I am thinking about or working on and that’s basically what I have always felt a site like this should be. I guess looking at the logs is just looking for a little external validation… When I check the logs the number one thing I’m looking for is what sites are referrals coming…
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Basic pkcs12 Management with security
Recently, I did an article for afp548.com where I explained that you can import a pkcs12 file into an 802.1x profile using networksetup. In that type of environment you would be leveraging TLS or TTLS with the Mac OS X client acting as the supplicant and the certificate required to establish authentication with the authenticator. So you need the certificate to get started, but how do you get the pkcs12 and dish it out to clients programatically? We’re going to start out with a new keychain where we’ve imported the certificate into that keychain (or skip this step if you already have a p12 file). First, find the certificate and…
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Snow Leopard systemsetup Options
systemsetup is a great little command, for setting date and time, for wake on LAN, etc. But in Mac OS X 10.6, you can also set your kernel boot architecture? Weird, eh? Not as weird as the length of the option… systemsetup -getkernelbootarchitecturesetting Try saying it three times really fast. Now again with a French accent! Anyway, so then you want to set the kernel boot architecture to 32 bit, set it to i386 and if you want to set it to 64 bit, use x86_64 with the -setkernelbootarchitecture option (default is the default value). It edits the com.apple.Boot.plist located at /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plist.
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Business Intelligence and ITIL
A lot of importance is being placed on business intelligence again. It seems as though the promises that business intelligence was supposed to deliver got lost at some point, but that it’s oddly enough found its way back onto the path of productivity gains and ergo back into the minds of the IT pundits that drive the rhetoric of the industry. But what I don’t hear people talking about is applying business intelligence to the business of IT. A lot of resources are put into a wide variety of IT projects. But what drives the agenda? Are the allocation of those resources justified based on quantifiable metrics or are they…