In place of the former Arise! Bookstore, there is a Nerd Party going on until Monday evening. Tonight there’s even a Linux workshop. For more info: http://nerdparty.drupalgardens.com
-
-
DeployStudio: Rename a Volume with Host Name
DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really…
-
MacSysAdmin
MacSysAdmin will again be held in Gothenburg, Sweden. The dates for MacSysAdmin (and most of the speakers) have been announced. The conference will be held from September 29th through October 1st at the Folkets Hus. I am honored to again be a speaker and will be there throughout the conference, which includes sessions from a number of Mac gurus, including Arek Dreyer, Andrina Kelly, Alan Gordon, Karl Kuehn and Duncan McCracken. Click here to sign up and hope to see you there!
-
Stupid Podcast Producer Tricks
The document handler in Podcast Producer has been exposed to the command line in the form of a tool called document2images (located in the /usr/libexec/podcastproducer directory), which takes a pdf and converts it into a set of tiff files. In its most basic iteration the documents2images tool simply inputs a document and then outputs a couple of tiff files per page of that document. 15 pages will typically net you 30 tiffs and an xml output (not that you can put Humpty Dumpty back together again very easily). When you use document2images you will need to specify the pdf using the –document option, the xml file to output using the…
-
BRU Primer -> Advanced
In BRU 2, you have 3 tools to use. These include: BRU Server Agent Config (UB) – A tool used to install the agent, which needs to be located on each machine that will be backed up (including the server if it has any data to back up) BRU Server Config (UB) – Used to configure the server daemon, backup server configurations and set passwords to communicate with the server. Also used to set licensing information and perform scans for new tape drives and libraries. BRU Server Console (UB) – Used to configure backup jobs, schedules, etc. To get started, open the BRU Server Config application from the components that…
-
Perl Control
There are a lot of versions of the popular perl scripting language out there, and depending on what version you may have written a script with you might find that using a different version than the one that comes with an OS by default can have a drastic impact on a script. In Mac OS X you can change the default version of perl that the perl and a2p command will use. Before doing so you should check the version of perl being used by default, which can be done using the perl command, followed by the -v option: perl -v By default, the OS currently uses version 5.10.0. To…
-
Archive & Restore Assets with fcsvr_client
Final Cut Server has an option to archive and restore assets. When archiving an asset, the asset will be moved to a file system path that is represented by the device ID. The archival and restore can be done using the steps shown in this video: The process of archival and restore can be kicked off from the command line, which will initiate the movement of the asset. To archive an asset, you will use the archive verb with the fcsvr_client tool. This will require you to provide the asset ID number along with the device that you will be archiving the asset to. For example, to archive an asset…
-
Debug Logging iCal
One of the tools in the iCal -> iCal Server troubleshooting toolbelt is to debug log HTTP connections. You can capture packets for port 8008 using tcpdump. In the following command, we’ll capture the packets over interface en0 for tcp port 8008 to a file called iCal.pcap: tcpdump -w iCal.pcap -i en0 tcp port 8008 We’ll then attempt to create a calendar entry in iCal or simply log into the server through iCal. CalDAV traffic will occur and then you can stop the tcpdump. In order to then read the tcpdump: tcpdump -nnr iCal.pcap Another option that can help to correlate traffic you see in the pcap from tcpdump is…
-
Scripting Productions and Assets in Final Cut Server
When you’re integrating Final Cut Server with other products, you often find yourself writing scripts to perform various tasks. One of those tasks might be to create a new project, or a production as it’s called in Final Cut Server. Because a production can have a number of attributes, a great way to do this is to create a template production and then make copies of it (or clones) when you want to create subsequent projects. To do so, you’ll use the fcsvr_client command, along with the clone verb. The -name option will allow you to set the name of the production which would then be followed by the unique…
-
Monitoring/Restarting Retrospect
As of version 8, Retrospect uses port 22024 when the Retrospect Console needs to communicate with the engine. It just so happens that this can become unresponsive when the engine itself decides to stop working. Therefore, if you’re using Retrospect 8, you can run a port scan against port 22024 ( i.e. stroke <IP_ADDRESS> 22024 22024 ) and then restart the engine if it goes unresponsive. To restart the engine, simply unload and then load com.retrospect.launchd.retroengine. For example: /bin/launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.retrospect.launchd.retroengine.plist; /bin/launchctl load /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.retrospect.launchd.retroengine.plist I have found that if you alter the nice value that the engine crashes less (not that I’m saying that it crashes a lot or is buggy…