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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Comments On https://krypted.com/
Comments on this site have been a pain since I enabled them about 2 1/2 years ago. I believe I enabled them due to something some judgmental person said when they couldn’t comment on an article I had written. During the first year, there was a lot of fine tuning the spam blocking to try and keep out the spammy crap. That continues to be a work in progress, but it seems to be in pretty good shape. During those couple of years I ended up racking up a queue of about 7,000 in the spam category and another 2,000+ in the pending category (which meant I need to deal…
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Forcing NFS to Use TCP
NFS has 3 settings in Lion Server: nbDaemons, the number of NFS daemons, useTCP, whether or not TCP is used and useUDP, whether or not udp is used. To disable UDP forces TCP: serveradmin settings nfs:useUDP = 0 Or to turn UDP back on: serveradmin settings nfs:useUDP = 1 To disable TCP if you’d rather just use UDP: serveradmin settings nfs:useTCP = 0 Or to turn TCP back on: serveradmin settings nfs:useTCP = 1
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Disable Rubber Band Scrolling In Lion & Up
10.7 and up have a little feature called elastic scrolling. When you get to the top of a page and you keep scrolling you see the linen background. There is a NAS devices whose web portals seems to be pretty shady overall, but specifically seems to lock up when this rubber band effect kicks in. So to disable: defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -bool FALSE To disable the disable, or re-enable the effect: defaults write -g NSScrollViewRubberbanding -bool TRUE
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Selecting Text in QuickLook
You’re searching for some content on your desktop and opening pages file after pages file and pdf after pdf in QuickLook. Finally you find that one juicy morsel. It’s a short script you just need to copy into your clipboard. But you can’t. The gods of technology are aligned against you, to make you hit command-O and then after waiting for the entire 3 seconds it takes Preview to open, you have to search within the document for that information. Holy crap, you just lost at least 5 to 8 seconds of your day. I guess now you have to cancel vacation or let your spouse know you’ll be home…
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Programmatically Running And Looping Keynote Presentations
These days, you can spend a lot of money buying really nice digital signage tools. And if you’re doing so, then you likely have some pretty dynamic content you’d like to load. Something that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a dynamic content platform, but which is nice for the quick presentation that you whip up and want to use for a form of digital signage is Keynote presentations. These are inexpensive and can be played on monitors through AirPlay or directly through a Mac Mini connected to a television or big monitor. Great for a monitor in the company lobby, the hallway in the school or for subliminal messaging at…
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Add Services to Server Admin From the Command Line
In the Server Admin application, you need to enable any services before you can actually start them. In order to do so to a lot of servers at once, you want to automate that. Such automation can be done using the serveradmin command line options. The settings would be sent to info. To see all of the settings available there: serveradmin settings info Note that there’s a whole section for info:serviceConfig: info:serviceConfig:roles:com.apple.SimpleServerSetup.ODPlugin:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.DirectoryServices:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.NetBoot:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.AddressBook:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.SWUpdate:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.NAT:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Mail:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Notification:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.VPN:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.DHCP:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Calendar:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.AppleFile:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Jabber:configured = yes…
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profiles -x: The Most Important New Feature In Mountain Lion!!!
There are a lot of cool new features in Mountain Lion. But the most important finds its way to us through how you can use the profiles command. If you can believe it (moment of suspense), the profiles command now supports a -x option that allows administrators to see what version of the profiles command is being run. OMGOMGOMGPWNIESOMGOMGOMG!!! profiles -x Since the profiles command appeared in Lion, the rev in Mountain Lion would arguably 2.0. Actually, if you check your output it’s 2.00!!! There ya’ go. Value, baby. That’s what Mountain Lion is all aboot! Other than that, the commands are about the same as when I wrote about…
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Disable Shadows On Mac OS X Screenshots
Screenshot formats, locations and styles are controlled by the com.apple.screencapture defaults domain. This time of the year (or OS Release Cycle) I am doing a lot of screenshots. And while I love the way they look with drop shadows, no one else does. So I find myself frequently disabling those drop shadows. To do so: defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true Then reboot or killall SystemUIServer: killall SystemUIServer To get them back: defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false ; killall SystemUIServer
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JAMF Nation User Conference 2012
JAMF has announced the 2012 rendition of their National User Conference. Having been to two of these, I can say that if you use any JAMF products that it is a great event to attend. It is a lot of very specific information about integrating, mass deploying, mass managing, mass document distributing and mass 3rd partying for Apple products. The National User Conference will be held October 23-25 2012, 8:00 am – 5:00 pm in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota (where all the cool kids live). The venue is one of the best conference spots I’ve seen in the Guthrie theater, overlooking the stone arch bridge. In previous years, there have been announcements,…