curl -L http://bit.ly/10hA8iC | bash Tip of the ‘ole hat to Erin for April fools fun for that one…
When you’re configuring a Mac to leverage an existing Windows infrastructure, having the clocks in sync is an important task. Luckily, Windows Server has been able to act as an NTP server for a long time. In this article, we’ll look at configuring Server 2008 R2 to be an NTP server for Mac and Linux clients. Note: Before you get started, or any time you’re hacking around in the registry, make sure to do a backup of your registry/SystemState! To enable NTP on Windows Server, open your favorite registry editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMCurrentControlSetServicesW32TimeTimeProvidersNtpServer. From here, enter a key called Enabled as a dword with a value of 00000001. The NTP Server should…
Thanks to Tedd Kidd for the following article, on automatically managing administrative privileges based on Active Directory groups! This is a quick and easy way to assign any user to the local admin group in OS X based on their group membership in your Active Directory. This should also work with Open Directory or eDirectory groups if your workstations are bound to those directory services. You’ll need to include this code in the workstation login script so that it runs as root but uses the $@ variable to determine the user that is logging in. #!/bin/bash # Set group name to check against groupname=”domain admins” if [ “`/usr/bin/dsmemberutil checkmembership -U…
For those of you who say Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise, Apple has released a number of assets (technical white papers) on integrating Macs (Lion) into enterprise environments at http://training.apple.com/lion. This is also the page that you’ll find links to all of the official training and certification courses for Lion. The assets up on this page are about as close to a publicly accessible book on integrating OS X into the enterprise as you’ll to see for Lion… The first covers the basics of integrating Macs into enterprise environments: The second covers self support: The third is on evaluating Macs in Enterprise environments: The fourth is on deployment: The…
I was sitting at the JAMF National User Conference today and I couldn’t help but notice that CrashPlan is a sponsor. It got me to thinking about something someone said last week at the MacTech conference about the fact that CrashPlan was great for clients but that it would need lots of agents for backing up Servers. So at 318, we’ve developed a tool for doing a lot of the service configuration backup in a Mac OS X Server environment, in the form of sabackup and our Open Directory Archiver package. This tends to get most everything we need to backup for the Apple platform. But what about Windows Servers……
DFS stands for Distributed File Sharing. DFS is most commonly used to virtualize the way with which storage is presented to users. Once virtualized, mounts are able to replicate to one another or be moved between servers without impacting the end user experience. While many who have never used DFS will wonder why enterprises actually care about it, those of us who have used it extensively will be stoked that this new feature has been incorporated into OS X Lion. Using DFS in OS X is similar to using DFS in Windows, simply connect to a share and the work on the back end to locate where the share is…
opendirectoryd Scripting directory services events is one of the most common ways that the OS X community automates post-imaging tasks. As such, there are about as many flavors of directory services scripts are there engineers that know both directory services and have a little scripting experience. In OS X Lion, many aspects of directory services change and bring with them new techniques for automation. The biggest change is the move from DirectoryService to opendirectoryd. In Snow Leopard and below, when you performed certain tasks, you restarted the directory services daemon, DirectoryService. The same is true in Lion, except that instead of doing a killall on DirectoryService, you do it on…
Many data migrations are handled in Excel. When migrating data you often find yourself “massaging” the data a bit. To do so, I often use Excel. For example, let’s look at taking a first and last name and then creating a short name that has a firstname.lastname convention and a full name that has a firstname (space) lastname convention. This can be done with formulas pretty quickly. First, let’s place our firstname into column A and our lastname data into column B, making sure that the first and last names for the rows match up (usually validating the first row and last row will be good enough). To start a…
For those who don’t yet get a subscription to MacTech Magazine, I’ve been a long time lurker and suggest you do the same. I recently submitted an article to them for the Enterprise Desktop Alliance and it will be in the February issue. There’s also one appearing in the March issue. They’re both fairly long and cover the topic of moving specific services off of Mac OS X Server and onto the Windows platform. I don’t recommend that any organization go out and start ripping out all their Mac OS X Servers because Apple dropped the Xserve. But I am a guy who really likes having a lot of options…
phpLDAPadmin is a tool that can be used to walk LDAP trees and view attributes of objects located within them using a web browser. This isn’t to say that it’s the prettiest tool out there but it works really well and is portable between various flavors of LDAP. Before you can use phpLDAPadmin you will need Apache. In Ubuntu, Apache can be installed using apt-get: apt-get install apache2 Once you have Apache installed, downloading phpLDAPadmin and installing it in Ubuntu Server 10 couldn’t be easier, just apt-get the package: apt-get install phpldapadmin Now you have the pieces, let’s copy phpLDAPadmin into your web root directory: cp -R /usr/share/phpldapadmin /var/www/myphpldapadmin In that…