• Articles and Books,  Mac Security

    Snow Leopard & Malware

    An article on ZDNet that states that Snow Leopard has anti-malware built into it (thanks Dee-Ann): http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=4104&tag=nl.e589 Side note: I wonder whether or not they read the EULA for their pre-released software? I realize that release date is really just a few days from now, but come on guys… Just wait a couple of days to post these things…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Foundations of Mac Snow Leopard Security

    I’ve been asked by a number of people whether or not we will be updating the Mac OS X security book I did a couple of years ago for Apress to Snow Leopard.  The answer is yes.  We are currently working on the updates and hope to have it available by December.  The book will undergo a number of changes/improvements, as all second editions should.  I’ll update when it’s available on Amazon & of course, in stores.

  • Articles and Books,  sites

    New Graphics

    In a further step to refine the site so it’s less of a drain on your browsers (and my boxen) I’ve further tweaked the graphical elements in the site.  It’s a little simpler, with the graphics comprised of sub-20KB files.  There are also less of them, which I hope will improve performance.  Stress tests seem to indicate that it can handle about 12,000 concurrent users. 🙂 Also, sorry for skipping some posts.  I was at WWDC and have been diligently working on my next book.

  • Articles and Books,  Business,  Consulting,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    10 Quick SysAdmin Time Savers

    I’m not gonna’ lie to you, I’m a pretty lazy admin. As such, I look for ways to reduce the amount of typing I have to do routinely. And ways to not make mistakes that I made when I was young and needed the rupies. The more time I spend at the command line, the more I use these, so here goes (hope they help you in some way shape or form): Make your own bin and put stuff you use often in there.  You can use any folder you like and just include it in the export PATH=$PATH line by throwing a : at the end and typing that path.…

  • Active Directory,  Articles and Books,  Business,  Consulting,  Network Infrastructure,  SQL,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware,  Windows Server

    Getting Started with Amazon's EC2 Cloud

    Yesterday I did a quick review of the various cloud offerings from Amazon. Previous to that I had done a review of using S3, the Amazon storage service, with Mac OS X, primarily through the lens of using S3 as a destination for Final Cut Server archives. Today I’m going to go ahead and look at using EC2 from Mac OS X. To get started, first download the EC2 tools from Amazon. Next, log into Amazon Web Services. If you don’t yet have a login you will obviously need to create one to proceed. Additionally, if you don’t yet have a private key you’ll need one of those too –…

  • Articles and Books,  personal,  sites

    https://krypted.com/ Shirts Now Online

    Maybe it’s too many years at Defcon, maybe it’s just trying to make shirts I would like to wear myself. Either way, https://krypted.com/ is now offering schwag. Not the free kind (I wish I could) though. So if you need to get your geek warez on head over to the shiny new Shirts tab of the site and check out what I’ve got to offer. This is the first batch. Time permitting the next batch will hopefully be online soon. Hope you like…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X

    Self Control for Mac OS X

    I’m an author (well, an engineer who writes about what I do). And when I’m writing I need privacy, peace and quiet – so I can focus. I recently realized that I write the best on airplanes where there’s no wireless, no Internet and no calls. I can just put on my headphones and sit with man pages and virtual machines and crank away. Now there’s an app that can help me to mirror that experience. Self Control allows me to block access to mail and the web, almost mirroring (minus the phone and baby and other distractions) that which I have on an airplane. So why not just unplug…

  • Articles and Books

    iTunes App Store: Books

    According to a recent O’Reilly Radar report, the fastest growing category on the iTunes App store is books. Some of these are full blown books at full cost. Others are $.99 or even free. This is an interesting potential source of being able to self-publish quickly on micro-topics. For example, a miniature 20 page book on how to do something very specific, sold on the App store for $.99 might be worth the cost to certain people. Like any other app, it might even take off and be uber-popular. On the same token, as an advertising ploy a free book might take off and garner a lot of attention. No…

  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mass Deployment,  Xsan

    Article on scripting networksetup for Xsan on Xsanity

    Wondering why I’ve been a little light on Xsan postings? I posted an article on how to write a script to automate the setup of the Metadata and house networks in an Xsan environment on Xsanity. It uses networksetup for the most part and is meant to be a hybrid between a networksetup walkthrough and a mini-shell scripting tutorial. It can also be leveraged for scripting the initial setup of your clients in an imaging workflow, although you will typically not need to use static IP addresses in a mass deployment scenario.