Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud services. Azure can host virtual machines and act as a location to store files. However, Azure can do much more as well, providing an Active Directory instance, provide SQL database access, work with hosted Visual Studio, host web sites or provide BizTalk services. All of these can be managed at https://manage.windowsazure.com. You can also manage Windows Azure from the command line on Linux, Windows or Mac. To download command line tools, visit http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/downloads/#cmd-line-tools. Once downloaded, run the package installer. When the package is finished installing, visit /usr/local/bin where you’ll find the azure binary. Once installed, you’ll need to configure your account from the windowsazure.com site to…
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25 Helpful Chrome OS Shell (crosh) Commands
To open Crosh: Control-Alt-T Find commands: help Find debugging commands: help_advanced To switch to a more bash-like command prompt: shell To see the version of Chrome OS running on your Chromebook: sudo /opt/google/chrome/chrome –version To show the operating system name: uname -a If the operating system is a bit old, update it using the update_engine_client command: update_engine_client -update To see the bios of your Chromebook, open up a command prompt (Control-Alt-T) and use the following command: sudo /usr/sbin/chromeos-firmwareupdate -V To record some sound from the microphone, use the sound command: sound record NUMBEROFSECONDS Look for (or grep for) BIOS version in the output. To see the Vital Product Data, or…
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Factory Reset (Powerwash) Chromebooks
If you ever loose track of the password on your Chromebook, find that the Chromebook is running oddly or want to sell a Chromebook, you can remove your Google account and readd it. The easiest way to do this is a feature called Powerwash. To pull it up, open Settings and then click on Advanced Settings. There, you’ll see the Powerwash button. Click it and then you will remove all of the user accounts installed on the device, basically performing a factory reset. Powerwash can also be run by clicking Restart while holding down Control-Alt-Shift-R at the login screen. This brings up a Powerwash prompt where you simply need to…
- cloud, FileMaker, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Network Infrastructure, Time Machine, Xsan
Obtain Information From Watchman Monitoring Using a Script
Watchman Monitoring is a tool used to monitor computers. I’ve noticed recently that there’s a lot of traffic on the Watchman Monitoring email list that shows people want a great little (and by little I mean inexpensive from a compute time standpoint) monitoring tool to become a RMM (Remote Management and Monitoring) tool. The difference here is in “Management.” Many of us actually don’t want a monitoring tool to become a management tool unless we are very deliberate about what we do with it. For example, that script that takes a machine name of ‘rm -Rf /’ that some ironic hipster of a user decided to name their hard drive…
- Articles and Books, Business, cloud, iPhone, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment
Apple's Customer Facing SystemStatus
Apple now has a new system status page for their services, available at http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus. This site goes through many of Apple’s services and shows an indicator light for when they are up. Additionally, you can scroll down to the detailed timeline and see a historical account of what services are online. This is yet another step in Apple’s continued progress at providing more and more information to the community on, well, everything. This includes seeing Apple popping up at conferences here and there, most notably at Black Hat this year, publishing more kbase articles that detail problems and allowing more community involvement from some employees. A more open Apple is a…
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Managing Office 365 Users Using PowerShell
Programmatically controlling the cloud is an important part of trying to reign in the chaos of disparate tools that the beancounters make us use these days. Of all the companies out there, Microsoft seems to understand this about as well as anyone and their fine programmers have provided us with a nice set of tools to manage Office 365 accounts, both in a browser (as with most cloud services) and in a shell (which is what we’ll talk about in this article). This article isn’t really about scripting PowerShell. Instead we’re just looking at a workflow that could be used to script a Student Information System, HRIS solution or another…
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iWork Public Beta Goes Bye-Bye Today :: Last Call
I’m sure you’ve heard by now. But just in case you hadn’t logged into iWork.com in awhile or let the to-do lapse, it’s just worth a reminder that iWork Public Beta, the site that you could upload Pages, Numbers and Keynotes to, is being deprecated. The end comes on today. In other words, if you have documents up on the site, you should download them immediately or you won’t be able to come August. Apple has even provided a document explaining how. The service that was being provided by the iWork public beta is replaced by iCloud. Using iCloud, you can sync your documents between all of your devices. When…
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Google recently decided that it was time to force some other company to buy cloudy dispositioned upstarts, Dropbox and Box.net. Google also decided that Office365 represented Microsoft being a little too brazen in their attempts to counteract the inroads that Google has made into Microsoft territory. Therefor, Google thumped their chest and gave away 5GB of storage in Google Drive. Google then released a tool that synchronizes data stored on a Google Drive to Macs and Windows systems. Installing Google Drive is pretty easy. Just browse to Google Docs and Google will tell you that there’s this weird new Google Drive thing you should check out. Here, click on Download…
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Link Baiting 101
I almost called this article “Aliens Can Listen To Calls on Your iPhone” or “How To Hack Into Every iPhone Ever (Even When They’re Powered Off)”. But then I thought that maybe it would be a bit too much. I’ve been a little melodramatic at times, but that’s when I was younger and needed the rupees. But TechTarget isn’t young (although I don’t know if they need the rupees). I’d like to point out two recent articles of theirs: Zaphod wrote this chapter just to mess with you: Apple iOS Security Attacks A Matter Of When, Not If, IT Pros Say The Salmon of Doubt would be a much better title…
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Goodbye Google Wave
Looks like Wave will be gone as of January. From Google: Dear Wavers, More than a year ago, we announced that Google Wave would no longer be developed as a separate product. At the time, we committed to maintaining the site at least through to the end of 2010. Today, we are sharing the specific dates for ending this maintenance period and shutting down Wave. As of January 31, 2012, all waves will be read-only, and the Wave service will be turned off on April 30, 2012. You will be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. We encourage…