MacTech Boot Camp is getting great reviews (90% of attendees recommend it). After selling out in a number of other cities, MacTech Boot Camps are coming to Los Angeles (July 27th at the LAX Sheraton Gateway) and Chicago (August 31st at the downtown Hotel Allegro). The Los Angeles event includes Ben Levy, Phil Goodman, Ric Wilson, Sean Colins, Chris Keller, Jonathan Goldhill, Scott Immerman, Sean Costello, Steve Favarger, Allen Hancock, and Peter Linde (there are some super great guys and some really good, experienced speakers in that bunch). While the early bird pricing for the LAX event has ended, you can use the following link to save $200: http://www.mactech.com/bootcamp/special-reg_Krypted Geared…
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- Articles and Books, Business, certifications, Consulting, iPhone, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment
MacTech Bootcamps Coming To A City Near You!
I’ve been watching the MacTech Conference and then Boot Camps for some time. After hearing of the resounding success of the Conference last summer I was then stoked to hear that the January Boot Camp went extremely well. A MacTech Boot Camp is a regional, single-track seminar designed specifically for consultants and techs. MacTech Conference is a multi-day conference for IT professionals with a focus on enterprise and development whereas the Boot Camps are for consultants and techs focused on home users and small to medium sized businesses. Both are going really well. https://krypted.com/ is now a media sponsor of MacTech Boot Camps! This means I get discounts to offer my…
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Leveraging jQuery for Input Validation
jQuery is the most popular JavaScript library in use at this point, finding its way into something around 20% of the largest websites in the world. One of the main reasons for this is that much of jQuery is meant to allow for working between JavaScript and Ajax. As such it often ends up getting used for graphical interfacing. One interesting use for graphics is to only allow someone to actually enter specific characters into fields. It is common to leverage input validation, but typically this includes validating the data that is submitted from a form; however, using jQuery, there is an AlphaNumeric script that only allows the use of…
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Backup Planning
The two attached files are a sample checklist and a sample backup calculator to be used in conjunction with the talk I’m giving at MacSysAdmin, which has been moved up to 10:45 in the morning today.
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The Lighter The Touch… Imaging & Support
When it comes to system imaging, the most important aspect is to be methodical. If there is an error, the last thing you want to do is try 3-4 different things to see if one fixes the problem. Bust out the scientific method and find out exactly what the problem is. Because you’re about to make a change, en masse, that is going to have a resounding impact on the ecosystem that is your environment. And the smaller the change, or the light the touch, that you make then the less likely you will be to introduce a support nightmare in some other part of the enterprise. Many environments have…
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NetWare + Portlock
When you run into booting issues with NetWare it’s often a simple fix. Move a file, edit a file, rename a file, etc. But getting to the point where you can actually implement the fix can be a pain. The Portlock Boot CD can come in pretty handy at this point. It enables you to mount a file system and edit it even if the host will not boot properly. It’s not that I’m saying that you should invest more money into that crusty old NetWare environment in most cases, but in some cases it can be a saviour…
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S3 Command Line Part II
Earlier we looked at using s3cmd to interact with the Amazon S3 storage cloud. Now we’re going to delve into using Another S3 Bash Interface. To get started, first download the scripts and then copy the hmac and s3 commands into the ec2 folder created in previous walkthroughs. To use the s3 script, you need to store your Amazon secret key in a text file and set two environment variables. The INSTALL file included with the package has all the details. The only tricky part I ran into, and from the comments on Amazon, other people ran into, is how to create the secret key text file. Now go into your…
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Amazon S3 from the Command Line
In a previous article we looked at how to upload Final Cut Server content to s3 using Jungle Disk. We also looked at how to upload ec2 images to s3. But now we’re going to take a deeper dive into using s3 from the command line. There are a number of tools that have been developed by the community to leverage Amazon’s S3 Storage Service. This isn’t as cut and dry as using ec2 due to the fact that the Amazon tools are written in Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python. However, I’m a shell kinda’ guy to a large degree and I was able to find a couple of places where people have written…
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Custom VMs using S3+EC2
I’m obviously enjoying using Amazon for a number of testing applications (in addition to of course buying books and light bulbs from them, and not one showed up broken). So far, I’ve done articles on getting started with Amazon ec2, using the command line with ec2, whitelisting an IP address, deploying ec2 en masse, and setting up a static IP for ec2. But the S3 articles have been sparse. So, now let’s look at using Amazon’s storage service (S3) from the command line. Funny enough, if you’re going to upload your own custom Amazon Machine Instances (AMIs) you’ll need to leverage S3. When you go to bundle an image, you will have a…
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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.…