Yosemite brought Xsan 4, which included a whole new way to add clients to an Xsan. Xsan Admin is gone, as of El Capitan, but unchanged from then to macOS Sierra (other than a couple of binaries moving around). These days, instead of scanning the network using Xsan Admin. we’ll be adding clients using a Configuration Profile. This is actually a much more similar process to adding Xsan clients to a StorNext environment than it is to adding clients to Metadata Controllers running Xsan 3 and below. But instead of making a fsnameservers file, we’re plugging that information into a profile, which will do that work on the client on our behalf.…
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Don’t Forget To Accept The Latest DEP License Agreement TODAY!
In case you’re using DEP and haven’t noticed this, you need to accept the latest terms of service in the Apple license agreement for DEP if you’re going to continue using the service. I don’t usually post emails I get from Apple, but I can easily see orgs using accounts that don’t have email flowing to anyone that is capable of responding, so I strongly recommend you go in and accept the latest and greatest agreements so your stuff doesn’t break! Here’s the email I got from Apple: Apple Deployment Programs Thank you for participating in the Device Enrollment Program. On September 13 Apple will release updated software license agreements.…
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Episode 11 Of The MacAdmins Podcast
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Episode 10 of the MacAdmins.org Podcast
Special thanks to @dials_mavis for being basically the best ever, cutting this thing together while he was sick, and for the rest of the team for being awesome to help hide the fact that I’m not. 🙂
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The Immutable Laws Of Game Mechanics In A Microtransaction-Based Economy Article on Huffington Post
My latest piece, called The Immutable Laws Of Game Mechanics In A Microtransaction-Based Economy is now available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-edge/the-immutable-laws-of-gam_b_11810172.html. In this piece I explore a few of the emergent rules that game developers should/need to follow when building out game play and planning for monetization of various aspects of their games. Hope you enjoy!
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opendiff
There is a little tool in OS X called opendiff. This command can be used to bring up a quick and dirty graphical view of changes in a file. For example, if you run opendiff followed by two file names, you’ll see what’s different in the two files and what’s the same: opendiff test test1 The result then looks as follows. Note that in the above screenshot, a and b are in white lines and the others are grey, as those are consistent in the two files and the c has been removed and replaced with the four lines on the left. In larger files, this is pretty useful as…
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Scripting Around Dropping Network Connections In OS X
Dropping network connections can be incredibly frustrating. And finding the source can be a challenge. Over the years, I’ve found a number of troubleshooting methods, but the intermittent drop can be the worse to troubleshoot around. When this happens, I’ve occasionally resorted to scripting around failures, and dumping information into a log file to find the issue. For example, you may find that when a network connection fails, you have a very strong signal somewhere, or that you have a very weak signal on all networks. I’ve found there are three pretty simple commands to test joining/unjoining, and using networks (beyond the standard pings or port scans on hosts). The…
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Programmatically Grab The Location Of An Account
Namespace conflicts can be interesting. Especially with multiple local domains. To grab the path of a directory domain of a currently logged in user (when running as the user) using a script, you can run the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep AppleMetaNodeLocation | awk '{print $2}' You can then replace the string we’re using with grep if you’d like to pull a different attribute from the user record, you’d use the following: dscl . -read /Users/`whoami` | grep UniqueID | awk '{print $2}'
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Decompile Non-ReadOnly AppleScripts
Forgot to save the source code of those AppleScripts in a place you can find it again before you compiled? Quick and dirty, provided you didn’t save it as ReadOnly, you can grab the source of an AppleScript using osadecompile. Just feed it the app (not the applet or the main.scpt btw), as I do with /Users/charlesedge/Documents/mycompiledapp.app below: osadecompile /Users/charlesedge/Documents/mycompiledapp.app Easy peasy.
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Programmatically Grab The Name Of Your MDM Enrollment Profile In OS X
Just a quick one-liner. Enjoy. profiles -Cv | grep Enrollment | awk '{ s = ""; for (i = 5; i <= NF; i++) s = s $i " "; print s }'