• iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    New iOS 9 Payloads

    September 9, 2015

    There are some new restriction payloads in iOS 9. These include the following: allowNews Boolean Supervised only. If set to false, disables News. Defaults to true. Availability: Available in iOS 9.0 and later. forceAirDropUnmanaged Boolean Optional. If set to true, causes AirDrop to be considered an unmanaged drop target. Defaults to false. Availability: Available in iOS 9.0 and later. allowUIAppInstallation Boolean Supervised only. When false, the App Store is disabled and its icon is removed from the Home screen. However, users may continue to use Host apps (iTunes, Configurator) to install or update their apps. Defaults to true. Availability: Available in iOS 9.0 and later. allowScreenShot Boolean Optional. If set to false, users can’t save a screenshot of the display…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    My Own List of Common Apple Ports

    August 17, 2015

    I’ve been underwhelmed (if that’s a word) by the list of common ports used on the Apple platform recently, so I started my own. It’s available at https://krypted.com//guides/common-apple-ports/ if you’re interested. It’s also under the Tools menu of the site. And yes, I’m aware that I can cat /etc/services; this includes some rudimentary notes.

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Challenges Sending Code Through Messages

    August 16, 2015

    Recently, I had a bit of a problem with some code I was sending back and forth through Messages. This was caused by smart quotes, which replace single and double quotation marks with directional quotation marks. This can cause a lot of problems. To disable smart quotes: defaults write com.apple.messageshelper.MessageController SOInputLineSettings -dict-add "automaticQuoteSubstitutionEnabled" -bool false

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Bash History Fun

    August 14, 2015

    We tend to use a lot of commands in the Terminal app. That is, after all, what it’s there fore. And there’s a nice history of what we do. There are also a number of ways to view and manage the bash history. The simplest of which is the history command, which will show the previous commands run. Here, we’ll simply run it: history Keep in mind that this shows the history based on context, so if you sudo bash, you’ll potentially see a different history. You can also use the bash built-in fc command, which has the additional awesomeness of being able to edit and re-run commands from the…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Scripting Volume Control in OS X

    August 6, 2015

    I’ve always found the easiest way to script the volume of an OS X computer (and when I say volume I mean sound level, not a logical volume created from partitioning a hard drive – but I have articles for scripting those as well) is using the osascript command to invoke an Applescript command that sets the volume to zero. To put some syntax around this: osascript -e "set volume 0"

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Find or Kill A Signal By Name In OS X

    August 2, 2015

    You can query whether a process is running by name. You can do this with ps and pipe the output to grep. It’s not hard, but you can do this more quickly with pgrep. You can also kill that process with pkill. Which includes the ability to send a signal. So, let’s look at closing down iTunes with pkill: pkill iTunes Or we can send it with a signal (9): pkill -9 iTunes Or you could just grab the pid of a process by name: pgrep Safari It might display: 797 And that’s it. Easy Peasy.

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Hide Safari’s Bookmarks Bar

    July 31, 2015

    Safari has a bookmarks bar. Some people want to hide it. A lot of people used to do stuff like this by modifying the default user template in OS X. Not something we’ll be doing much in the future. So to do so with a script: defaults write com.apple.Safari ShowFavoritesBar -bool false To turn it back on: defaults write com.apple.Safari ShowFavoritesBar -bool true

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