Previously, I covered how to Programmatically Obtain Recent Wi-Fi Networks On A Mac. But, here I’m gonna’ go a step further and look at how to extract the password for a network as well. The two are stored in different locations. The recent networks are in the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.airport.preferences defaults domain. If you pull one of those, then you can use the security command to extract the password itself. security find-generic-password -ga "Krypted Home" The output is as follows, showing everything that is tracked about this network in the keychain. keychain: "/Library/Keychains/System.keychain" class: "genp" attributes: 0x00000007 <blob>="Krypted Home" 0x00000008 <blob>=<NULL> "acct"<blob>="Krypted Home" "cdat"<timedate>=0x32303135313230373135313731375A00 "20151207151717Z\000" "crtr"<uint32>=<NULL> "cusi"<sint32>=<NULL> "desc"<blob>="AirPort network password" "gena"<blob>=<NULL> "icmt"<blob>=<NULL> "invi"<sint32>=<NULL> "mdat"<timedate>=0x32303135313230373135313731375A00 "20151207151717Z\000"…
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10.11.2 and iOS 9.2 Available
The last couple of days have resulted in a lot of bug fixes from our friends at Apple. OS X 10.11.2 and iOS 9.2 are available. Hope you have a caching server right about now! The 10.11.2 update notes: The OS X El Capitan 10.11.2 update improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all users. This update: Improves Wi-Fi reliability Improves the reliability of Handoff and AirDrop Fixes an issue that may cause Bluetooth devices to disconnect Fixes an issue that prevented Mail from deleting messages in an offline Exchange account Fixes an issue that prevented importing photos from an iPhone to a Mac…
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The Second Edition of our Enterprise Mac Administrators Guide Now Shipping
My 14th book, The second edition of the Mac Administrator’s Guide is now shipping. This was a big, big rewrite, given the fact that the first edition was before the App Store, Gatekeeper, and many, many other technologies. You can buy this book here! Also, huge congrats to Bill Smith, for publishing his first book, and most notably for doing so much amazing work on this book! Finally, we’re editing the second and third books I did this past summer right now, so look out for those announcements shortly!
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Use The jamfHelper Binary To Display Messages In OS X
The jamfHelper binary is used to deploy an alert to client computers that are enrolled in the JSS. This can be a full screen alert with headings, icons, text, and countdowns. This could also just be a small utility window that informs a user that something was installed. You can do similar tasks with push notifications, but I find that a lot of times an APNs update will disappear before someone can click on it. Therefore, we can use the jamfHelper binary to send alert screens in OS X. We’ll go through a couple of minor examples here. The first is to send a window called KRYPTED that is full screen, with test as the…
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Is Imaging Dead In OS X?
I love answering a question with a question. Is asr still in OS X? Is NetInstall still in OS X Server? Can OS X still NetBoot? Does System Image Utility still work? The answer to all of these is yes. Therefore, the answer to “Is imaging dead” is clearly no. Is it on its way out, maybe. Debatable. Is it changing? Of course. When does Apple not evolve? What have we seen recently? Well, the rhetoric would point to the fact that imaging is dying. That seems clear. And this is slowly coming out of people at Apple. The word imaging is becoming a bad thing. But, as a customer…
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My First Huffington Post Article On Switch To The Apple Platform
My first article on the Huffington Post is up on HuffPost here. I feel very lucky to have gotten to meet Arianna years ago when I did tech work for her company, publishing, and at her home. She’s a very special lady and, while it’s been a long time, I still recall a few very cool and sometimes odd conversations. She’s not connected to this, but I’m proud to be involved with anything she’s involved with. And, oddly there’s parity: we’ve both written 15 books. Not even remotely oddly, she’s sold far more than I have. I hope this is the first of many articles, helping with tech and Apple and…
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Enable And Disable Permissions On Volumes Using A Script
Someone hands you a USB drive. You put it in your computer and you can’t access anything on it. You are running an imaging lab and you want to backup or troubleshoot a device before you re-image it, but you can’t access certain files. Obviously, you can sudo. But, you can also simply disable permissions on that volume (which, like getting someone to make you a sandwich, requires sudo of course). The command used to enable and disable permissions on a volume is vsdbutil, located at /usr/sbin/vsdbutil. And there’s a LaunchDaemon at /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.vsdbutil.plist that interacts with diskarbitrationd so that when a volume is mounted, it is marked as having permissions…
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Quick And Dirty Language Management In OS X
I bet you thought this would be the article where I showed you how to make your computer curse more. Well, language can mean much more than that. In fact, Apple has dedicated a whole binary to switching your default language in OS X, in languagesetup. This command, located at /usr/sbin/languagesetup, is capable of changing the default language used by a system to a number of different languages. There are other ways to accomplish this, but none quite so easy. To get started, note that there are two ways to run languagesetup. The first is interactively, which I mostly use to figure out what I actually want to do with…
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No git Commit Message #tomhardy
Click for lightning. Merge-your-damn-self. But if you commit with a well written message (and not just a period to get past a sanity check), I’m happy. Tom Hardy likes it when you tell me wtf. via GIPHY
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How Big Is My Journal And Where Is It?
Back when I worked with Xsan a lot more than I do now, one of the things we spent a lot of time doing was working with metadata and journal data on Xsan volumes. You can also view journal data for non-Xsan volumes. The hfs.util binary is used to view journal data about volumes. In this example, we’ll look at the journal size and location the boot volume of our system: /System/Library/Filesystems/hfs.fs/Contents/Resources/hfs.util -I /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD The output shows the size of the journal and the location, as follows: /Volumes/Macintosh HD : journal size 40960 k at offset 0x1a38b000