Recently I was working on a project where we were isolating IP addresses by country. In the process, I found an easy little tool built right into OS X called ip2cc. Using ip2cc, you can lookup what country an IP is in. To do so, simply run ip2cc followed by a name or ip address. For example, to lookup apple.com you might run: ip2cc apple.com Or to lookup Much Music, you might run: ip2cc muchmusic.ca The output would be: IP::Country modules (v2.28) Copyright (c) 2002-13 Nigel Wetters Gourlay Database updated Wed May 15 15:29:48 2013 Name: muchmusic.com Address: 199.85.71.88 Country: CA (Canada) You can just get the country line: ip2cc…
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Disable Handoff In OS X
OS X Yosemite (10.10) and iOS 8 have a great new feature when used together called Handoff. Handoff shows you texts, web pages and more that you were using on an iOS device on your computer when you come back to it from other locations. Handoff is really, really awesome. But, for certain scenarios, it can be a bit of a challenge. It’s not completely obvious how you might disable Handoff, so we thought we’d point it out if you have institutionally owned iOS devices that have Macs close by running the same iCloud account. Learn How To Disable Handoff In OS X Here…
- Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Network Infrastructure, Programming, Ubuntu, Unix
Opposite Day: Reversing Lines In Files
The other day, my daughter said “it’s opposite day” when it was time to do a little homework, trying to get out of it! Which reminded me of a funny little command line tool called rev. Rev reads a file and reverses all the lines. So let’s touch a file called rev ~/Desktop/revtest and then populate it with the following lines: 123 321 123 Now run rev followed by the file name: rev ~/Desktop/revtest Now cat it: cat !$ Now rev it again: rev !$ You go go forward and back at will for fun, much more fun than homework… Enjoy!
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Refresh OS X CRLs
I recently found an existing image with a lot of stale crl information. We couldn’t rebuild the image, so we decided to instead refresh all of the crl information. This information is stored in /var/db/crls/crlcache.db. Deleting the file turned out to be problematic so we needed to clear items out of the tables instead. While this could be done using a few different tools, it turns out there’s a command built into os x to take care of this process for us called crlrefresh. To use crlrefresh to clean up stale crlinformation and fetch new crlinformation for all CRL and certificates, use: crlrefresh rpvv
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See How Long The Active User Has Logged In On A Mac
The following will grab you an integer of the number of hours an active user has logged into a computer: user=$( ls -l /dev/console | awk '{ print $3 }' ) ; ac users $user | awk '{ print $2 }'
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Casper 9.62 Is Out!
Casper 9.62 is now out! And holy buckets, look at all the stuff that got fixed in this release: http://resources.jamfsoftware.com/documents/products/documentation/Casper-Suite-9.62-Release-Notes.pdf?mtime=1416856726 PS – There’s also some api improvement goodness!
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Quick-Tip: Menu Items Modifier Keys In OS X
A modifier key is a key that when held in combination with another key, causes a unique behavior. For example, Command-c copies highlighted data to your clipboard. The Finder modifier keys are pretty well documented. But a number of menu items support modifier keys as well. For example: Click on the Dropbox item in your menu, you’ll be able to see the status of files that have sync’d as well as a cogwheel with the typical settings for an app like Dropbox. Option-click on the Dropbox menu item, you’ll see the items under the cogwheel menu. Option-click the Wi-Fi menu item to see extended Wi-Fi information. Option-click Bluetooth, you’ll see version and…
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MacVoices Podcast With Chuck Joiner About The New Take Control Of OS X Server Book!
Yay, podcasts! Chuck Joiner was kind enough to have me on MacVoices. We did a show, now available at http://www.macvoices.com/macvoices-14223-charles-edge-helps-take-control-os-x-server Or if you’d like to watch on YouTube or inline: http://youtu.be/AeccoRqIrgc
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Bushel Goes Into Invitation Mode!
Yesterday the Bushel team finished some new code. This code allows you to refer your friends to Bushel! This skips the codes that everyone was waiting for and lets people create accounts immediately! From your home screen, click on Invite Friends. Or from the Account screen, scroll down to the section that says “Invite friends to join Bushel”. From here, you can post codes to Facebook, Tweet codes, post codes to LinkedIn and even email them. We’re not going into general availability just yet. But we’re definitely making it easier long-term to sign up and use Bushel! We hope you love it as much as we do! Since we’re still architecting how these…
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My Take Control Of OS X Server Book Now Available!
Thanks to all the awesome work from Adam and Tanya Engst, Tidbits announced today that my Take Control of OS X Server is now available! To quote some of the Tidbits writeup: Some projects turn out to be harder than expected, and while Charles Edge’s “Take Control of OS X Server” was one of them, we’re extremely pleased to announce that the full 235-page book is now available in PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket versions to help anyone in a home or small office environment looking to get started with Apple’s OS X Server. As you’ll likely remember, we published this book chapter by chapter for TidBITS members, finishing it in early…