For what amounts to my 12th book, I decided to try something a little different, which is namely to shoot for a slightly different audience than I’ve done with the rest of my books. The kind folks at Take Control Books have been great to work with and I’m super excited that Adam has posted the first part of Take Control of OS X Server on TidBits.com. And, the first few chapters are totally free for TidBits members! Chapter 1 is available at http://tidbits.com/article/14748 and Chapter 2 is available at http://tidbits.com/article/14749. Fun times, hope you enjoy!
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Which Apple TV Works With My TV?
I recently purchased a new TV (actually won, but that’s aside from the point). I put the DirecTV receiver on there and it worked like a charm. Then I put the Apple TV on and it appeared to work like a charm. But when the screensaver kicked in, the colors inverted. Sometimes I’d see lines across the screen and other times the Apple TV would get weird and just be blurry. I knew immediately that I was sending it too much. Turns out the new TV couldn’t do less than 1080p and the old Apple TV couldn’t do anything higher than 720p. To confirm, I looked up the serial number.…
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Reset Lost Admin Passwords In OS X
I’ve gotten a couple of questions about this and don’t remember where I posted it previously, so here goes again. If you forget a local admin password in OS X and you have physical access to the machine then unless you’re using full disk encryption or firmware passwords (and know those passwords) you can reset the password. To do so boot the computer or server from your recovery partition using Command-R at boot (or Option and then selecting the recovery partition). At the Recovery Desktop open Terminal from the Utilities menu. From terminal use the following command: resetpassword When the Reset Password window appears, choose the volume you’d like to reset an account…
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Make iMovie Work With Network Volumes
I work with a lot of network storage and video world stuff. While most in the editorial world prefer FinalCut, Avid, Adobe and other tools for video management, I do see the occasional task done in iMovie. By default, iMovie doesn’t support using assets stored on network volumes. However, you can make it. To do so, just use defaults to write com.apple.iMovieApp with a boolean allowNV key marked as true: defaults write com.apple.iMovieApp allowNV -bool TRUE
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DeviceScout
DeviceScout is a tool that leverages JAMF’s Casper Suite to show administrators vital statistics and show alerts on client systems. These alerts display some of the critical aspects of systems, from encryption to disk capacity to backups, there are a number of pretty cool aspects of DeviceScout. Using the device view, you can view serial numbers, device types, check-in status, boot volumes, memory, etc. It’s a lot of insight into what you have on your systems. I’m a huge fan of such visibility. You will need to be running Casper to leverage DeviceScout, but it provides a very simple interface for management and even techs to see what’s going on…
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Scale Printing in Preview for OS X
Basically, if I’m printing something in OS X from Preview I want it to scale to fit the page. Luckily, I’m not the only one. To enable this option, use defaults to write a boolean key called PVImagePrintingScaleMode as TRUE and viola: defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode -boolean TRUE To then disable this option, swap PVImagePrintingScaleMode to false: defaults write com.apple.Preview PVImagePrintingScaleMode -boolean FALSE
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Shell BUILTINs Available In Powershell
The following are Shell builtins from BSD/Mac that are available in Powershell (note the obvious lack of a builtin command): alias break cd chdir command continue do echo end exit fc for foreach history if kill popd pushd pwd return set switch trap type where while
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MacSysAdmin 2014!
Well, it’s that time of the year when one of my favorite conferences opens up registration! Come one, come all to MacSysAdmin for good times, good people and lots of fun Macinnerdiness! I hope to see you there! The official page is up at http://www.macsysadmin.se.
- Active Directory, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Microsoft Exchange Server, Network Infrastructure, Ubuntu, Unix, VMware, Windows Server
Stashbox: Turning a Mac Mini Into A Logstash and Kibana Server
You have a lot of boxes. You would like to be able to parse through the logs of all those boxes at the same time, searching for a given timestamp across a set of machines for a specific string (like a filename or a port number). elasticsearch, logstash and kibana are one way to answer that kind of need. This will involve downloading three separate packages (which for this article, we’ll do in /usr/local) and creating a config file. First, install the latest Java JDK. This is available at jdk8-downloads-2133151.html. The following is going to download the latest version of logstash and untar the package into /usr/local/logstash (I like nesting…
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Redirect Logs To A Syslog Server In OS X
I could have sworn that I’ve written this up before, but I just tried to link it into the article for tomorrow and it’s not on my site, so here goes. To redirect logs in OS X to a syslog server, open /etc/syslog.conf and add the following line (assuming an IP of 10.10.10.92 – replace that with the IP of your syslog box): *.* @10.10.10.92 To customize the port number (e.g. 9200) use @10.10.10.92:9200 instead. This should be instant but you can always use launchctl to unload and reload syslog if for…