Ever wonder what your computer is up to? Ever wanted to know how much time the computer was awake for, how much battery was left, the exact percentage of use each core was taking up, how much CPU CrashPlan is using, etc? Well, lucky you, there’s systemstats. You just run it: systemstats And it tells you all kinds of juicy stuff. Summary ======= System Version: 13A598 Total Time: 195:13:01 Usage ===== Time on A/C: 165:42:24 Time on Battery: 29:30:35 Wake Time: 181:18:08 User Active: 46:46:18 User Idle: 134:31:49 Dark Wake Time: 00:01:15 Sleep Time: 13:53:37 Standby Time: 00:19:57 Battery ======= Time on Battery: 29:30:35 -10.2 %/hr -21576 mAh -7112 mW Wake:…
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MacIT Is Coming! #MacIT2014
Last year was my first year in many not being able to make it to MacIT. This year, I made it a priority to get out to the area and I’m glad to report the good people that select speakers elected to have me join in the revelry. If you haven’t yet made plans to get to San Francisco from March 26th to the 29th you should. While the speakers and sessions haven’t been officially announced, the page that they should appear on soon is http://www.macitconf.com/sessions. For more information on the logistics around the conference, check out http://www.macitconf.com. Look forward to seeing you there!
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Reindex Spotlight from the Command Line
Spotlight is really a simple tool. Spotlight consists of mds, a command that is the metadata server, mdworker, the pawn that mds sends to scan objects and index them and then the three command lines of mdutil (manage the indexes), mdls (list metadata of an object) and mdfind, which as the name implies, finds things. All of this is used to keep a database called .store.db nested under .Spotlight-V100 at the root of each volume that’s been indexed. To reindex Spotlight from the command line, we’ll use mdutil. From a command prompt, enter the following to index your boot volume. sudo mdutil -E / Or an external drive named krypted:…
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MacTech BootCamps
MacTech Conference is over, but if you’d like to get your MacTech on a little more, there are still the Boot Camps at each city. The first day of each of these includes the Microsoft Office accreditation which I was luckily to sit in on at the MacTech Conference in Los Angeles. The second day is the full day MacTech BootCamp. Austin: January 22, 2014 – Sessions Chair: Nathan Toups Seattle: February 12, 2014 – Sessions Chair: Shelley Watson Atlanta: March 12, 2014 – Sessions Chair: LeRoy Dennison Denver: April 30, 2014 – Sessions Chair: Mary Norbury Boston: May 21, 2014 – Sessions Chair: Leon Lincoln, Andy Espo Washington DC: June 25, 2014 – Sessions Chair: Will O’Neal, Paul Suh Chicago: July 23, 2014 – Sessions Chair: Pam Lefkowitz,…
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Mac IT Conferences Board on Pinterest
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MacTech 2013
My MacTech was cut a bit short this year and I was really only able to go for the first day. After my talk, I got to see a lot of excellent people and was, as always, excited to see how our industry continues to grow and thrive. I think a lot of people doubted this type of growth would happen a few years ago, with the cancellation of the server hardware by Apple. But it has thrived and from Gothenburg (MacSysAdmin) to Minneapolis (JNUC) to Pennsylvania (PSU MacAdmins) to Los Angeles (MacTech) to San Francisco (WWDC and MacIT), there are more conferences and more people attending those conferences than…
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Manage Profiles From The Command Line In OS X 10.9
You can export profiles from Apple Configurator or Profile Manager (or some of the 3rd party MDM tools). You can then install profiles by just opening them and installing. Once profiles are installed on a Mac, mdmclient, a binary located in /usr/libexec will process changes such as wiping a system that has been FileVaulted (note you need to FileVault if you want to wipe an OS X Lion client computer). /System/Library/LaunchDaemons and /System/Library/LaunchAgents has a mdmclient daemon and agent respectively that start it up automatically. To script profile deployment, administrators can add and remove configuration profiles using the new /usr/bin/profiles command. To see all profiles, aggregated, use the profiles command…
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Build and Reverse MD5 Hashes Programatically
An MD5 hash encodes a string into a 128-bit fingerprint in a one-way transaction that nets the same result no matter what computer you’re using to generate hashes. I know it’s hard to imagine, but the md5 command will create a hash. There are a few ways people go about doing such things. The easiest way I’ve found is to echo the string into md5, most easily done using a command such as the following, which simply echoes out the word test to the md5 command on a Mac: echo -n test | md5 And the output is a simple hash: 098f6bcd4621d373cade4e832627b4f6 The reason I use the -n is because…
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Clear ASL Logs Following Upgrades
I’ve had a couple of servers that after upgrading to 10.9 I’ve noticed were pretty slow to open up Terminal. To fix, I just cleared the ASL logs. To do so, just rm the contents of /var/log/asl. Here, I back them up first: cp -r /var/log/asl/ /Users/krypted/Desktop/asl/ rm -f /var/log/asl/*.asl If you end up not needing them you can just delete the asl directory from your Desktop.
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Restoring the Default Gatekeeper Database
As I’ve mentioned previously, spctl is the command line tool to manage signing for Gatekeeper. This file edits the information stored in /var/db/SystemPolicy. Regrettably, this information can become corrupted (like all information in a database. And when it does, Apple has done us a favor by making a hidden default database with this information in the same directory, called .SystemPolicy-default. To restore the default database, we just copy it over the top of the old one. Here, we’ll rename the old one first: mv /var/db/SystemPolicy /var/db/SystemPolicyOLD And then we’ll copy the defaults to make it the production database: cp /var/db/.SystemPolicy-default /var/db/SystemPolicy Then reboot and you should be good to go.