• Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    View Power Consuming Apps In Mavericks

    Mavericks allows you to look at power hungry apps, so you can keep track of what’s draining your batter. To do so, click no the battery icon in the menu bar and then look in the Apps Using Significant Energy section. If you’re concerned about an aggregate of apps using too much energy, hold down the option key when you click on the icon. When you do so, the Condition will be listed; hopefully as Normal.

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Configure RADIUS in Mavericks Server

    RADIUS is automatically managed when using Apple Airports. When you open the Server app, if an Airport base station is detected you’ll see it in the Server app sidebar. But what if you want to use RADIUS to authenticate Meraki, Cisco, Aerohive and other device from other vendors? Then we have to enable things differently. To get started, we need to create an com.apple.access_radius, which we can do with Workgroup Manager or with dseditgroup: dseditgroup -o create -n . -u admin -r RADIUS com.apple.access_radius Next, place all of the users that have access to the service in the new group. You will need to show system groups to do so.…

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

    ARD 3.7

    Apple has released the client and server updates for Apple Remote Desktop. Both are now available on the App Store. For official information of the server update, see http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5896?viewlocale=en_US. New features include: Support for OS X Mavericks A shared clipboard which allows automatic copy and paste between local and remote computers Improved support for Mac systems with multiple displays or multiple IP addresses Enhanced multi-observe with gesture support for swiping between screens Output of remote UNIX commands is no longer truncated The client update documentation is at http://support.apple.com/kb/HT5896?viewlocale=en_US&locale=en_US.

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

    Provide VPN Services Using Mavericks Server

    OS X Server has long had a VPN service that can be run. The server is capable of running the two most commonly used VPN protocols: PPTP and L2TP. The L2TP protocol is always in use, but the server can run both concurrently. You should use L2TP when at all possible. Sure, “All the great themes have been used up and turned into theme parks.” But security is a theme that it never hurts to keep in the forefront of your mind. If you were thinking of exposing the other services in Mavericks Server to the Internet without having users connect to a VPN service then you should think again,…

  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Manage The Adaptive Firewall in Mavericks Server

    OS X Server (Mavericks 10.9 running Server 3) has an adaptive firewall built in, or a firewall that controls incoming access based on clients attempting to abuse the server. The firewall automatically blocks incoming connections that it considers to be dangerous. For example, if a client attempts too many incorrect logins then a firewall rule restricts that user from attempting to communicate with the server for 15 minutes. If you’re troubleshooting and you accidentally tripped up one of these rules then it can be a bit frustrating. Which is why Apple gives us afctl, a tool that interacts with the adaptive firewall. The most basic task you can do with…

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

    OS X 10.9 Mavericks Gives nvram A Delete All Option

    A nifty little new option in OS X 10.9 Mavericks is the ability to delete all of the firmware variables you’ve created. This can get helpful if you’ve got a bunch of things that you’ve done to a system and want to remove them all. If you run nvkram followed by a -p option you’ll see all of the configured firmware variables: nvram -p If you run it with a -d you’ll delete the given variables that you define (e.g. boot-args): nvram -d boot-args But, if you run the -c you’ll wipe them all: nvram -c Enjoy!

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

    Configure DHCP in Mavericks Server

    DHCP, or Dynamic Host Control Protocol, is the service used to hand out IP addresses and other network settings by network appliances and servers. The DHCP Server built into OS X Server 3, installed on Mavericks Server is easy-to-use and fast. It’s pretty transparent, just as DHCP services should be. To install the service, open the Server app and then click on the Show button beside Advanced in the server sidebar. Then click on DHCP. At the DHCP screen, you’ll see two tabs: Settings, used for managing the service and Clients, used to see leases in use by computers that obtain IP address information from the server. You’ll also see…

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

    OS X 10.9 Mavericks Makes fdesetup A Bit More Useful

    Previously I’ve written a little here and there about using FileVault and more specifically scripting things around Filevault. The fdesetup command that enables FileVault for OS X clients from the command line got a few new options in OS X 10.9 Mavericks. We’ve always been able to enable FileVault using scripts thanks to fdesetup but now Apple’s taken some of the difficulty out of configuring recovery keys. This comes in the form of the changerecovery, haspersonalrecoverykey, hasinstitutionalkey, usingrecoverykey and validate recovery options. These options all revolve around one idea: make it easier to deploy centrally managed keys that can be used to unlock encrypted volumes in the event that such an…

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

    New statshares Option in the smbutil command For OS X 10.9 Mavericks

    I wrote about using the smbutil for DFS in Lion awhile back. I haven’t needed to write anything else as it hadn’t changed since. But in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, a new option for smbutil appears: statshares. The statshares option has an -m option to look at a mount path for showing the path to the mount (e.g. if the mount is called krypted this should be something like /Volumes/krypted): smbutil statshares -m /Volumes/krypted When run, you see a list of all the attributes OS X tracks for that mount path, including the name of the server, the user ID (octal), how SMB negotiated an authentication, what version of SMB…