In OS X you’ve always had this weird shroud of the “Classic” environment. This type of environment was used to facilitate running things in the previous incarnation of Apple’s operating systems. Many of these have disappeared over the years. In Mavericks we see yet another go away in a very small an almost noticeable binary, bless. While this command conjures fears of getting excommunicated by a Borgia for many, for those of us in the Apple community, the bless command is used to define a folder to mount to boot to. In 10.8 and below, there was an option to bless –folder9, used to define a OS 9/Classic system folder.…
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Encrypt Mavericks and Mavericks Server
Encrypting a volume in OS X Mavericks couldn’t be easier. In this article, we will look at three ways to encrypt OS X Mavericks volumes. The reason there are three ways is that booted volumes and non-booted volumes have different methods for enabling encryption. Encrypting Attached Storage For non-boot volumes, just control-click or right-click on them and then click on Encrypt “VOLUMENAME” where the name of the volume is in quotes. When prompted, provide an encryption password for the volume, verify that password and if you so choose, provide a hint. Once the encryption process has begun, the entry previously clicked on says Encrypting “VOLUMENAME” where the name of the…
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New Startup Profiles In OS X 10.9 Mavericks Profiles Command
I wrote an article on using the profiles command awhile back, available at https://krypted.com//mac-security/profile-manager-and-profiles/. There is a nifty new feature in the profiles command in Mavericks, where you can configure profiles to install at the next boot, rather than immediately. Use the -s to define a startup profile and take note that if it fails, the profile will attempt to install at each subsequent reboot until installed. To use the command, simply add a -s then the -F for the profile and the -f to automatically confirm, as follows (and I like to throw in a -v usually for good measure): profiles -s -F /Profiles/SuperAwesome.mobileconfig -f -v And that’s it. Nice…
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Setup the DNS Service in OS X Mavericks Server
Under the hood, OS X Server has a number of substantial changes; however, at first the Server app (Server 3) appears to have had very few changes. The changes in the Server app were far more substantial in the Mountain Lion version of OS X Server. All of the options from Mountain Lion are still there and using the new command line interface for managing the service, there are far more options than ever before. The DNS service in OS X Server, as with previous versions, is based on bind 9 (BIND 9.9.2-P2 to be exact). This is very much compatible with practically every DNS server in the world, including…
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OS X & Recent Servers
Click on your Apple, then click on Servers. Here, you’ll see a list of the recent servers you’ve logged into. Now open a Connect to Server dialog (Command-K) and then click the disclosure triangle for the recent servers. There are two different values here. How’s that possible? Well, the first list mirrors the ~/Library/com.apple.NetAuthAgent.plist contents. To view the contents use defaults to read the domain: defaults read com.apple.NetAuthAgent Which shows the following information, mirroring the list shown in the first screenshot (Servers under the Recent Items list of the Apple menu): { PreviouslySelectedShares = { "10.1.1.6" = ( "_JOBS1" ); "192.168.210.175" = ( Desktop ); "192.168.55.2" = ( 318SERVER, "Disk Images"…
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Connect to Currently Logged In User Using ARD
When you’re kickstarting ARD/Screen Sharing, you might notice times when you are asked if you want to connect to the local logged in user or to a new session, which shows the login window. In most cases, I want to connect to the console user, or that locally logged in user. To go right there, instead of seeing the OS X login window, you can use the defaults command to write a VNCAlwaysStartOnConsole key (boolean, true) into com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist in /Library/Preferences, as follows: defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteManagement VNCAlwaysStartOnConsole -bool true The newer features here are pretty cool and really nice to have, but I’ve now added this to a lot of my…
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AFP548.com Podcast, Episode 2
I’m honored that the good people at AFP548 decided to have me in the second episode of their podcast. Thanks to all the people (@sacrilicious @bruienne etc) involved and hopefully you enjoy it! It’s available at http://www.afp548.com/2013/10/16/episode-two-eco-sphere or:
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Use awk To Display Lines That Exceed A Number of Characters
The number of characters n a line of text can be a difficult thing to calculate in a given app. If you have data in a text file, you can use awk to view the number of characters in a given line of the file. This is very helpful, for example, if you have code that you’ve put into documentation that exceeds the character maximum and therefore wraps. When going to print, you need to split these lines up. Here, we’re going to use the awk command to review all lines that exceed 56 characters: awk 'length($0) > 56' ~/Repo/Chapter1.xml
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More Information About DHCP Leases in OS X
You can obtain a pretty decent amount of information about leases your OS X computer gets just by looking in the Network System Preference pane, for each interface. However, you can get a little lot more information, as with most things, from the command line. First, we’re going to take a look at en0 on our host and see what the MAC address is: ifconfig en0 ether Now, we can look in the /var/db/dhcpclient/leases directory to see a list of all of the leases we have running on our system. Based on the MAC address of our computer, we should see a file there that starts with the name of…
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Adaptive Firewall Statistics for OS X Server
I wrote up afctl (the command line tool to manage the OS X Server Adaptive Firewall) awhile back here https://krypted.com//mac-security/a-little-more-about-afctl-in-os-x-server. One thing I didn’t touch on is statistics. There’s a nice little command called hb_summary located in /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/System/Library/CoreServices/AdaptiveFirewall.bundle/Contents/MacOS that provides statistics for blocked hosts. To see statistics about how much the Adaptive Firewall is being used, just run the command with no options: /Applications/Server.app/Contents/ServerRoot/System/Library/CoreServices/AdaptiveFirewall.bundle/Contents/MacOS/hb_summary The output provides the following information (helpful if plugging this information into a tool like Splunk): Date Date statistics start Number of hosts blocked Addresses blocked Number of times each address was blocked Last time a host was blocked Total number of times a block was…