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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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.
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FaceTime Failing In OS X Mavericks 10.9 With “The server encountered an error verifying registration”
After updating to Mavericks (OS X 10.9) I’ve seen a few instances where “The server encountered an error verifying registration” errors appear when trying to open FaceTime after an upgrade. I think this comes down to the GUID/username entry for the Accounts not matching the AuthID in ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ids.service.com.apple.madrid.plist file. It seems as though the accounts that work have a consistent entry here and those that don’t have random or missing information. If some of the keys are filled in and the Status for each alias is 3 it doesn’t appear to try and connect again. The easiest and quickest way to fix this for me has been to delete the…
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Debugging and Deploying iBooks
Just got to do my first troubleshooting for the iBooks app in OS X. Wasn’t a ton of info, so went digging for the debug menu that has become a staple of so many Apple apps. And it turns out that it was there. Looking at the plist for iBooksX prefs: defaults read com.apple.iBooksX This shows that we can go ahead and deploy a key to suppress the welcome screen (nice little deployment note made there) and a few other things. But what I was looking for is that BKShowDebugMenu key { BKAlreadyDisplayedWelcomeExperience = 1; "BKBookshelfCategoryManager~012384" = 1; BKBookshelfViewControllerFilterAction = 5; BKBookshelfViewControllerSortAction = 1; BKShowDebugMenu = 0; BKSimulateCrashDuringMigration = 0;…
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Command Line Finder Tags
Neat. So you can associate a file with a tag by dragging it into the appropriate TAGS section of a sidebar. You can tag a file while you’re saving it. You can also Tags are kept in Extended Attributes. In com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags to be exact. xattr /Users/krypted/Desktop/Test.pdf The output of xattr with no options is as follows: com.apple.FinderInfo com.apple.metadata:_kMDItemUserTags com.apple.quarantine Or use -l to get a more detailed output: xattr -l /Users/krypted/Desktop/Test.pdf The output of which would include the tag: com.apple.FinderInfo: 00000000 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 1C 00 00 00 00 00 00 |................| 00000010 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00…
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Mavericks & Show Hidden Files
I noticed this because part of my postflight imaging task for my lab systems is to show all files, but in Mavericks, the com.apple.finder defaults domain is case sensitive. So if you have com.apple.Finder you’ll need to edit it in such a workflow. So, for example, if you need to see hidden files, use the following commands: defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles -boolean true killall Finder The problem with seeing hidden files is that you see a lot of stuff that you really probably don’t want to see. So to get back to a state where you don’t have to see all of the invisible files, use the following commands: defaults…