A number of files got shuffled around in Mountain Lion Server. One is the swupd.plist file used to daisy chain multiple servers so they act as a cascade of software update servers. The new path for the property list is /Library/Server/Software Update/Config/swupd.plist. Here, the metaIndexURL key is sill the location that points to an internal Software Update Server that the server you are editing should look to for updates. To set a server to look at another internal server for software updates, edit the metaIndexURL key in the /Library/Server/Software Update/Config/swupd.plist file to include the path to the new server. The path should always have /content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist after the FQDN of the host…
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Jump Straight From Snow Leopard to Mountain Lion
That’s right folks, Apple has been kind enough to allow users of Snow Leopard to go straight to Mountain Lion. I’m not saying I’d take a Snow Leopard Server directly to Mountain Lion Server without stopping off at the trusty Lion upgrade path grill for a burger and some fries, but for client systems, the Mountain Lion installer is built to upgrade either Snow Leopard or Lion clients directly to Mountain Lion. To install, just get to 10.6.8 and get all available updates installed and search for Mountain Lion in the App Store and click Install. Click Continue ’till the installer is finished and you’ll have a shiny new cougar…
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Manage Gatekeeper from the Command Line in Mountain Lion
Gatekeeper is the new feature of OS X that controls what types of apps can be opened. To configure Gatekeeper, open the Security & Privacy System Preference pane. Click on the General tab and unlock to make changes. Here, you’ll see “Allow applications downloaded from:” along with the following 3 options: Mac App Store: Only apps downloaded from the App Store can be opened. “Mac App Store and identified developers”: Only apps downloaded from the App Store and those signed can be opened. Anywhere: Any app can be opened. Configuring Gatekeeper is as easy as selecting one of these options. Now, under the hood, the state of Gatekeeper is kept…
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Extended Wireless Information in OS X
Hold down the Option key when you click on the AirPort icon in the menu bar: You can then see the SSID, channel, security, RSSI, transmit rate, etc. The airport command is now located at /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport so this would be similar to: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/A/Resources/airport -I
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Man Pages
For those learning OS X or other Unixy based systems, and for those who have been using them for decades, man is one of the most important commands in our arsenal. The man command is short for manual and shows us how to use each command that has a man page, or a page that acts as an instruction manual for the command (or method). Another command, apropos, searches the whatis database for objects that match a string, or entry. For example, if you’d like to see a listing of all man pages that reference the word case, use the following command: apropos case Or use whatis in the place…
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What Changed On My Mac?
According to Wikipedia, fsevents is an API from Apple that allows applications to register for notifications of changes to a given directory tree. This means that when something changes, an application (or daemon/agent) can see the change and take action or track what happened. For Linux, there’s a similar tool in iNotify. This time of the year, a lot of imaging and packaging is going on at schools and companies around the world. A lot of people are also moving various settings out of images and into either post-flight packages, automations or managed preferences of some sort. In OS X, it’s easy to make a change on a computer and…
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Apple Configurator 1.1 Released
Apple Configurator 1.1 was released on Monday. Configurator is updated through the App Store. It comes with a few new features, indicated on the App Store download page. My favorite part is probably that rather than let me do stupid things (which I am apt to do) I now get a screen warning me that I’m doing something stupid if Configurator doesn’t complete a sanity check against one of the profiles: Overall, the two updates that we’ve gotten to Configurator have been minor. The features and options, which make up the strategies that you deploy Configurator with, have remained pretty much the same. I look forward to seeing continued updates.
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A Cheat Sheet For Using pf in OS X Lion and Up
I’ve done plenty of writing on the Application Layer Firewall (ALF) and the IP FireWall (IPFW) in OS X over the years. There will be more on ALF coming in “July” but in the meantime, there’s something I hadn’t written much about in Lion and that’s the pf implementation. To get started, let’s look at the /etc/pf.conf configuration file that comprises pf: scrub-anchor "com.apple/*" nat-anchor "com.apple/*" rdr-anchor "com.apple/*" dummynet-anchor "com.apple/*" anchor "com.apple/*" load anchor "com.apple" from "/etc/pf.anchors/com.apple" Here, you can see that pf is configured with a number of anchors. An anchor is a collection of rules and tables. Basically, the anchor file being loaded is /etc/pf.anchors/com.apple. In here, we…
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One Teletype to Bind Them (Or, Clustered SSH for OS X)
When working at scale, and particularly with hosts that need to have the same configuration or you want to perform the same queries on, the issue becomes how do I ‘reach out and touch’ my fleet? Without centralized infrastructure backed by a messaging broker or a heavier process that leaves hooks in systems and/or requires its own domain specific language, sometimes you can get by with… plain ol’ ssh. Apple Remote Desktop can take us a lot of the way there, and one of the announced features of Mountain Lion is that screen sharing gets another piece of ARD’s pie, the ability to drag-and-drop files to transfer them to the…
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Programmatically Running And Looping Keynote Presentations
These days, you can spend a lot of money buying really nice digital signage tools. And if you’re doing so, then you likely have some pretty dynamic content you’d like to load. Something that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a dynamic content platform, but which is nice for the quick presentation that you whip up and want to use for a form of digital signage is Keynote presentations. These are inexpensive and can be played on monitors through AirPlay or directly through a Mac Mini connected to a television or big monitor. Great for a monitor in the company lobby, the hallway in the school or for subliminal messaging at…