When I was speaking at MacADUK, I asked Tom Bridge about starting a podcast. He’s got a great voice, and I thought he’d be a great co-host. Before we were able to get to that when we got home, Adam Codega, independently of the conversation I’d had with Tom, dropped a note on Twitter to see who else might be interested in doing a Podcast. A few people responded that they’d be interested in also jumping in on a new Podcast. Over the next few weeks, decisions were made that the podcast would be hosted as a part of MacAdmins.org, the format, the hosting location, and lots of other really cool stuff.…
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Swiping Through Spam Like A Boss
Who still says “like a boss?” I guess I did. Get over it. But don’t get over spam. Especially annoying are the ones we know we accidentally signed up for. Because it’s our own darn fault. But luckily, there’s a lot more tools for dealing with bulk mail (solicited or unsolicited) these days. Most modern email clients have the ability to deal with spam. Exchange/Office 365 has clutter and junk. You can build rules on sites. You can use spam assassin on your servers. But, there’s also a nice little app called unroll.me. Once you sign up you’ll have 3 ways of dealing with each message: request removal from a list, mark as rolled up into a…
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5 Mobile Apps You Really Need for SMB Success
There’s a quick and easy IT Business Edge slideshow at http://www.itbusinessedge.com/slideshows/the-5-mobile-apps-you-really-need-for-smb-success.html that I helped with about 5 Mobile Apps You Really Need for SMB Success. Hope you enjoy!
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Edit NetBoot Sets Without Creating New Images
Mac admins spend a lot of time building images. In System Image Utility this can mean baking an image that just looks for a path of a NetRestore source and restores an operating system. Constantly making these is a pretty duplicative task. The goal of this article is to take a generic NetRestore NetBoot image and augment it in such a way that you don’t need to create new NetBoot images unless there’s a new build train. Instead, all you need to do is edit a file that changes the path (uri) of your image so that it can be restored. Using this, you can just stop the NetInstall service in…
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Configure sFlows on a Brocade 8470
sFlow is an industry standard that allows network equipment with the appropriate agents to send data to sFlow collectors, which then analyze network traffic. You can install sFlow on routers, switches, and even put agents on servers to monitor traffic. Brocade (along with most other switch manufacturers) supports sFlow. Before you do anything log into the switch and check the current flow configuration: show sFlow To configure, log into the switch and use the the int command to access an interface. From within the interface, use the following command: sflow forwarding Then exit the interface using the very difficult to remember exit command: exit Repeat the enablement of forwarding for…
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Simple Preflight and Sanity Checking in Scripts
I was recently building some preflight scripts and was looking to record some information about a machine live, before proceeding with a script. I found the cheapest way to determine information about architectures and chipsets when scripting preflight scripts for OS X to be the arch and machine commands respectively. For example, to verify the architecture is i386, use the arch command with no options: /usr/bin/arch Which simply outputs “i386”: i386 To check the machine type, simply use the machine command: /usr/bin/machine Which outputs as follows: x86_64h
- Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Mass Deployment, Network Infrastructure, Programming, Ubuntu, Unix
Opposite Day: Reversing Lines In Files
The other day, my daughter said “it’s opposite day” when it was time to do a little homework, trying to get out of it! Which reminded me of a funny little command line tool called rev. Rev reads a file and reverses all the lines. So let’s touch a file called rev ~/Desktop/revtest and then populate it with the following lines: 123 321 123 Now run rev followed by the file name: rev ~/Desktop/revtest Now cat it: cat !$ Now rev it again: rev !$ You go go forward and back at will for fun, much more fun than homework… Enjoy!
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Listen To iOS Network Communications
OS X has a command called rvictl, which can be used to proxy network communications from iOS devices through a computer over what’s known as a Remote Virtual Interface, or RVI. To setup an rvi, you’ll need the udid of a device and the device will need to be plugged into a Mac and have the device paired to the Mac. This may seem like a lot but if you’ve followed along with a couple of the other articles I’ve done recently this should be pretty simple. First we’ll pair: idevicepair pair Then tap Trust on the device itself. Then we’ll grab that udid with idevice_id: idevice_id -l Next, we’ll…
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Use libimobiledevice To View iOS Logs
Xcode and other tools can be used to view logs on iOS devices. One of those other tools is libimobiledevice. I usually install libimobiledevice using homebrew, as there are a few dependencies that can be a little annoying. To install homebrew if you haven’t already, run the following command: ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)" Once run, follow the prompts to complete the installation. Once homebrew is installed, run the following brew command to download the required components and then libimobiledevice: brew install -v --devel --fresh automake autoconf libtool wget libimobiledevice Then run ideviceinstaller: brew install -v --HEAD --fresh --build-from-source ideviceinstaller Once these are installed, you can plug in a paired…
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Directory Utility in Yosemite. I’m not Dead Yet… Mapping Attributes 101
The Directory Utility application has moved to /System/Library/CoreServices/Applications. Once open, you can use it to bind to directory services, change search policies and even dink around with NIS if you still rock the flannel with your ripped up jeans. But, the thing that I tend to do in Directory Utility the most is look at user and group attributes. To do so, open Directory Utility and click on the Directory Editor tab. In the bar directly below, you’ll see Viewing and In Node. The Viewing option is what type of object you’re going to look at. The In Node option shows the directory domain you’re viewing. Below, we show the local users in…