• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Unix,  Windows Server,  Xsan

    Make iMovie Work With Network Volumes

    I work with a lot of network storage and video world stuff. While most in the editorial world prefer FinalCut, Avid, Adobe and other tools for video management, I do see the occasional task done in iMovie. By default, iMovie doesn’t support using assets stored on network volumes. However, you can make it. To do so, just use defaults to write com.apple.iMovieApp with a boolean allowNV key marked as true: defaults write com.apple.iMovieApp allowNV -bool TRUE

  • Active Directory,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware,  Windows Server

    Stashbox: Turning a Mac Mini Into A Logstash and Kibana Server

    You have a lot of boxes. You would like to be able to parse through the logs of all those boxes at the same time, searching for a given timestamp across a set of machines for a specific string (like a filename or a port number). elasticsearch, logstash and kibana are one way to answer that kind of need. This will involve downloading three separate packages (which for this article, we’ll do in /usr/local) and creating a config file. First, install the latest Java JDK. This is available at jdk8-downloads-2133151.html. The following is going to download the latest version of logstash and untar the package into /usr/local/logstash (I like nesting…

  • iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Microsoft Exchange Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware

    Quick nmap Hacks

    The nmap application is a pretty easy-to-use tool that can be used to port scan objects in a network environment. To obtain mmap in an easy-to-use package installer, for OS X check out the download page at http://nmap.org/download.html#macosx (use the same page to grab it for Windows or *nix as well). Once downloaded run the package/rpm/whatever. Before I scan a system, I like to pull the routing table and eth info to determine how scans are being run, which can be run by using the mmap command anong with the —iflist option: nmap —iflist Basic Scanning To then scan a computer, just use the mmap command followed by the host…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware

    Show Line Numbers When Viewing A File

    The nl command is used to show line numbers when viewing a file (unless you use the -b option along with an n, which seems to be one of the more pointless things to ever do at the command line, but then what do I know…). So if you’d like to see the line numbers for a file called xsbackup.sh: nl xsbackup.sh The output would look like this: 1 # 2 #!/bin/bash 3 # 4 # Script Name: Or at least, that’s how I used to do it. For decades I never noticed that cat had a -b option. So if you’d like to use cat to see line numbers…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Network Infrastructure,  Network Printing,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  VMware

    Use Netstat To Locate What Process Is Using A Port

    You’re installing software on some host. The installation goes well and then you go to access the information you need or connect to the service from another host. Wait, what’s that? Port is already in use? Crap. We’ve all been there. The quick and dirty answer: netstat. Let’s say you’re trying to use port 8080: netstat -tuln | grep 8080 Let’s say the response is httpd. OK, let’s see where that’s located using whereis: whereis httpd And what kind of file is httpd: file /usr/sbin/httpd Which responds with: /usr/sbin/httpd: Mach-O 64-bit executable x86_64 I guess we knew that since it had a port open, but what type of executable is…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Ubuntu,  Unix,  Xsan

    compgen like a boss

    I’ve traditionally used the apropos command to find new commands. But you can also use the compgen command, which looks at the completion matches for given words, to find a list of commands that you can run, simply use compgen with a -c option: compgen -c You can parse information for a single command: compgen -c | grep apropos You can also use -a for aliases, -b for bash built-ins and -k for bash keys, as well as `-A function` for functions. You can then string ’em together: compgen -abckA function I won’t paste the output but I’ll let you pipe it to grep to compgen like a boss. Enjoy!

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Get Ze Fuser!

    A quick and easy way to figure out what process ID and user has a file open is to use fuser. While fuser sounds like maybe some rad command that could emit lasers out of your laptop and fuse together your frenemies, it’s not. It also can’t put that bowl you just dropped off the table that you made when you were 6 and your mother still gushes over. I told you not to use it as an ash try she’ll say. Also, I don’t use it often as lsof can do such things as well. But sometimes you don’t wanna’ wait that long. So let’s look at using fuser.…

  • Unix,  Xsan

    One Liner Script To Check If Xsan Is Installed

    The following will tell you whether Xsan has been installed on a client system. Here we’re checking if the file exists using the [] for a file (I always quote paths that aren’t variables when doing this type of thing) and and then echoing a response that it does. [ -f "/Library/Preferences/Xsan/uuid" ] && echo "Xsan is installed" If the file exists, we could also perform some other tasks or use an else and make changes, like copying an authorization and fsnameservers file into the directory when installing StorNext clients on OS X. The way I would likely do this, if I were saying if the uuid file doesn’t exist,…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Network Infrastructure,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Clear Squid Proxy Caches

    Every now and then you run into a problem with a caching server that causes you to need to clear out the cache. If running Squid, you can look in the /etc/squid/squid.conf configuration file and find a setting in that file called the cache_dir, which is a path. For example, we’ll use /var/squid/cache in this article. You can clear the cache of a Squid proxy then, by deleting that directory: rm -Rf /var/squid/cache Then recreate the cache directory: mkdir /var/squid/cache Then run squid with a -z option: squid -z Then fire up squid again: squid