A bootable installer is one of the fastest ways to install Yosemite. Rather than copy the installer to a local drive you can run it right off a USB disk (or Thunderbolt if you dare). Such a little USB drive would be similar to the sticks that came with the older MacBook Air, when we were all still sitting around wondering how you would ever install the OS on a computer with no optical media or Ethernet otherwise. Luckily, Apple loves us. To make a bootable USB/flash drive of Yosemite like the one that used to come with the MacBook Air, first name the USB drive. I’ll use yosinstall for…
-
-
Using the Help Options in OS X Server
OS X Yosemite, running the Server app comes complete with lots of awesome features to help you get up and running, started and owning the configuration of Apple Servers. One such is the built-in options to help manage your servers. Open Server, click Help, then click Server Help. You can then search and browse for information about things you’d like to accomplish using the Help Center. Now, click the arrow for each service for information about configuring that service. You will see an arrow for each service. Click the arrow for more information on that specific service. And just like that, simple and easy-to-use documentation, available live on OS X…
-
Consolidate VMware Snapshots
Each snapshot of a virtual machine in VMware creates files. You can consolidate these files when they’re no longer needed. This can let you save space and improve the performance of virtual machines (not to mention operations like moving virtual machines through the vMotion or manually). Consolidating snapshots is also a typical troubleshooting step for a number of problems you can encounter in ESX. The Consolidation command searches for delta data to combine and reorganizes so as not to corrupt any necessary dependencies. When a virtual machine needs to be consolidated, you can see this in the vSphere client under the Summary tab; however, in my experience it doesn’t always…
-
5 iOS Web Browsers and Why You’d Use Them
Safari is an amazing web browser, built right into iOS. The Safari browser does practically anything you can think of. Well, there are a few features we’re still waiting on from Safari. But luckily the webkit engine in Safari can be used by other vendors as well. So here are some apps that take use of this and why you might want to add these to your VPP account on the app store: Finish Reading About 5 iOS Web Browsers and Why You’d Use Them Here…
-
Yosemite And Macs At Work
Yosemite is best characterized as the continued coming together between iOS and OS X. The lessons we learn from mobile operating systems are helping us all to better realize things we’d like to do on our devices that have tactile keyboards and vice versa. For example, list apps like Wunderlist are driving simplistic and focused interfaces that sync with 3rd party cloud services, rather than people using slightly more complicated apps for the same tasks. And some of these technologies are starting to make it into the operating system so you don’t even have to buy an app to get them to work! Learn How Yosemite Impacts Macs At Work…
-
Integrate Nike Running App With Apple’s Health App
The new Health app from Apple provides a conduit to run all of your health data through on an iOS device in order to then provide you with a single pane of glass to see all of your health related data. This can include diet, workouts, weight, blood pressure, etc, provided that the vendors of such devices or apps you may use support those features. The Nike Running app (not yet for the Fuelband) is one such app. And if you track runs with Nike Running then you’ll want to setup the integration asap, as the Health app only looks at runs that are configured after you setup the integration. To…
-
Delete nvram
A nifty little new option that came in OS X 10.9 Mavericks and stays in Yosemite is the ability to delete all of the firmware variables you’ve created. This can get helpful if you’ve got a bunch of things that you’ve done to a system and want to remove them all. If you run nvkram followed by a -p option you’ll see all of the configured firmware variables: nvram -p If you run it with a -d you’ll delete the given variables that you define (e.g. boot-args): nvram -d boot-args But, if you run the -c you’ll wipe them all: nvram -c
-
Cascading Software Update Service Updates In Yosemite Server
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. The default server is http://swscan.apple.com/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist. 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 name. So if your internal software update…
-
When The Project Manager Realizes A Feature Can’t Be Built
-
Yosemite Server: Configure Clients In Xsan 4 Environments
Yosemite brings Xsan 4, which brings a new way to add clients to an Xsan. Xsan Admin is gone. From now on, instead of scanning the network using Xsan Admin. we’ll be adding clients using a Configuration Profile. This is actually a much more similar process to adding Xsan clients to a StorNext environment than it is to adding clients to Metadata Controllers running Xsan 3 and below. But instead of making a fsnameservers file, we’re plugging that information into a profile, which will do that work on the client on our behalf. To make the Xsan configuration profile, we’re going to use Profile Manager. To get started, open the Profile…