• Articles and Books,  iPhone

    iPhone and iPad Admin Guide Now Shipping

    The Enterprise iPhone and iPad Administrator’s Guide is now shipping (and rapidly moving up in Amazon’s rankings)! There have also been a couple of sightings in Border’s. Apress also sent out a press release and an email blast regarding the book in the past week. So, feel free to buy it using the link below! 🙂

  • Articles and Books,  Mac Security

    A Great Article on Sandbox by Beau

    In all versions of OS X previous to Leopard, access control restrictions were limited to a security model referred to as Discretionary Access Controls (DAC). The most visible form of DAC in OS X is in it’s implementation of the POSIX file-system security model, which establishes identity-based restrictions on an object in the form of a subject’s user or group membership. Similarly Access Control Lists are a form of discretionary control, though they are far more extensible and discrete then the POSIX model. In such models,  newly created objects or processes inherit their access rights based upon those of the creating subject, so that any spawned objects are not granted…

  • FileMaker

    New RepTools!!!

    Originally posted at http://www.318.com/TechJournal 318, Inc. is proud to announce the immediate availability of our flagship software product, RepToolsâ„¢ 2008. RepToolsâ„¢ 2008 is a customer relationship management (CRM) suite developed specifically for the entertainment industry. RepToolsâ„¢ 2008 has nine integrated modules that are designed to efficiently manage all of the information businesses need to manage sales forces automation, asset management, and customer relationships from the beginning to the end of production. With instantaneous access to every aspect of the production process and comprehensive metrics for detailed analysis, RepToolsâ„¢ 2008 will let you worry about what matters the most: your customers. Over 100 New Features: Document Management – RepToolsâ„¢ 2008 has an all new…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X: Flushing the DNS Cache Resolver

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal So you need to empty your cache resolver, but you fire up your handylookupd but you’re getting a command not found error. What to do… Try dscacheutil, which let’s you do so very much more than lookupd. For example, using the -cachedump allows you to dump an overview of the cache contents. -cachedump has a slew of flags to get pretty granular with the output such as -entries and -buckets. -configurationallows you to access detailed information about your search policy. -statistics allows you to view detailed information on statistics of calls. Examples of using these commands: Emtpy the DNS Cache Resolver: dscacheutil -flushcache Dump cache with user entries: dscacheutil -cachedump -entries user Lookup all the users on a…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X 10.5: The New Terminal

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Apple has been slowly winning over a lot of traditional Unix and Linux converts. This new breed of switcher is after a cool shell environment. In Leopard, Apple has upgraded Terminal.app to provide a whole slew of new features that are sure to continue winning new converts. Let’s just take a look at a few of them: Secure Keyboard Entry – Prevent other applications from detecting keystrokes used in terminal. Enable this using the Terminal menu. Tabbed Interface – I always have 3 shell windows open. That’s how I roll. But with the new tabbed interface (which you can access using the Command-T keystroke) I find…

  • Mac OS X Server

    Mac OS X Server 10.5: New Documentation

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal To answer all those questions like “How do I create a share point now?” Apple has been kind enough to post the documentation for Leopard Server at: http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/resources/ All of the new services are documented per Apple standards, so happy reading!

  • Mac OS X

    Mac OS X Leopard: What About that ZFS Thingie?

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal ZFS was released by a team at Sun in November of 2004. The name stands for “Zettabyte File System”. ZFS is a 128-bit file system, so it can store 18 billion billion (18.4 × 1018) times more data than current 64-bit systems. We’re not going to sit here and do the math for that but you are more than welcome to figure out what the theoretical size is at that point – all we can say is that it’s friggin’ huge. Traditional file systems reside on single devices and require a volume manager to use more than one device to generate a logical or…

  • Articles and Books,  personal

    Distributed Computing for the Good of Man

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Most screen savers just waste power. Might as well just put your computer to sleep. But if you want to use a screen saver and you want to do something good for humanity then check out one of these: fightaidsathome.scripps.edu – Join more than 300,000 other computing nodes and dedicate your computing power to finding new AIDS treatments climateprediction.net – Improve climate prediction models with the University of Oxford mersenne.org – Help George Woltman be the first to find a 10 million-digit prime einstein.phys.uwm.edu – Test Einstein’s theory of gravitational waves

  • Articles and Books,  Business,  Consulting,  Kerio,  Mac OS X,  Microsoft Exchange Server

    318 Kerio Article

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Article about 318 on Apple.com, focusing on a project we did integrating Kerio to replace Microsoft Exchange, giving our client the ability to centralize all of their server assets into an Open Directory environment while still using MAPI to provide groupware components to their user base, have handheld devices that sync with their Calendar/Mail/Contacts and of course, use the standard Exchange features of mail, etc. Good stuff: http://consultants.apple.com/at_a_glance/318inc/

  • Xsan

    Dealing with Drive Failures with Xsan

    I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Sometimes a drive fails, or a RAID controller goes down on an array with a redundant drive and the parity on a RAID must be rebuilt. In other words, if you loose a drive in a RAID 5, RAID 1, RAID 0+1 or RAID 3 array you will be left with a degraded RAID (also referred to as a critical RAID) unless you have configured your Xserve RAID to use a hot spare. If you are using a hot spare on the channel of the failed drive the RAID will begin to rebuild itself automatically. If you are not using a hot spare, upgrading…