• Apps,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Who Signed My OS X App?

    The codesign command is used to sign apps and check the signature of apps. Apps need to be signed more and more and more these days. So, you might need to loop through your apps and verify that they’re signed. You might also choose to stop trusting given signing authorities if one is compromised. To check signing authorities, you can use codesign -dv --verbose=4 /Applications/Firefox.app/ 2>&1 | sed -n '/Authority/p' The options in the above command: -d is used to display information about the app (as opposed to a -s which would actually sign the app) -v increases the verbosity level (without the v’s we won’t see the signing “Authority”) –verbose=4 indicates the level of verbosity…

  • Mac OS X,  Network Infrastructure

    See IPv4 and IPv6 Machines On The Network

    Prepare for your network administrators to cringe… I’ve spoken on these commands but never really put them together in this way, exactly. So I wanted to find a coworker on a network. So one way to find people is to use a ping sweep. Here I’m going to royally piss off my switch admins and ping sweep the subnet: ping 255.255.255.255 Next, I’m going to run arp to translate: arp -a Finally, if a machine is ipv6, it wouldn’t show up. So I’m going to run: ndp -a Now, I find the hostname, then look at the MAC address, copy that to my clipboard, find for that to get the IP…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Remove All User Keychains Except One in macOS

    macOS has keychains. Sometimes they’re a thing. When they are you might want to delete them. Let’s say you have an admin account. You want to keep the keychains for that account, but remove all the others. For this, you could do a shell operator to extglob. Or you could do a quick while loop as follows: ls /Users | grep -v "admin" | while read USERNAME do; rm -Rf "/Users/$USERNAME/Library/Keychains/*" done; If you borrow this, be careful.

  • Articles and Books

    My Latest Inc.com Article On Not Letting Those Huge New Clients Put Ya’ Out Of Business

    You work for weeks, months, or years to build a business that is killing it. Then you get a huge new customer. You feel like you’ve been put on the map. But then the reality sets in. Maybe you won the business because you’re innovative, less expensive, faster, etc. But now you start getting completely destroyed by the overhead of making those sweet, sweet dollars from that new customer. Wouldn’t it have been great to have known about a few things to ask about? My response includes a few tips on how to work with them, that just might save you some serious margin!. Check it out at http://www.inc.com/charles-edge/how-to-work-with-big-companies-without-getting-caught-in-red-tape.html.

  • Tamarisk

    My Latest Huffington Post Article On Compassion

    OK, I don’t talk politics, about personal stuff, etc on this site usually. And I’m not gonna’ start now. But with Give To The Max Day in Minnesota today, I did write an article on the meaning of Compassion on Huffington Post. It can be found at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-edge/what-does-compassion-mean_b_12999974.html if you’re interested in such things; if not, hope you have a wonderful day!

  • Mac OS X Server

    Check to See if Your Caching Server is Working

    One of the first things we do when we setup a new macOS Caching Server is to check the logs to see if it’s actually serving content. You can view thee logs at /Library/Server/Caching/Logs/Debug.log. In the log, when a Caching Server has registered for your network, you’ll see a line that begins with the following: Got request for host = http://swcdn.apple.com/ This above means that the server actually got a request (as it says) and that the request is for an asset at swcdn.apple.com (followed by the actual package path). Once found, the server caches the asset, which starts with the following: Initializing asset handler for http://swcdn.apple.com/ The path would…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Update Ruby to Install Rails on macOS 5.3 Server

    I thought there might be an easier way to do this. So there’s this binary called serverrails that I assumed would install rails – no wait, actually it’s a ruby script that tells me to ‘gem install rails’ – which fails: cat `which serverrails` #!/usr/bin/ruby # Stub rails command to load rails from Gems or print an error if not installed. require 'rubygems' version = ">= 0" if ARGV.first =~ /^_(.*)_$/ and Gem::Version.correct? $1 then version = $1 ARGV.shift end begin gem 'railties', version or raise rescue Exception puts 'Rails is not currently installed on this system. To get the latest version, simply type:' puts puts ' $ sudo gem…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  MacAdmins Podcast

    Episode 13 Of The MacAdmins.Org Podcast Now Available

    Stoked that we got to interview Michael Lynn (@mikeymikey) for the MacAdmins podcast. It turned out to be a great episode on the future of Mac management and MDM. I’m glad we were able to have him join in! Pepijn and Marcus did a great job as well, so all round, a great episode. Hope you enjoy! Or find it on the Podcast site at http://podcast.macadmins.org/2016/10/24/episode-13-mdm-me-maybe/

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Quick and Dirty OS Installations with startosinstall

    Automating OS installations is going to eventually be about as easy on macOS as it is in iOS (er, if you have MDM that is). But in the meantime, it’s getting a bit more challenging. The obvious way Apple would prefer this to happen these days is via the startosinstall command that first shipped with El Capitan and with brtool getting moved around all the time, and becoming less of a thing, there’s one quick and easy thing you can do: sudo "/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall" --applicationpath "/Applications/Install macOS Sierra.app" --agreetolicense --nointeraction --volume /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD In the above command, we’ve dropped “Install macOS Sierra.app” on a machine. While you’d guess that…