Was interviewed by the most excellent guys from the Command Control Power podcast. Wetland everything from Bushel, to IBM, to Apple, to OS X Server, to Krypted, to Instagram nerdy and even a little reading It’s now available at http://commandcontrolpower.com/podcast/2015/9/12/117-charles-edge-of-jamf-software-and-kryptedcom-talks-about-the-response-to-bushel. I have tons of fun with these guys and look forward to getting a good excuse to hang out with them again! Maybe next time I’ll interview them!
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Device Management and Manual Labor
Getting a bunch of iOS and Mac devices setup is more of a logistical challenge than a technical hurdle. When you buy a couple iPads, it’s pretty simple to set them up for the email, security settings and apps that you need those devices to have. You can put them all on a table, give them an Apple ID and then set them up identically to give to users. But the first time someone wipes a device, or looses a device that you need to wipe, you’ll have to do that manual labor again. And if you’re buying more than a couple of Apple devices, then the amount of time becomes amplified…
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iconutil
Sometimes you just have to convert an iconset file to an icns file. And who knew, Apple was kind enough to give us a command to do just that in OS X! To use the iconutil command, run it with the -c option which indicates that the file will be converted. The -o indicates the file to convert a file to. Let’s use the myfile.iconset as the source file and then mynewfile.icns as the target file. The command would be as follows: iconutil -c myfile.iconset -o mynewfile.icns
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Automating Image File Changes
Ever need to automate changes to image files? Maybe a LaunchAgent that would watch a specific folder and resize png files that were dropped in there, or a little script that sanitized images as they came in to be a specific size (e.g. Poster Frames)? Well, sips is a little tool built into OS X that can help immensely with this. It will even convert that png to a jpeg or pict to png. Let’s look at using sips. First up, let’s just get the width and height of an image file: sips --getProperty pixelHeight /Shared/tmpimages/1.png sips --getProperty pixelWidth /Shared/tmpimages/1.png Or for dpi: sips --getProperty dpiHeight /Shared/tmpimages/1.png sips --getProperty dpiWidth…
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Archive & Restore Assets with fcsvr_client
Final Cut Server has an option to archive and restore assets. When archiving an asset, the asset will be moved to a file system path that is represented by the device ID. The archival and restore can be done using the steps shown in this video: The process of archival and restore can be kicked off from the command line, which will initiate the movement of the asset. To archive an asset, you will use the archive verb with the fcsvr_client tool. This will require you to provide the asset ID number along with the device that you will be archiving the asset to. For example, to archive an asset…
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Don't Defrag the Whole SAN
I see a numer of environments that are running routine defragmentation scripts on Xsan volumes. I do not agree with this practice, but given certain edge cases I have watched it happen. When defragmenting a volume, there is no reason to do so to the entire volume. Especially if much of the content is static and not changing very often. And if specific files doesn’t have a lot of extents then they are easily skipped. Let’s look at a couple of quick ways to narrow down your defrag using snfsdefrag. The first is by specifying the path. In this case you would specify a -r option and follow that with…
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Create Groups Using dscl
The directory services command line (dscl) command can be used to create a group. Here we’re going to use dscl to create a group called Local Admins (or ldadmins for short). First up, create the group: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins Now give our ladmins group the full name by creating the name key: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins RealName “Local Admins” Now to give the group a password: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins passwd “*” Now let’s give the group a Group ID: dscl . create /Groups/ladmins gid 400 That wasn’t so hard, but our group doesn’t have any users. dscl . create /Groups/ladmins GroupMembership localadmin Why create a group with just…
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Config AutoPlay (GUI & Registry) for Windows
When you insert a drive into a Windows, by default it’s gonna’ likely mount the drive (and run the autorun.inf if there is one or AutoPlay to play the music if it’s an audio disc). When you insert a disk or drive into a Windows computer you can hold down the Shift key and it will disable the auto-run and AutoPlay functionality of the system. But you can also control that functionality at a pretty granular level. The most common way to do so is likely using the Global Policy Editor. To do so, open gpedit.msc, click on Computer Configuration and then Administrative Templates, then System and select the option…
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Mac OS X: User Templates
New users on a Mac have a certain set of default settings that are copied into their user profiles the first time they log in from the contents of the /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj directory. You can drop files into this directory or edit files that are already there that will then be copied into new accounts when they’re created, allowing you to customize the look and feel, default documents, fonts and other aspects of user accounts without having to do so each time a new user is created or logged into a system. This can be incredibly useful for scenarios where you are not using network accounts or mobile accounts…
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FTP Command Line and Automation
The ftp command that runs on a Mac is similar to that from any other platform, including Windows – and not much has changed with regard to FTP for a long, long time. When using FTP you will login to an FTP server, then issue some commands, one of which will kill your session to the host. The commands you issue during an FTP session are issued in an interactive mode of the shell, where you are actually running them against the target server ls – list the contents of a directory on the FTP server cd – change the working directory on the FTP server pwd – show the…