There’s a great website at https://macosxautomation.com that provides a lot of information on using Automator to build automations for the Mac. When you build automations, you can run them by double-clicking on apps or workflows. You can also invoke them with the automator command. The automator command can, surprisingly, be used to run automator workflows. I know, it’s crazy. Located at /usr/bin/automator the automator command can be used to fire up workflows. In its most basic incantation, you can invoke a workflow without much fuss. Here, I’ll use a workflow that just fires up a specific screensaver: /usr/bin/automator ~/Desktop/screensaver.workflow In addition, you can run workflows in verbose mode for simple…
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Changes in Mountain Lion Server
Mountain Lion Server is now available on the OS X App Store and as with the last few updates there are some things missing that you might be expecting and depending on. First up, three major services are gone: Podcast Producer, RADIUS and dhcp. You can still do dhcp as you always did with OS X client as those features work on OS X Server, but the more granular controls available in OS X Server are now gone. The biggest impact of dhcp is probably in testing NetBoot services when there are network issues and you need to prove to network admins that it’s the network and not your server……
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Easily Automating and Simulating Web Traffic
There are a variety of applications out there that will simulate web traffic. But there’s nothing like the idea of true traffic. Load a page, click on a link, wait for the next page to load, click on another link, etc. Traditional load simulators simply are not real world enough in most cases. There are a variety of more real world simulators but they are typically cost prohibitive for the use I recently encountered a need for. So I started looking at using Automator. In its simplest form, you can just fire up Automator, click on the Record button and then perform an action. However, this is going to perform…
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Automator Video