I recently got my hands on one of those Google ChromeBooks (Cr-48). Interesting to have an operating system that is just a web browser. But, as anyone likely reading this article already knows, the graphical interface is the web browser and the operating system is still Linux. But what version? Well, let’s go on a journey together. First, you need ChromeOS. If you’ve got a ChromeBook this is a pretty easy thing to get. If not, check http://getchrome.eu/download.php for a USB or optical download that can be run live (or even in a virtual machine). Or, if you know that you’re going to be using a virtual machine, consider a pre-built…
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Removing DigiNotar Trust in OS X
DigiNotar got hacked awhile back. And more and more issues seem to continue to surface as a result (most notably spoofing Google). Read this article for more info on it, but I’m not gonna’ rehash it all right now. Instead, let’s correct it. To do so, we’ll use the security command. Then we’ll use the delete-certificate option along with the -Z operator, which allows inputing (or outputting when installing certificates) a SHA1 has of a certificate. Root Certificates (those that appear under the System Roots section of the Keychain Access application) are all located in the /System/Library/Keychains/SystemRootCertificates.keychain keychain and so we’ll specify that as well: sudo security delete-certificate -Z C060ED44CBD881BD0EF86C0BA287DDCF8167478C…
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Fixing Color Problems with Ubuntu
The Terminal application defaults have a problem passing colors with Ubuntu and other types of Linux machines with properly formed .bashrc files. This is because those systems do not know how to interpret the Lion xterm-color256 terminal declaration. The fix is to change this setting to xterm-color. This needs to be done for each Terminal default. Click on each (Basic, Grass, Homebrew, etc) and then click on the Advanced tab. From there, just set the Declare terminal as: to xterm-color and close. This can also be done through the command line. These settings are stored in the com.apple.Terminal.plist per user, in their ~/Library/Preferences. The key for each is in TerminalType,…
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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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S/MIME in OS X Isn't Just For Tin Hat Wearing Nerds Anymore
S/MIME, or Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is the de facto standard for encrypting and signing mail. You can encrypt mail to keep prying eyes off of it. Signing though, is much more common as it addresses the issue of non-repudiation in many organizations, or giving people a way to make sure that the email that they think you sent really came from you. It was also available in GPG plug-ins for mail, back in the day. But S/MIME used to really be for people who thought the government was out to get them, work for government agencies, just liked to be kinda’ nerdy or actually had something to hide. But…
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mDNSResponder, mDNS and dns-sd
The process that makes Bonjour work is mDNSResponder, located in /usr/sbin. /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist invokes mDNSResponder on boot. One of the easiest ways to troubleshoot issues you think are related to Bonjour is to temporarily disable the mDNSResponder: launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist To enable it: launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist In addition to basic starting and stopping of the mDNSResponder, when troubleshooting any service, one should always look at logs. Log events are logged to the standard syslog facility and so are available via Console. These are locate at /var/log/system.log. Searching for mDNSResponder errors in system.log can also be done from the command line using: cat /var/log/system.log | grep mDNSResponder Or interactively so…
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Using the ExtremeZ-IP Command Line
When you are configuring ExtremeZ-IP as a print server, you will need to set up and configure each printer. However, if you already have setup and configured printer queues for the Windows server, you can import existing queues into ExtremeZ-IP. This can be done programatically via the ExtremeZ-IP EZIPUTIL command line tool. EZIPUTIL has a number of options, whereby the SERVER option is used to configure global settings for ExtremeZ-IP, VOLUME is used to create, edit and delete print queues and PRINT is used to manage shared print queues. Each of the options also has a number of switches for the feature(s) that are being managed. These are structured as…
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Programmatically Interacting with Google Apps
There are a number of ways that you can interact with Google Apps: there is the website, the new Google Cloud Connect and an API that allows you to integrate Google Apps with your own solutions. The API is available for python and java and can take some time to get used to, even though Google has done a good job with making it pretty straight forward (comparably). Therefore, there are a couple of tools that ease the learning curve a bit. GoogleCL on Ubuntu The first, and easiest is GoogleCL. GoogleCL is a command line version of Google Apps that will allow you to interact with YouTube, Picasa, Blogger…
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Defaults & symbolichotkeys in Mac OS X
Front Row is awesome. Hot keys are awesome. Typos are not. While zipping along, typing my fool heart out, I tend to fat finger about enough to drop my words per minute in half at times. Occasionally, my typos will land me in an annoying spot, with some application opening: often that application is Front Row. Which led me to unmapping the hot key. But then of course, since I reimage my machines a lot, I wanted to put that into my image… Hot keys are stored in com.apple.symbolichotkeys.plist, in a users ~/Library/Preferences. You could setup a system with the exact key mappings that you wish to have, use managed…
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Managing SyncPlans from the PresSTORE CLI
PresSTORE has a Synchronize module, that can be used to copy data from one location to another. This is done by the use of synchronization plans, or sync plans for short. Each plan is given a name and has a number of attributes associated with it, such as whether it is enabled or disabled. PresSTORE has a command line interface called nsdchat that is available at /usr/local/asw. To run it in interactive mode you can run the following command: /usr/local/asw/nsdchat From here, you can use the SyncPlan command to interface with the plans that you have created. To see a list of plans you will use the SyncPlan command from…