OS X has a command called rvictl, which can be used to proxy network communications from iOS devices through a computer over what’s known as a Remote Virtual Interface, or RVI. To setup an rvi, you’ll need the udid of a device and the device will need to be plugged into a Mac and have the device paired to the Mac. This may seem like a lot but if you’ve followed along with a couple of the other articles I’ve done recently this should be pretty simple. First we’ll pair: idevicepair pair Then tap Trust on the device itself. Then we’ll grab that udid with idevice_id: idevice_id -l Next, we’ll…
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Use The FTP Server In OS X Yosemite Server
Yosemite Sam Server (Server 3.5 running on OS X Yosemite) sees little change with the FTP Service. Instead of sharing out each directory the new incantation of the FTP service allows administrators to share a single directory out. This directory can be any share that has previously been configured in the File Sharing service or a website configured in the Websites service. To setup FTP, first open the Server app and then click on the FTP service. Once open, use the Share: drop-down list to select a share that already exists (output of sharing -l basically) and click on one of the shares or Custom to create a new share…
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Debugging Twitter
I was recently working on a new project developing against Twitter using their JSON interface. Turns out that the Twitter app has an awesome little feature to assist with such a task, a Console. To see the menu for the Console, enable the Develop menu, by putting a true boolean ShowDevelopMenu key into the com.twitter.twitter-mac.plist: defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ShowDevelopMenu -bool true Once enabled, use the Develop menu to open Console. Here, you can select various buttons and see the GET, POST, PUT or DELETE sent. as well as the entities sent. To disable the Develop menu: defaults write com.twitter.twitter-mac ShowDevelopMenu -bool false
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Using the CrashPlan Pro REST API
CrashPlan Pro Server is a pretty cool tool with a lot of great features that can be used to back up client computers. There are a lot of things that CrashPlan Pro is good at out of the box, but there are also a lot of other things that CrashPlan Pro wasn’t intended for that it could be good at, given a little additional flexibility. The REST API that CrashPlan Pro uses provides a little flexibility and as with most APIs I would expect it to provide even more as time goes on. I often hear people run away screaming when REST comes up, thinking they’re going to have to…
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DeployStudio: Rename a Volume with Host Name
DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really…