These days, you can spend a lot of money buying really nice digital signage tools. And if you’re doing so, then you likely have some pretty dynamic content you’d like to load. Something that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a dynamic content platform, but which is nice for the quick presentation that you whip up and want to use for a form of digital signage is Keynote presentations. These are inexpensive and can be played on monitors through AirPlay or directly through a Mac Mini connected to a television or big monitor. Great for a monitor in the company lobby, the hallway in the school or for subliminal messaging at…
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Add Services to Server Admin From the Command Line
In the Server Admin application, you need to enable any services before you can actually start them. In order to do so to a lot of servers at once, you want to automate that. Such automation can be done using the serveradmin command line options. The settings would be sent to info. To see all of the settings available there: serveradmin settings info Note that there’s a whole section for info:serviceConfig: info:serviceConfig:roles:com.apple.SimpleServerSetup.ODPlugin:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.DirectoryServices:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.NetBoot:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.AddressBook:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.SWUpdate:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.NAT:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Mail:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Notification:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.VPN:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.DHCP:configured = no info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Calendar:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.AppleFile:configured = yes info:serviceConfig:services:com.apple.ServerAdmin.Jabber:configured = yes…
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Disable Shadows On Mac OS X Screenshots
Screenshot formats, locations and styles are controlled by the com.apple.screencapture defaults domain. This time of the year (or OS Release Cycle) I am doing a lot of screenshots. And while I love the way they look with drop shadows, no one else does. So I find myself frequently disabling those drop shadows. To do so: defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true Then reboot or killall SystemUIServer: killall SystemUIServer To get them back: defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false ; killall SystemUIServer
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JAMF Nation User Conference 2012
JAMF has announced the 2012 rendition of their National User Conference. Having been to two of these, I can say that if you use any JAMF products that it is a great event to attend. It is a lot of very specific information about integrating, mass deploying, mass managing, mass document distributing and mass 3rd partying for Apple products. The National User Conference will be held October 23-25 2012, 8:00 am – 5:00 pm in beautiful Minneapolis, Minnesota (where all the cool kids live). The venue is one of the best conference spots I’ve seen in the Guthrie theater, overlooking the stone arch bridge. In previous years, there have been announcements,…
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Troubleshooting Mac OS X Kernels w/ dmesg
The first thing that loads in OS X is the kernel. The kernel is how users interface with hardware and sets the stage for interaction by probing for each driver that needs to be loaded and tracking what is found. The presence of everything about the system is tracked when the kernel loads as well as pertinent boot parameters. Even if you’re booting in verbose mode, most of this probably happens too fast to notice. You might be able to pause it, but you’re still trying to react to things too quickly in many cases. That’s where the dmesg command comes into play, which lets you review and control the…
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Getting The Address Book Debug Menu
A number of Apple applications have debug menus. In these menus are advanced options, or options used for troubleshooting that don’t need to be presented to users in everyday use of the tools. Address Book has such a menu. To see it, write a boolean ABShowDebugMenu key into the com.apple.addressbook defaults domain as true: defaults write com.apple.addressbook ABShowDebugMenu -bool YES Once run, a number of new features will be available, allowing you to, amongst other things, browse an Address Book Archive, open Time Machine from within the Address Book application (allowing you to restore specific contacts), export detailed database information and disable global searching. This still isn’t the kind of…
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How To Gain About Half An Inch In Safari
No, this isn’t spam about some weird pump imported from Botswana (although if you need one, just let me know and I’ll grab some messages from my spam filter in Google Apps for ya’). Instead, we’re talking about getting rid of two icons in imaging that can recoup about a half an inch from the Safari bookmarks bar. I’m talking about the reading list and the top sites icons: To disable the reading glasses and the grid from here, use the defaults command and write an empty payload into the ProxiesInBookmarksBar key in com.apple.Safari, as follows: defaults write com.apple.Safari ProxiesInBookmarksBar '()' Or to just disable one of them, write the…
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Limiting The Number of Windows Users in Lion Server (aka How-to of hidden serveradmin settings)
Lion Server doesn’t have an option in the GUI for throttling the maximum number of users that can connect to the server via SMB. Nor does it have said option in the serveradmin interface. If you run the following, you would have previously seen the required setting: serveradmin settings smb The required setting (if controlled via serveradmin) is MaxClients= followed by the number of clients that you want to be the max: serveradmin settings smb:MaxClients=10 This is pretty easy stuff, but I have a point that goes beyond limiting the number of users. Not all of the settings that can be run through serveradmin are actually in the preferences any…
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Automatically assign admin rights in OS X based on Active Directory group membership
Thanks to Tedd Kidd for the following article, on automatically managing administrative privileges based on Active Directory groups! This is a quick and easy way to assign any user to the local admin group in OS X based on their group membership in your Active Directory. This should also work with Open Directory or eDirectory groups if your workstations are bound to those directory services. You’ll need to include this code in the workstation login script so that it runs as root but uses the $@ variable to determine the user that is logging in. #!/bin/bash # Set group name to check against groupname=”domain admins” if [ “`/usr/bin/dsmemberutil checkmembership -U…
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Holy White Papers, Apple?!?!?
For those of you who say Apple doesn’t care about the enterprise, Apple has released a number of assets (technical white papers) on integrating Macs (Lion) into enterprise environments at http://training.apple.com/lion. This is also the page that you’ll find links to all of the official training and certification courses for Lion. The assets up on this page are about as close to a publicly accessible book on integrating OS X into the enterprise as you’ll to see for Lion… The first covers the basics of integrating Macs into enterprise environments: The second covers self support: The third is on evaluating Macs in Enterprise environments: The fourth is on deployment: The…