MacSysAdmin 2009 will be held in the Burgårdens Konferenscenter in the center of Göteborg, Sweden. I’ve just been added to the roster of speakers, effectively bringing down the average Knowledge of speakers by at least 1d6. But I’ll try and keep ya’ entertained at the least. Hope you can make it and thanks to Tycho for the opportunity!
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Foundations of Mac Snow Leopard Security
I’ve been asked by a number of people whether or not we will be updating the Mac OS X security book I did a couple of years ago for Apress to Snow Leopard. The answer is yes. We are currently working on the updates and hope to have it available by December. The book will undergo a number of changes/improvements, as all second editions should. I’ll update when it’s available on Amazon & of course, in stores.
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Programatically Encrypt Virtual Memory
Encrypting virtual memory is a request I see more and more. And touching a large number of machines to enable it en masse is a bit labor intensive. The setting is stored in the /Library/Preferences/com.apple.virtualMemory.plist, in the UseEncryptedSwap key, a boolean key that can have either a yes or a no as the value. By default it is disabled. In order to enable it you would then use the following defaults command: defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.virtualMemory UseEncryptedSwap -bool yes To then disable encrypted virtual memory programatically: defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.virtualMemory UseEncryptedSwap -bool no I recently had a request to do this on systems that were already running full disk encryption. It worked…
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Programatically Setting Password Policies
Mac OS X, like many operating systems has a robust password policy engine. One that is not leveraged by default on either Mac OS X client or on Mac OS X Server. In Mac OS X Server, when using Open Directory, you can easily click on Open Directory in the SERVERS sidebar list of Server Admin and then click on the Settings icon in the Server Admin toolbar. Here, if you click on Policies you’ll see the available Policies for Open Directory accounts. However, in order to use Password Policies in non-Directory Services environments (ie – on standalone Mac OS X clients or servers) you’ll need to use the command…
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RIP Entourage
Just when Microsoft released the EWS update for Microsoft Entourage, today it announced that it will be replacing Entourage with Microsoft Outlook for the Mac. Outlook for the Mac will be included in Microsoft Office Business Edition and be released at the end of 2010 more than likely. Maybe there will finally be an AutoArchive for Mac OS X?
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Entourage Web Services Edition Available
For those who have been waiting for a time when Entourage uses less bandwidth, has enhanced support for EWS features and well, works better, the time has come. The beta came and went and we waiting. And the wait is now over. Entourage Web Services Edition is now available for download. You only really need this if you have an Exchange Server 2007 environment and can support EWS.
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Disable Caps Lock in Mac OS X
I don’t think I’ve actually used the caps lock key in years. Well, scratch that, I’ve frustratingly used it by accident. I did a post a couple of years back with a couple of ways to disable it for Windows. But recently I’ve been doing a lot of work and have accidentally made the amount of work a little more by enabling the caps lock key and typing entire paragraphs. So to disable, open the Keyboard & Mouse Preference Pane from System Preferences and then click on Modifier Keys. From here, change the Caps Lock Key value to No Action. Check out com.apple.systempreferences.plist and the com.apple.preference.keyboard.config array within it for…
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DeployStudio: Creating a New Master Image
Once you have been using DeployStudio for a time, you’ll invariably end up creating a new master image. This is a hot topic this summer, given that Apple will be releasing Mac OS X 10.6 later this year and many people integrating DeployStudio want to make sure that they can manage the solution themselves during the subsequent updates. Provided you have been leveraging all of the best in package based imaging this might be a relatively small file, or if you are using a monolithic image for distribution it might be a fairly large file. Either way, DeployStudio makes it fairly straight forward to create a new master image. To…
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iostat with a Graphical Curriculum…
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iostat on Mac OS X
In the past I’ve discussed a number of other solutions for monitoring disk capacity and looking into where that capacity is being utilized. But if you want to look into raw performance, then few tools are as useful as iostat. iostat is a command line tool that looks at the input and output statistics (thus iostat) for various disks. simply running the iostat command with no switches will show you a fair number of statistics about your system including per disk performance metrics, CPU utilization of those disks and average loads. Running iostat with simply a -d option will only show information relevant to disks. You can also follow the…