There are a number of man pages in Mac OS X that don’t show up when you type man followed by the command – especially if you’ve gone and started bolting new open source software onto your OS that keeps its man page in its own directory structure. If you have the path to a directory of man pages then you can view these using the man command easily once you add it to your MANPATH. The MANPATH is an environment variable that can be set by editing a users .bash_profile directory. Simply add the directory you’d like to scan in a new line that starts with MANPATH=. For example…
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Quick Tips on ZFS
ZFS is coming to the Mac, according to the Apple website. But it isn’t here yet. In the meantime, you can learn a lot about some upcoming technology without ever downloading a single trial copy of Mac OS X by using the hobbled ZFS implementation on Leopard or a full version hosted on OpenSolaris, or another OS that has full ZFS support. ZFS on most *nix systems follows the same command line structures for the most part. For example, running the following command will show you each of your ZFS mount points and if you can’t actually write to any volumes (as is the case with 10.5.x), the OS will…
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10 Tips and Tricks for PowerLine Networking
In the IT industry we can often discount certain technologies off-hand simply because they don’t fit into our paradigm. I did this for a little while with PowerLine networking but have been trying to dabble with products as they’ve been released over the past few years. While I think PowerLine is cool technology, it’s got some caveats. Therefore, here’s my own list of tips and tricks for utilizing PowerLine in a manner that doesn’t suck: You probably want to think it through before you do this. PowerLine isn’t going to work for everyone. There are two types of technology that don’t work together: High Definition Power Line Communication, aka HD-PLC (Panasonic) vs. HomePlug (D-Link,…
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Disable SMB Signing
Mac OS X 10.5 supports SMB signing. But if you have some older operating systems you may need to disable SMB signing when using Windows Server 2003 and up to host your files, typically when the 2003 Server is also a Domain Controller (DC). To determine if SMB signing is required use Netmon (Network Monitor). When using Netmon it is best to use a hub rather than a switch. Once you have set the addresses and performed a capture, you’ll then look for the SMB negotiation string. Options here are values of 3, 7 and 15 meaning SMB signing is disabled, enabled/not required and required respectively. If SMB signing is…
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Touching Date Changes
No, I’m not getting all teary-eyed about something… Instead I’m thinking about changing the modification date stamp on a file. Let’s take a fairly innocuous and hidden file, such as the the COOKIES file located in the /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc directory. Since I’ve already tried the recipe, I’m going to go ahead and replace the contents of this file with the contents of the mutex script posted a few days ago. This leaves the date the file was created altered as can be seen by doing an ls -al on the file: -rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 4968 Apr 21 22:04 /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc/COOKIES We’re going to go a step further and use stat on the file to…
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sqlite3 and Address Book.app from the Command Line
The Mac OS X program, Address Book uses sqlite3 to store information. The actual database is located in each users Library/Application Support/AddressBook directory and called AddressBook-v22.abcddb. In order to interfaces with Address Book.app you can use the sqlite3 command followed by the path to the database itself. For example, the following command will simply dump you into a sqlite interactive command line environment: sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/AddressBook-v22.abcddb Once in the environment you can view databases, manually work with the data, etc. The basic information about a contact is stored in the ZABCDRECORD table. You can view the contents of this table using the following command: select * from ZABCDRECORD If you…
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Design Considerations: Exchange 2007 and the Mac
In Exchange 2007, the Client Access Server (CAS) role accepts connections from clients in order to allow them access to the Exchange Server infrastructure (mailboxes, public folders, GAL, etc). CAS accepts connections from: POP3 and/or IMAP4 clients Outlook Web Access (OWA) and/or OWA Light clients Exchange ActiveSync (EAS) clients Entourage falls into this category, and so when you are deploying Exchange 2007 alongside Entourage you will point your clients at your host running CAS. This is a change from previous versions, where you could enable IIS on any host and point clients there; however, it is similar in that CAS is very similar to the front end functionality that this…
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Reading Address Book from the Command Line
There isn’t an easy-to-use command line interface to the Address Book. You can use AppleScript with it, but not necessarily the command line. This isn’t to say there isn’t an AddressBook framework waiting for someone to use it. Well, Scott Stevenson posted a tool on his blog, Theocacao. This tool is pretty rudimentary but can be useful for a few basic tasks, and provides a nice framework for the development of a larger tool. Basically, abtool has one positional parameter – a search string. Using that it will look for a pattern in the name. It doesn’t search any of the other fields, use wildcards, nor allow for changing of…
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Mac OS X: Fast User Switching
Fast User Switching is a feature in Mac OS X (and Windows for that matter) that allows you to switch user accounts without logging out of your computer. This allows multiple users to use the same computer without having privy to each others stuff and allows you a great way to leave the system if you have multiple people that use it (you don’t want others unlocking into your account, for example). Fast User Switching is disabled by default though. To enable fast user switching, open the System Preferences and click on the Accounts System Preference pane. Then, click on Login Options and click the Enable fast user switching checkbox. To enable Fast User…
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Command Line System Information
When you click on About This Mac and then click on More Info… you see the Apple System Profiler. This tool, dating back to the Classic OS (prehistory so-to-speak) can be used to access a wide variety of information about your system, including installed hardware, software and some settings. Some of this information can also be obtained through other tools. For example, the networksetup command can obtain a wide variety of information about various network settings. But it helps to have one tool to query for any information you may need about a computer (well, much of the information you may need). While it is fairly straight forward to…