Ever need to have a program check a file to tell you what version of Mac OS X you’re running to do a quick sanity check? In /System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist you’ll find a key for ProductVersion. The value in this key is the version of Mac OS X you’re using. Keep in mind that the path should be relative to the volume that houses the operating system. Therefore, if you’re using a volume during imaging and you’re running a postflight or preflight script make sure you check the path relative to the operating system you’re augmenting.
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Advanced Features of the Mac OS X Calculator
The Calculator application in Mac OS X is pretty handy beyond the basic 10-key functions that most people use. As with many things from Apple you can make things much more complicated than the easy to use, basic screens that Apple provides. For example, did you know that Calculator can perform binary, hexadecimal, ASCII and Unicode conversions? To do so, click on the View menu and select Programmer (or use Command-3 to open the view. You can also stop carrying around that old TI-85 you’ve been using for years (to some degree) to calculate those random tangents from time to time. One of the best parts of Calculator is that…
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Disable Automatic Login Programatically
Automatic logon can be enabled for Windows, or Mac OS X. We already discussed disabling automatic logon using a script for Windows, so let’s look at doing so for Mac OS X. The variable that controls automatic logon is stored in /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist in the autoLoginUser key. By default automatic logon is disabled and so you can simply delete that key to disable it, which you can do with the following command: defaults delete /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow autoLoginUser You can also enter an autoLoginUser into the field to define the user who will automatically be logged in. You may remember that the loginwindow defaults domain is the same location that login hooks are…
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Mac OS X 10.5: Screen Sharing as an Application
I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal Screen Sharing is a new feature in Leopard that allows you to control machines that appear in your side bar. However, you can actually open Screen Sharing and use it in a similar manner as how you use an application like Chicken of the VNC (although not with an identical feature set). The way you go about this is to create a shortcut to the Screen Sharing application bundle from the /System/Library/CoreServices/Screen Sharing.app file somewhere else, such as the Applications folder, or maybe just put it in your dock. Then you can run the following command: defaults write com.apple.ScreenSharing ShowBonjourBrowser_Debug 1 You will now…
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Spotlight Keystroke Luv
Command-Spacebar can be used to invoke the spotlight box. Then type the name for an application and hit enter. This will open the app.
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HOWTO: arp poisoning made easy
So arp can display the table for name to Ethernet address resolution. That’s pretty easy, just run arp with a -a flag and it will show you all the other systems in your arp table. the table is managed dynamically. But what if you wanted to set one in there statically. Well, you could use the arp with a -s flag followed by the host name and then the ethernet address you want to assign for that host name. If you point a host name to an invalid address then you’ve poisoned your arp cache.
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Mac OS X: Forensics
It’s old but it’s good: http://www.afp548.com/Articles/security/postmortem.html
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SANS Mac OS X Security Checklist
A project I worked on with the SANS Institute: https://www.sans.org/score/macosxchecklist.php
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Mac OS X Log Analysis
Mac OS X has a lot of options for logging data. But these options can actually cause a lot of white noise. So there are two tools that you should look at if you’re interested. The first is Splunk: http://www.splunk.com/LogAnalysis The second is Sawmill: http://www.sawmill.net
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Unix Users Association of Southern California Talk
Here is the preso I gave at the UUASC meeting for LA on Heterogenous Networking on September 7th: Mac OS X: Playing Nice in a Heterogenous World