I love Notification Center on my phone. I think it’s great to receive a simple list of items that have changed since the last time I looked at the phone. I can also quickly dismiss the screen so the fact that there’s often 20 or more items in the list when I’ve been sitting at my computer for 10 minutes and not looking at the phone doesn’t really bum me out much. In Mountain Lion, Notification Center comes to the Mac. What I’ve grown to love on the iPhone, I’m not sold on for OS X. You see, the alerts that pop up on the screen are great for a…
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Core Dumps in Mac OS X
Every now and then, OS X has to drop some kids off at the pool. Usually it’s some developer that didn’t build a sanity check for every-single-possible-flippin’-thing-you-might-think-to-do-to-his/her-poor-flippin’-app-OMGYFI! And then, suddenly, out of nowhere, you get crap all over the system. Actually, as expected, Apple’s dumps are pretty well sequestered in the /cores directory. Each core file has a number appended behind it. For example, core.9901. When applications crash, they can save a lot of information about the state when they crashed into these files. For example, I have seen cached passwords in there… To disable core dumps, add the following line to /etc/sysctl.conf: kern.coredump=0 After a restart core dumps will…
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2,000 Posts And Going Strong
In December of 2004, in response to a request from my publisher at the time, I started this site in its current form. I kept the domain from my personal tinkeration site, which was a glorified file service, some static html pages for me to remember things (I can be a bit forgetful at times) and some .htaccess files to keep parts of the site private. I’d been using the domain for awhile, but started tinkering around with a few blogging engines and eventually settled on the one I’m using now. The total number of posts now sits a little over 2020, with a few being drafts on upcoming products…
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Vulnerability Scanning Web Servers Using Nikto On OS X
I’ve had a pretty easy time using Nikto over the years. Nikto is a security scanner specific to web servers. I did a post on Nessus recently, but Nessus is a tool for looking at any service running on a system and trying to find available vulnerabilities. Nikto is can do many of the same things, but is specific and therefore more in depth for web servers. This involves looking at things like CGI directories and robots.txt files as well. Nikto is written in Perl. In order to do everything Nikto can do there are a few perl mules that need to be installed. But let’s look at one of…
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A Cheat Sheet For Using pf in OS X Lion and Up
I’ve done plenty of writing on the Application Layer Firewall (ALF) and the IP FireWall (IPFW) in OS X over the years. There will be more on ALF coming in “July” but in the meantime, there’s something I hadn’t written much about in Lion and that’s the pf implementation. To get started, let’s look at the /etc/pf.conf configuration file that comprises pf: scrub-anchor "com.apple/*" nat-anchor "com.apple/*" rdr-anchor "com.apple/*" dummynet-anchor "com.apple/*" anchor "com.apple/*" load anchor "com.apple" from "/etc/pf.anchors/com.apple" Here, you can see that pf is configured with a number of anchors. An anchor is a collection of rules and tables. Basically, the anchor file being loaded is /etc/pf.anchors/com.apple. In here, we…
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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…