• Articles and Books,  iPhone,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  public speaking

    MacSysAdmin 2012!

    May 7, 2012

    MacSysAdmin has quickly become one of my favorite conferences to attend. I love the high level of technical acumen and the chance to row a canoe from Minneapolis to Gothenburg, Sweden, which is a serious workout, let me tell you! The 2012 lineup boasts one of the politest guys I know in Arek Dreyer, my coworker Zack Smith, Andrew Renz (of Code 42/CrashPlan fame), the well dressed (and spoken) Ed Marczak, the great Greg Neagle (Munki/Repasado/awesome guy), Alan Gordon’s alter-ego Alan Gordon, the JAMFerific Andrina Kelly, the ostentatious Duncan McCracken, Rick Wylie, Gary Larizza, Luis Giraldo in all his wireless awesomeness, Sébastien Tomasi (representing the file set goodness that is…

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  • Articles and Books,  Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    'Using Mac OS X Lion Server' Now Finished

    March 19, 2012

    My next book, Using Mac OS X Lion Server, from O’Reilly is all done. I accepted the final changes last week and it was sent to the printer on Wednesday. The digital copies should be shipping shortly and the print copies should be shipping in about one to two weeks. If you haven’t yet ordered it, you can pick it up on Amazon, here, or directly from O’Reilly, here. Hope you enjoy! Also, for those interested, we’ve already begun updating the book for all the new features in Mountain Lion Server. Now that I’m pretty in tune with publishing through O’Reilly and the various technical aspects of doing so, I…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Man Pages Made Easy

    July 31, 2011

    Ever since upgrading to Lion I’ve been making a few slight changes in workflow. One such change, which I’m still on the fence about, is to switch from reading man pages in a tiled Terminal screen, to reading them in a browser window. It seems like a small thing, but I spend a lot of time switching between terminal screens or using screen to switch between sessions. Bwana allows you to read a man page from within a browser. Simply load download the Bwana app into your /Applications directory and wait a few seconds. Then open a browser window and look for a man page. For example: man:dsconfigad Now, you…

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  • Mac OS X

    Automating Image File Changes

    July 24, 2011

    Ever need to automate changes to image files? Maybe a LaunchAgent that would watch a specific folder and resize png files that were dropped in there, or a little script that sanitized images as they came in to be a specific size (e.g. Poster Frames)? Well, sips is a little tool built into OS X that can help immensely with this. It will even convert that png to a jpeg or pict to png. Let’s look at using sips. First up, let’s just get the width and height of an image file: sips --getProperty pixelHeight /Shared/tmpimages/1.png sips --getProperty pixelWidth /Shared/tmpimages/1.png Or for dpi: sips --getProperty dpiHeight /Shared/tmpimages/1.png sips --getProperty dpiWidth…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    S/MIME in OS X Isn't Just For Tin Hat Wearing Nerds Anymore

    June 29, 2011

    S/MIME, or Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions is the de facto standard for encrypting and signing mail. You can encrypt mail to keep prying eyes off of it. Signing though, is much more common as it addresses the issue of non-repudiation in many organizations, or giving people a way to make sure that the email that they think you sent really came from you. It was also available in GPG plug-ins for mail, back in the day. But S/MIME used to really be for people who thought the government was out to get them, work for government agencies, just liked to be kinda’ nerdy or actually had something to hide. But…

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  • Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security

    Apache2 & umasks

    May 19, 2011

    I’ve been noticing more and more people using Apache as a way of getting files to and from servers. Call me silly but I think we’re going to continue to see more and more of this. A really common issue that comes up with Apache2 is default permissions of new files. Mac OS X is great with ACLs and whatnot. But Apache is built for posix. Posix is built on the foundation that the permissions of new files that are created come from umask. If you have a script that uploads a file then you can set the permissions as part of the script. But if you just pull it…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment

    Making Every User an Admin

    July 27, 2010

    If you deploy a large number of computers to users who are somewhat likely to play practical jokes on each other then you will run into some interesting issues. If you are deploying one computer to every user and you want each user to be an administrator of their computer then you might be tempted to allow all users to be administrators of all computers. If you do then prepare for an infinite number of sometimes amusing practical jokes. But really, being proactive about this brings up an interesting point: how do you deploy a computer and make only the user who you want to be an administrator an administrator.…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Scripting a Battery Sanity Check

    May 6, 2010

    When I’m running a script that might be somewhat time intensive I like to check the battery of the MacBooks first. Otherwise I might end up hosing some machines that die out in the middle of a script. To do so I’ll use ioreg to grab the maximum load that a battery can sustain, stored in MaxCapacity: capacity=`ioreg -l | grep MaxCapacity | cut -c 35-39` Then I’ll grab the current load on the battery, stored in CurrentCapacity: current=`ioreg -l | grep CurrentCapacity | cut -c 39-43` Finally I’ll grab a percentage: echo “scale=2; $current*100/$capacity” | bc If the percentage is above a certain threshold then I’ll run the script,…

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  • Mac Security

    Finding Stolen Machinery

    May 1, 2010

    I got this press release and thought it was pretty interesting. It’s just a cut/paste, and hasn’t been edited: BREAKING NEWS – New York City – MacPhoneHome finds another stolen computer! Late on a recent Sunday night, a Columbia University student was crossing Morningside Park returning to the Columbia University campus. He was accosted by four knife wielding thugs who beat him and robbed his MacBook Pro laptop, iPhone and wallet. The student advised Columbia University security personnel that since his laptop was partitioned with both a Windows and Mac Partition, he had installed both PC PhoneHome and MacPhoneHome tracking and recovery software on his computer which is available by…

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