One of my favorite things about grabbing things with scripts is just how many ways (and sometimes how needfully or needlessly convoluted you can make them) to grab the same pieces of information. For example, something as simple as what hosts you use to resolve names on a Mac. There are a number of ways to grab what DNS server a device is using in macOS. So when you’re running a script you might choose to grab DNS information one way or another, according to what you’re after. Some of this might seem more complicated than it should be. And that’s correct… resolv.conf The /etc/resolv.conf file is updated automatically to…
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- Active Directory, Mac OS X, Mac OS X Server, Mac Security, Network Infrastructure, Ubuntu, Unix, VMware, Windows Server, Windows XP, Xsan
List All DNS Records For A Domain
Sometimes you want to move a domain but you don’t have a copy of the zone file in order to recreate records. The easy way to do this is to grab a zone transfer. To do so, dig is your friend: dig -tAXFR mycompany.com Sometimes though (and actually more often than not) a zone transfer is disabled. In that case you’ll need to dig the domain a bit differently. I like to use +nocmd, query for any and list the results (+answer): dig +nocmd https://krypted.com/ any +answer Which results in the following: ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 39183 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1,…
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5 Free Network Troubleshooting Tools for iPhone and iPod Touch (and iPad of course)
There are a number of ways to troubleshoot network connections on (or using) an iOS device. These can be common troubleshooting steps that you might run from the command line or a third party app on a desktop computer or they could be specific to testing the network environment for an iOS device. Some of these apps are even free. Ping Lite One of the most common tasks that most administrators routinely do to test both DNS resolution and connectivity is pinging something. Ping Lite comes with a function to show your IP, a ping tool, a tool to ping the subnet, the ability to run trace routes and for…
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How Exchange's Autodiscover Works With Mail.app
Autodiscover automatically configures profile settings for Exchange clients. These clients include Microsoft Outlook 2007 or Outlook 2010, Outlook for Mac, Mail.app in Mac OS X, iPhone, iPad and ActiveSync enabled phones. Autodiscover is often made out to be complicated. There’s an Autodiscover service that gets installed when a Client Access Server (CAS) role is setup for Exchange 2010 in the form of a default virtual directory named Autodiscover for the default Web site in Internet Information Services (IIS). You then forward an autodiscover service locater record in DNS in the form of _autodiscover._tcp. The virtual directory handles Autodiscover requests. But what about other vendors, and even for Exchange, how do…
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Installing Ubuntu 10 in Fusion
I’ve done a number of articles on using Ubuntu 10 as a server recently, but haven’t actually looked at doing the base installation of an Ubuntu 10 host. In this example, I’ll look at using Ubuntu 10.04 Desktop. In many of the previous examples I’ve been looking at Ubuntu 10.10 Server; the reason I’m using 10.04 Desktop here is because I believe there is a smaller learning curve and that inherently Mac OS X Systems Administrators who might be following this thread actually like a GUI. There are a number of aspects of this type of setup that are simply not GUI oriented; however, the base OS can easily be,…