A lot of environments want to use Time Machine at scale. But prior to Lion there hasn’t been a simple way to do so. Apple has introduced a new weapon in the war to backup client computers in the new command tmutil that was introduced in OS X Lion. The tmutil command allows administrators to enable Time Machine, make snapshots, kick off backups, delete snapshots, perform restores, configure options within Time Machine and, with a little scripting, build a centralized dashboard, pulling in Time Machine statistics from clients. Enabling Time Machine The first thing to know is that pretty much everything you do in Time Machine is going to require…
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The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant
In OS X Lion, Apple has released a tool called Lion Recovery, that lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc. But a lot of administrators and other users have had concerns over how to build a custom recovery disk so they can have physical media handy to perform such restores. Today, Apple has released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, which allows administrators to build such physical media. Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will install a recovery partition on a USB-attached volume (you can always clone from USB later if you really want it to be a SCSI or Fibre Channel volume). This partition doesn’t…
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Fixing Color Problems with Ubuntu
The Terminal application defaults have a problem passing colors with Ubuntu and other types of Linux machines with properly formed .bashrc files. This is because those systems do not know how to interpret the Lion xterm-color256 terminal declaration. The fix is to change this setting to xterm-color. This needs to be done for each Terminal default. Click on each (Basic, Grass, Homebrew, etc) and then click on the Advanced tab. From there, just set the Declare terminal as: to xterm-color and close. This can also be done through the command line. These settings are stored in the com.apple.Terminal.plist per user, in their ~/Library/Preferences. The key for each is in TerminalType,…
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LoginWindow: PolicyBanners and Backgrounds
The Login Window in OS X is the screen you see while you’re typing in a username and password. There are a number of customizations used in some environments to make the system easier for users to use, or to make it more specific to a given user environment. One such is customizing the Login Window’s background, which can be done by replacing this file with one that you would like to use: /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/LoginUIKit.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/LoginUICore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/appleLinen.png You can also configure a message to be shown to users. This message, often referred to as an Acceptable Use Policy, can be used as a policy banner that users must accept in order to log…