MacTech Day 1 My MacTech experience started last night. I flew into Los Angeles and was picked up at the airport by my coworker, Zack Smith. Given that I lived in Santa Monica for over a decade, I drove the Mini Cooper that 318 bought recently from LAX to Studio City. On the way, I got to get caught up with Zack’s stories from a month of vacation (living vicariously through others definitely has its moments). We got to the Universal City Sheraton in less than an hour during rush hour. Given the 405 being all messed up, we dodged a few bullets and cut through South Central Los Angeles…
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Dealing With Profile Manager Conflicts in Lion
Changing OS X Settings for Profiles bound to clients results in Managed Client changes (mcxread shows them) and inserts the info into Managed Client in this order: User Computer Computer Group Everyone User Group The data in the managed client attributes is replaced completely and not per-key. Installing profiles from the command line provides more information as to what is going on behind the scenes. Having said this, in some cases I can get a Provisioning Profile Validation: failed to read CMS (-25257) error when attempting to install the same profile a second time. In other cases it just fails if I try to run verbosely (in those cases it…
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Scripting Video Changes in Lion: avconvert, pcastaction & podcast
The avconvert command is a new addition in OS X Lion that allows administrators to quickly and easily convert video from one format to another using presets for video conversion. The presets are mostly common Apple formats tuned to specific devices. In its simplest form, avconvert uses a preset, a source and then an output to convert the source to the output using the preset to define the format to use for conversion. A useful preset is the 640×480 one. To convert this using this idea: /usr/bin/avconvert --preset Preset640x480 --source /Convert/test.mov --output Converted/test.mov While some of the presets are pretty self explanatory, I haven’t gone through them all to see…
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Automating Image File Changes
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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Using DFS in OS X Lion
DFS stands for Distributed File Sharing. DFS is most commonly used to virtualize the way with which storage is presented to users. Once virtualized, mounts are able to replicate to one another or be moved between servers without impacting the end user experience. While many who have never used DFS will wonder why enterprises actually care about it, those of us who have used it extensively will be stoked that this new feature has been incorporated into OS X Lion. Using DFS in OS X is similar to using DFS in Windows, simply connect to a share and the work on the back end to locate where the share is…
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RAMdisk on MacBook Air
I can’t remember where I picked up how to get a RAM Disk mounted in OS X, but it’s a great way to get some unbelievable speeds on your Mac for those minor IO intensive processes that don’t need persistent data. It should be mentioned that the contents of RAM disks are erased, once ejected, but the speed of processes while they’re running can be pretty phenomenal on systems with fast RAM. The best example is a MacBook Air, where the memory is surface-mounted QFP and so really fast. Let’s say you have 4GB of memory and you want to run a process that isn’t going to take more than a…
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OS X Server: Forcing DNS Propagation
Here I sat, tapping my fingers on the desk, waiting for a DNS change to propagate through a number of secondaries (note to self, I have too many secondary DNS servers at home). While sitting, tapping my fingers I dozed off and dreamt of fishing on the river I grew up on, of the sweet looks my daughter gives me and of retiring into a luddite colony of burning men and women in the desert. When I awoke and wiped the drool from my face, I realized I was wasting my life waiting for DNS to propagate. Then I flushed the cache one more time, just to see if it’s…
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S/MIME in OS X Isn't Just For Tin Hat Wearing Nerds Anymore
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…