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

    Childproof Your Mac

    December 29, 2014

    When I put a computer in my daughters room, I soon realized I could no longer watch over her shoulder as she worked away at school games, Minecraft and of course Civilization (after all, that was my first game). So much as I wrote an article a long time ago about child-proofing an iPad, now I’m writing about child-proofing a Mac. For me, I find that child-proofing is a bit like taking my kid to McDonald’s. I said never ever ever ever would I do this and then… Well, peer pressure, ya’ll… So if I have to do it, I figure someone else might. So here’s a quick and dirty guide to doing…

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

    Show Volumes On The OS X Desktop

    December 28, 2014

    I spent a lot of time on Windows a long time ago. And one of the things I got used to was having hard drives on the desktop. And I liked it. So when Apple took them off the desktop I started running these commands on new accounts only own systems. The other day when I gave them to someone, they said I should post them. So here goes… To show removable media (cards, etc): defaults write com.apple.finder ShowRemovableMediaOnDesktop -bool true To show external hard drives (USB, Thunderbolt, firewire, etc): defaults write com.apple.finder ShowExternalHardDrivesOnDesktop -bool true To show mounted servers (AFP, SMB, NFS, etc): defaults write com.apple.finder ShowMountedServersOnDesktop -bool true…

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

    The 12 Days Of Krypted

    December 25, 2014

    Merry Christmas ya’ll! On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me one 32 gig iPad On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me two bash one-liners On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me three Red Hat servers On the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me four email blasts On the fifth day of Christmas my true love gave to me five retweets On the sixth day of Christmas my true love gave to me six regular expressions On the seventh day of Christmas my true love gave to me seven lines of perl…

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

    Disable Natural Scrolling With a Script

    December 23, 2014

    I guess it’s a sign of my age. But I can’t stand that whole natural scrolling thing. So I disable it as a part of my imaging process. To do so, set the com.apple.swipescrolldirection global domain to false using defaults, as follows: defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool false To set it back: defaults write NSGlobalDomain com.apple.swipescrolldirection -bool true

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  • Mac OS X,  Mass Deployment

    Disable The Startup Sound In OS X

    December 22, 2014

    Sometimes you have to reboot on an airplane or with someone sleeping close by. When this happens, it helps if you’ve disabled the startup sound in OS X. To do so, run the following command to set nvram with an empty SystemAudioVolume: sudo nvram SystemAudioVolume=” “

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  • Articles and Books

    2 New Take Control Books

    December 19, 2014

    From Take Control: Apple Mail. It’s hard to get by on a Mac or iOS device without it. But living with Mail can be a recipe for hair-pulling frustration, whether because of connection failures caused by Mail’s mysteriously unreliable automatic settings detection or trying to figure out the difference between long and short swipes in the iOS version. No one knows more about Mail than Joe Kissell, and he has distilled his most important advice into the second edition of “Take Control of Apple Mail,” now completely revised and updated to explain Mail in 10.10 Yosemite and iOS 8. 183 pages of goodness is only $15. Point others here > http://tid.bl.it/tco-apple-mail Apple’s…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    Scripted Country Geolocations Using OS X’s Built-In ip2cc

    December 13, 2014

    Recently I was working on a project where we were isolating IP addresses by country. In the process, I found an easy little tool built right into OS X called ip2cc. Using ip2cc, you can lookup what country an IP is in. To do so, simply run ip2cc followed by a name or ip address. For example, to lookup apple.com you might run: ip2cc apple.com Or to lookup Much Music, you might run: ip2cc muchmusic.ca The output would be: IP::Country modules (v2.28) Copyright (c) 2002-13 Nigel Wetters Gourlay Database updated Wed May 15 15:29:48 2013 Name: muchmusic.com Address: 199.85.71.88 Country: CA (Canada) You can just get the country line: ip2cc…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  Mac Security,  Mass Deployment,  Network Infrastructure,  Programming,  Ubuntu,  Unix

    Opposite Day: Reversing Lines In Files

    December 12, 2014

    The other day, my daughter said “it’s opposite day” when it was time to do a little homework, trying to get out of it! Which reminded me of a funny little command line tool called rev. Rev reads a file and reverses all the lines. So let’s touch a file called rev ~/Desktop/revtest and then populate it with the following lines: 123 321 123 Now run rev followed by the file name: rev ~/Desktop/revtest Now cat it: cat !$ Now rev it again: rev !$ You go go forward and back at will for fun, much more fun than homework… Enjoy!

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

    Refresh OS X CRLs

    December 11, 2014

    I recently found an existing image with a lot of stale crl information. We couldn’t rebuild the image, so we decided to instead refresh all of the crl information. This information is stored in /var/db/crls/crlcache.db. Deleting the file turned out to be problematic so we needed to clear items out of the tables instead. While this could be done using a few different tools, it turns out there’s a command built into os x to take care of this process for us called crlrefresh. To use crlrefresh to clean up stale crlinformation and fetch new crlinformation for all CRL and certificates, use: crlrefresh rpvv

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