Apple Configurator has now been in my grubby hands long enough for me to start looking at it a little deeper than I did in the introductory article I did awhile back. Architecturally, Apple Configurator keeps its data in ~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.configurator. Here, you’ll find a directory called IPSWs, another called Resources, file called AppleConfigurator.storedata and another called Users.storedata. The IPSWs directory is where operating system versions, per model of iOS are stored. These look something like iPad2,1_5.1_9B176_Restore.ipsw, which is iOS 5.1 for a standard iPad 2. iPad 1, the retina display iPad, as well as each iPod Touch and iPhone 4 each have their own entry as well. The IPSWs…
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Pentesting Mac OS X Server With Nessus 5
One of my favorite tools for penetration testing is Nessus from Tenable Network Security. Nessus 5 is the latest release in the family of vulnerability scanners that is probably amongst the most prolific. Nessus 5 does discovery, configuration auditing, profiling, looks at patch management and performs vulnerability analysis on a variety of platforms. Nessus can also run on a Linux, Windows or Mac OS X and can be used to scan and keep track of vulnerabilities for practically any platform, including Mac OS X. To install Nessus, go to the Nessus site and click on the Download button, around the middle of the page. Agree to the download agreement and…
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Paths in Title Bars
When I install a new system that I am personally going to be using, one of the few tweaks I make is to configure the Finder to show me paths in the title bar. This just keeps me from the occasional Command-click on the folder name and keeps me abreast of where I am. Mostly it’s helpful in list or icon view as. To enable full paths use defaults to write an _FXShowPosixPathInTitle key into com.apple.finder.plist. The key should be boolean and we’re setting it to true. After about 30 seconds new windows should show with the path in the title bar: defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES I actually…
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Using dirname and basename For Paths In Scripts
There are two commands that can be really helpful when scripting operations that involve filenames and paths. The first of these is dirname: dirname can be used to return the directory portion of a path. The second is basename: basename can be used to output the file name portion of a path. For our first example, let’s say that we have an output of /var/db/shadow/hash/850F62CD-966C-43A7-9C66-9F9E6799A955, which we know contains the encrypted password for a given user. To just see the UUID here would be done using the following extremely basic incantation of basename: basename /var/db/shadow/hash/850F62CD-966C-43A7-9C66-9F9E6799A955 Basename can also be used to trim output. For example, let’s say we didn’t need…
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Change H: on SMB PDCs
Samba can be a PDC, allowing Windows clients to join a single line domain name and then access domain resources (such as roaming profiles) as though the domain were Windows NT-based. When you set this up the default behavior for Mac OS X Server based domains is to create a drive mapping for H: to the users profile path (as specified in the homeDirectory attribute) on the server. H: is kinda’ low for some computers with a lot of drives and it can also conflict with other drive mappings you may choose to use. Therefore you may find that in some cases you need to change the H:. To do…
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Moving that iPhoto Library
There are a number of reasons you might choose to change the location of your iPhoto library. Maybe you want to store pictures on a firewire drive, or maybe you want to store them on an iSCSI LUN, which I described how to work with recently. Either way, there are two ways I typically see people go about changing the location that iPhoto uses to store data. The first is to actually create a symbolic link from ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library to the directory you would like to use. The second, which is a better option is to go ahead and edit the location that the iPhoto preferences set as the path…