Seems like the answer to a lot of Samba problems are to toggle streams on or off according to what kind of problems are being encountered. So I thought I’d do a couple of quick .command files that can be sent to clients to do it. This way, they can be sent to users having problems to test enabling or disabling the option. Click to download
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Sync'ing iTunes Libraries
I recently spent a few days trimming down the amount of space consumed by my home folder. In so doing I discovered a number of things I could be doing better with regards to utilization of my drive space. So I decided to offload most of my media (photos, movies, etc) off my laptop and onto my Mac Mini server. I also decided that one thing I’d like to live on both is iTunes. Note: Before you do anything in this article you should verify you have a good back up. Also, both machines will end up needing to be Authorized for your iTunes account. There are a lot of…
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Scripting FaceTime
I will go through long stretches without playing with new technology until I either get unbusy or get talked into figuring out how to do something remotely interesting with it. Like linking FaceTime up to a help desk database. It turns out that Apple made it a very straight forward process. Simply use a facetime handler as the prefix to a URL with the phone number of the other person (iPhone 4) or their FaceTime email address (usually with the desktop app). For example, if my email were krypted@krypted.com then you could use the following from terminal: open facetime://krypted@krypted.com Or if my phone number were 310-555-1212 (it is you know;):…
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Pushing Wireless Networks Out
If you need to push a wireless network into your image in Mac OS X, you can do so with the networksetup command. Networksetup has a few options that are specifically geared to working with wireless networks. In order to obtain a list of all of the networks that your system has used, you will use the networksetup command along with the -listpreferredwirelessnetworks option. The man page lists that you will follow this command with the hardwareport. The hardwareport is the name of the wireless network adapter, which can be seen in the System Preference pane. By default this is called AirPort, so the default command to see all wireless…
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Adding Objects To The Dock
Using Mac OS X, one of the most trivial things (provided you have permission) is to add an object to the dock. Applications go on the left side of the dock and folders/documents/stacks go on the right. From the command line it isn’t quite as trivial but not that complicated either. To do so from the command line, you can write directly into the com.apple.dock.plist for a user. To do so, we’re going to use the defaults command and we’re going to look at adding an application first: defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-apps -array-add ‘<dict><key>tile-data</key><dict><key>file-data</key><dict><key>_CFURLString</key><string>/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008/Microsoft Word</string><key>_CFURLStringType</key><integer>0</integer></dict></dict></dict>’ You can also add a custom title for the object that you are adding…
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DeployStudio: Rename a Volume with Host Name
DeployStudio has the ability to rename volumes as part of a standard workflow. These are typically set to something like “Macintosh HD” (the default) or “Computer Lab” or something like that. But what if you wanted to name the volume something unique to a given computer, which makes it easier to keep track with what you are doing across a number of servers? You could create a workflow for each computer and change the hard drive name for each to something unique; but that would be tedious and pollute your list of workflows, likely resulting in accidentally running the wrong workflow at times. Instead, you could look at a really…
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BRU Primer -> Advanced
In BRU 2, you have 3 tools to use. These include: BRU Server Agent Config (UB) – A tool used to install the agent, which needs to be located on each machine that will be backed up (including the server if it has any data to back up) BRU Server Config (UB) – Used to configure the server daemon, backup server configurations and set passwords to communicate with the server. Also used to set licensing information and perform scans for new tape drives and libraries. BRU Server Console (UB) – Used to configure backup jobs, schedules, etc. To get started, open the BRU Server Config application from the components that…
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Archive & Restore Assets with fcsvr_client
Final Cut Server has an option to archive and restore assets. When archiving an asset, the asset will be moved to a file system path that is represented by the device ID. The archival and restore can be done using the steps shown in this video: The process of archival and restore can be kicked off from the command line, which will initiate the movement of the asset. To archive an asset, you will use the archive verb with the fcsvr_client tool. This will require you to provide the asset ID number along with the device that you will be archiving the asset to. For example, to archive an asset…
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Scripting a Battery Sanity Check
When I’m running a script that might be somewhat time intensive I like to check the battery of the MacBooks first. Otherwise I might end up hosing some machines that die out in the middle of a script. To do so I’ll use ioreg to grab the maximum load that a battery can sustain, stored in MaxCapacity: capacity=`ioreg -l | grep MaxCapacity | cut -c 35-39` Then I’ll grab the current load on the battery, stored in CurrentCapacity: current=`ioreg -l | grep CurrentCapacity | cut -c 39-43` Finally I’ll grab a percentage: echo “scale=2; $current*100/$capacity” | bc If the percentage is above a certain threshold then I’ll run the script,…
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Scripting the Force Log Out
Scripting a log out event seems like the kind of thing that would be pretty simple, and if you use the AppleScript later it does appear simple, unless you want to force the event to occur immediately. Why would we want to do such a thing? Most commonly there are two requests. One is to invoke the script with the screen saver to meet some form of policy that requires a log out after a certain amount of time whether the user has saved their data or not (seems a big mean, but it’s not unheard of). The second is to invoke the script as part of a deployment or…