Every now and then I need to reclaim that space in /var/vm or I need to stop a process from paging to swap files while I’m troubleshooting something else. I in no way endorse disabling swap files (which basically kills using swap files as a part of your overall virtual memory) for extended periods of time. However, it has saved me in the case of stability concerns long enough to get a system patched or something like that. To disable OS X swap files, all you need to do is stop the com.apple.dynamic_pager daemon and restart. Use launchctl to stop: sudo launchctl unload -wF /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist Once restarted, you may need…
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A Guide To Using Mountain Lion Server (OS X 10.8)
I’ve been doing a number of postings on how to use various features of the latest version of OS X Server. Given that WordPress is pretty much a reverse chronological listing of articles I’ve written, I thought I’d put together a listing of the pages that I’ve done for OS X Server 10.8 (Mountain Lion Server) in order to offer a more pedagogically aligned way of reading these posts. As such, here is the Table of Contents for these posts: Introduction What Changed 10 Impactful Changes Upgrading from Lion Upgrading from Snow Leopard Managing the Server Configuring Alerts Using Web Modules Enable Push Notifications Configuring Time and Time Services Setting Up…
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A Sneak Peak At Mac OS X 10.9
Yes, it’s about a month or two into the OS cycle and there’s now a 10.8.1. So it’s time to announce the name and image that will be used with the next OS. We’re down to Ocelot, Serval and Bobcat. Therefore, I would think that 10.9 will be… Drumroll… BOBCAT! And from some Chinese factories I’ve been smuggled pictures of what the box that contains the disks will look like. It’s a little retro (disks are now retro btw). And I mean, Police Academy 2 era retro. But think of the startup sounds the OS could make. Think of how much people would want that face beaming back at them…
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Limiting The Number of Windows Users in Lion Server (aka How-to of hidden serveradmin settings)
Lion Server doesn’t have an option in the GUI for throttling the maximum number of users that can connect to the server via SMB. Nor does it have said option in the serveradmin interface. If you run the following, you would have previously seen the required setting: serveradmin settings smb The required setting (if controlled via serveradmin) is MaxClients= followed by the number of clients that you want to be the max: serveradmin settings smb:MaxClients=10 This is pretty easy stuff, but I have a point that goes beyond limiting the number of users. Not all of the settings that can be run through serveradmin are actually in the preferences any…
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MacTech InDepth In New York
I have been added as a speaker at MacTech InDepth in New York. If you haven’t signed up yet, and you work with Mac OS X Server then you should really check out the sessions that have been planned: The Elephant in the Room: The New Lion OS X is out, now what? There are a lot of differences to contend with between Lion and Snow Leopard. Now with the new Mountain Lion update, what changes can we expect to see? We discuss the differences in advanced services, GUI simplicity, and Apache management GUI’s. We help you understand the updates in the new OS and make the transition easier. We…
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FTP On Lion Server
Much has been made about the demise of FTP on OS X Server. Well, while it may be badly burned, it’s not dead yet. Let’s look at enabling FTP first on the server and then per share. Enable FTP on the Server The first thing to do on a server that you want to expose through FTP is enable tnftpd. To do so, open Workgroup Manager or Server and create a group that has user who you want to provide FTP services to. In this example we are going to assume a dedicated FTP server and open access to everyone, but feel free to swap out your group name for…
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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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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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Hosting afp on Linux
One of the main reasons people get a server is to share files. Mac OS X Server is one of the more common devices used to share files to Mac OS X clients, using afp, the default file sharing protocol for Mac OS X. But you don’t have to use Mac OS X Server. You can use Linux as well. We’re going to look at using an open source project called netatalk to do so. If you find that after reading this that you’d like to find out more about netatalk then check out the open source project page at http://netatalk.sourceforge.net. The netatalk installer can be installed through most of…
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AFP and Cleartext Passwords
AFP can be persnickety about you doing something as painfully silly as authenticating into a host using a password sent in cleartext (completely unencrypted). But when you’re troubleshooting it can be useful to disable this behavior, if only to test and then re-enable again. To do so: defaults write com.Apple.AppleShareClient afp_cleartext_allow -bool YES And to disable the warning: defaults write com.Apple.AppleShareClient afp_cleartext_warn -bool NO