Blog

I’ve found over the months my Downloads folder starts to fill up with all kinds of junk. Old disk images, versions of documentation, expense reports, you name it. All this stuff just sits in my Downloads folder until I consciously go through and delete the outdated stuff and organize the rest of it. To help myself out, I put a very basic bash script in a cron entry that removes old files from the Downloads directory. That way, I have a certain amount of time to move it out. If I don’t, it probably wasn’t worth keeping.
More »

The iChat Server module in Mac OS X Server provides a great interface to the jabberd daemon, getting you up and running quickly with standard and Kerberos authentication using your Open Directory users. Unfortunately, there are a few useful features that are not yet accessible in Server Admin. One of these is a simple tool for automatically setting everyone to be a buddy with each other. In smaller organizations, it’s a great way to get in touch with everyone without having to ask everyone to become a buddy individually. More »

The 8-core Xserve platform has often seemed overpriced and overkill for many IT server applications that require less performance, but must have server isolation for industry compliance, security, and high availability.  Parallels has made a welcome step forward in virtualization on the Xserve platform, with Parallels Server for Mac.  For an initial release, it has proven quite dependable despite a few issues with recent X Server updates.  No doubt this product will continue to improve in the near future, and it’s exciting to see the Xserve hardware used more efficiently.

More »

Here is an introductory guide on how to create an Adobe CS3 .pkg installer ( in lieu of the slient install ) with little to no fuss(1), and more importantly no real manual interaction with all the associated files. I have modified a perl script from Geoff Franks that was created for parsing Microsoft Office update log files to now parse the output of logGen. Please note that Perl is not my primary language ( As of late the snake is eating most of my llama time. ) and so this is not yet as polished as other scripts I publicly post ( I really didn’t have to change too much to get this working. ). I encourage the community to send back code additions and bug reports.
1. Its worth mentioning there are easier to use commercial pieces of software such as composer and other methodologies such as the slightly immature package snapshot feature (Not recommended for CS3, trust me I’ve tried it).

Please read the article below and then download pkgGen

More »

This is such a hack and is posted mainly for academic reasons

Here is a quick hack for pushing out environment variables via MCX ( Managed Preferences ), This only will work with 10.4 and its a silly mishmash of stuff that is totally unsupported which of-course makes it the best kind of hack.
First a little background on the file that allows us to do this (environment.plist) curiosity of Apple.

From page 24 of the Command_Line_v10.4_2nd_Ed[PDF]

“Another way to set environment variables in Mac OS X is with a special property list in
your home folder. At login, the computer looks for the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist
file. If the file is present, the computer registers the environment variables in the
property-list file.”

More »

For anyone interested in deleting Mobile (Portable) accounts after a certain number of days ( most likely a lab environment ) I have created a bash with an accompanying loginhook and package installer(w/postflight). Any feedback or code additions would be greatly appreciated. Static Link here

Elmer “Rabbit Droppings” remover v1.9

These scripts are designed to remove mobile home directories after 15 days of inactivity, test in a non production environment before deploying!

 

You can find the package maker project ->here<- and the installer package ->here<-

 

More »

You can Download the Application ->here<- and the “Source” ->here.<-

I often teach classes to administrators who are new to the command line, I on the other hand ssh more then I sleep and so no matter what the class ( for better or worse ) I tend to throw one liners on screen every 10 mins . Because of this I often start class out by showing people how to make a simple “.command” file. The rational being that if they don’t think they’re going to remember the commands then just saving them in a file ( perhaps on a thumb drive ), will probably suffice while they are learning. If your not familiar with these files, they are a handy way to have a double clickable “scripts” , sans the hash bang i.e. #!/bin/bash or what could almost be referred to as a “batch” file. Creating one of these files is as simple as opening TextEdit.app changing the format to”Plain text” Format->Make Plain Text + Shift + T ). More »

Update: 8/20/2007 Zack has posted a guide to convert CS3 into a .pkg installer

The instructions in Official CS3 Deployment guide [PDF] are somewhat misleading, and in some cases just don’t include information that you need (of course, if you are using logen or other deployment tools to create a package, you can ignore this article, but this is a resource for those who want to see / use / implement the cs3 silent installer).

1. Understand the that “Silent” installer is just running the normal installer (you get an icon on the doc and everything) with the screen output and dialogs supressed. So instead of prompting on error, the app just quits, with no log or mention of why it did. For example, the installer fails if you have safari or firefox open, the normal install will prompt you with the error, but no mention of why the install failed shows up in the log.

2. It also fails if the installer is not run with Sudo or Root privileges. Again, no error message to tell you otherwise. (this is mentioned indirectly in the ARD part of the deployment guide, but nowhere else).

3. the “deploy over ARD” option is to just copy the installation files to the client machine, and to then push out the unix command from ARD to run the silent installer.
More »