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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 All this stuff just sits in my Downloads folder until I consciously go through and delete the outdated stuff and organize the rest of it.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.
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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

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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.”

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Backing up share point data on Mac OS X Server.

In response to this article on afp548 and a job I had to today here is a quick, if not old school way to backup share points.

nidump -r /config/SharePoints . >shares.nidump
To restore from the backup.
niload -r /config/SharePoints . <shares.nidump
Perhaps more later…
( and yes I know about ^h^h^h^h^h^h

If would you like to contact me with comments or inaccuracies about this article, feel free but support requests will be ignored unless you would like to sign up for Iris Professional Services service. Thanks

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 »