Fri - February 10, 2006

Nothing to see here, move along...


I haven't posted here in over a year. May I direct your attention here , instead?

Posted at 06:50 PM     Read More  


Sun - January 2, 2005

Updating Dock icons


In one-to-one deployments, you may not have direct control of a user's Dock - especially if you do not use Macintosh Manager becuase you are using a non-Apple directory. When you update applications on a user's machine, this sometimes breaks Dock items. We faced this when updating machines from Office v.X to Office 2004. I wrote a script that ran at login that changed any existing Office v.X Dock icons into their corresponding Office 2004 icons.

Posted at 09:15 AM     Read More  

Using niutil to manage user accounts


Let's say you've assumed responsibility for managing a new group of Mac OS X machines. These machines were previously set up by a variety of people, and have different local admin account names and passwords. To simplify your life, you want to standardize the local admin account name and password, and additionally, create a way to update the local admin password periodically.

Posted at 09:00 AM     Read More  


Thu - December 30, 2004

Update to "Globally launching items at login"



Posted at 07:04 PM     Read More  


Tue - June 15, 2004

Screensaver over loginwindow


Apple seems to have missed a bit of functionality with their screensaver: when a Mac is sitting at the loginwindow, the screen saver never comes on. If you have a Mac sitting at the loginwindow for many hours a day, and you do not have the Mac set to dim the screen after a short time, you could begin to burn-in the loginwindow's image into the screen!
There may be other reasons you need a screensaver to run at login. Whatever those might be, there's a fairly simple solution.

Posted at 07:36 PM     Read More  


Sat - May 22, 2004

Web access to radmind data (updated)


It's useful to be able to quickly view radmind data via a webpage. Kris Steinhoff has written a radmind management module for Webmin. This module allows one to perform many common radmind management tasks via a webpage. We wrote a standalone CGI that gives us read-only access to radmind data. (With the help of Chris Buskirk, I've added some files the CGI depends on and updated the script to fix the viewing of check-ins in domains other than .com - you should be able to get this up and running very easily on a Mac OS X radmind/web server)

Posted at 11:41 PM     Read More  


Mon - May 10, 2004

Running radmind via cron (by way of periodic) and on-demand


Here are some more of the scripts I use to automate radmind...

Posted at 10:10 PM     Read More  

run_radmind script (updated)


Here is the run_radmind script I use. It's called on demand at logout, and as a periodic task nightly.

Posted at 09:22 PM     Read More  


Fri - May 7, 2004

Monitoring radmind (updated)


(Updated 5/7/04) Once you have set up some sort of automation for radmind, so that it runs automatically every night, for example, it becomes important to be able to monitor the machines you manage to see if they are running radmind regularly and to be notified if there are any problems.

Posted at 10:46 PM     Read More  


Sat - January 17, 2004

Using radmind to upgrade from 10.2.x to 10.3.x - UPDATE


One of the main reasons I started this blog was to communicate my adventures in using radmind to upgrade machines from 10.2.x to 10.3.x. It turned out not to be trivial, so I wanted to share my experiences so others could benefit.

It's far past time for an update on my progress.

So far I have successfully upgraded about 85 machines from 10.2.6 to 10.3.1 or 10.3.2 using radmind. I continue to upgrade a few each week. I will have moved most of our OS X boxes to Panther before the end of January.

Posted at 05:38 PM     Read More  

10.3.2 auto proxy configuration


Mac OS X 10.3.2 adds a feature to the Proxies tab of the Network Preferences Pane. This allows you to specify a URL to automatically configure proxies. This URL points to a "PAC" (Proxy Auto Configuration") file. These files are traditionally used Netscape and IE for Windows to configure their proxies. Now that this feature has been added to Mac OS X, Mac OS X applications can take advantage of this feature.

Posted at 05:05 PM     Read More  

Custom startup items


In this blog, I've posted several scripts that we run at startup, without being terribly specific as to the details. Today I'd like to remedy that. I'll show you a custom startup item that can run any number of scripts (or executable binaries for that matter) that you place in a special directory.

Posted at 05:04 PM     Read More  


Tue - November 18, 2003

Enforcing ColorSync profiles


We had a need on certain machines to ensure that the ColorSync monitor profile was always set to a specific ColorSync profile, regardless of who logged in. This would ensure color consistency for all artwork created at a given workstation.

Posted at 09:44 PM     Read More  

Screensaver configuration


For our environment, we are required to enforce a screensaver that comes on after 10 minutes of inactivity and requires a password to clear. Here's how we accomplish that for all users of a system.

Posted at 09:39 PM     Read More  


Sat - November 15, 2003

Managing account passwords


In most managed environments, workstations will all have either the same root password, or an admin account with a common password. This allows support personnel to access any machine they support and perform admin tasks. A problem arises when it is necessary or desirable to change the password on these admin accounts. If each machine must be visited individually in order to change the password, it probably won't happen very often, if at all. Here's one way to ensure password consistency...

Posted at 09:28 PM     Read More  
Globally launching items at login
Turning on SSHd
Creating new System users for Panther and Postfix
Fixing empty SSH keys
Power Management
Panther global config files changes
Using radmind to upgrade from 10.2 to 10.3

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