Articles by: Nate Walck

Apple has pushed some changes to XProtect.  Rich Trouton has the details over on his blog.

Working with Open Directory can be a great experience…until it isn’t.  When your database goes up in flames (or perhaps if), it can be frustrating and maddening.  Charles Edge has an article posted on what to do when your OD database decides to spontaneously corrupt itself.

A new Office 2011 update was released as of 5/7/2013.  This update requires only Office 2011 14.1.0, so it can be applied to a wide range of product versions.  More info over on the Microsoft KB article.

Has anyone else seen this issue?  It has only been reproduced on Thunderbolt-equipped Macs while attached to Cinema Displays (Either Mini-Display Port or Thunderbolt).  If you are able to test this on both Thunderbolt and Non-Thunderbolt Macs as well as Cinema and Third party displays, please leave the results of [...]

Charles Edge has an article posted about testing memory on Apple computers from the command line.  If you have wanted to run a quick and easy memtest without booting to diagnostic media, then this is the answer you have been looking for.

After some undocumented options were found in the asr tool, Greg Neagle started digging around some other commands to see if he could find any other hidden options. The result of this interest has lead to some methods for finding hidden options in any command, although his specific example involves softwareupdate. [...]

Installing printers via lpadmin on OS X can be a pain, especially if you do not know the names of the specific options you need for the printer (Duplex, Finisher, etc).  You can dig through the .ppd if you’d like, but this is not as helpful as you might hope. [...]

Apple Software Restore (ASR) has some hidden documentation that reveals a few command line options which were previously unknown to most. A post on jamfnation led to some discussion on ##osx-server about an undocumented ASR command.  Rich Trouton blogged about how to view these commands using a very interesting method.  If [...]

As usual with all things FileVault related, Rich Trouton has the details on a new .app for setting up FileVault 2.  FileVault Setup.app is a standalone app that provides a pretty interface for end users to configure File Vault 2 with during first login.  This is a interesting way to [...]

Noel Alonso has a post outlining one way you could easily delete a machine out of Active Directory using ldapsearch and ldapdelete. This script could easily be modified and changed to do various other things, such as passing the hostname in as an argument or doing a different action upon [...]