Archive for category: Tips

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

Kyle Crawford has an interesting post that covers reloading LaunchAgents while a user is logged in without requiring them to take action (Log out/in, reboot, etc). While somewhat hacky, it is a novel way to ensure that a given LaunchAgent is reloaded without burdening the End User to take action.

The Context My OS X deployment workflow is a very hands-off approach.  As Mike Boylan and I described in our post “How to Lose 100 Pounds in 10 Days,” my process involves crafting an OS X installer package using Greg Neagle’s CreateOSXInstallPkg to incorporate Munki, iCloud prompt / Lion registration suppression, [...]

iCloud is a great tool for consumer use, but in most enterprises it is not desirable.  OS X defaults to saving documents on iCloud if the application supports it.  If company policy states you cannot save documents to the cloud, then this must be disabled.  Charles Edge has a post on [...]

If you have ever needed to package up and deploy python modules or ruby gems, you know that it is kind of a pain.  It is a very manual process. Enter FPM (Effing Package Management) with its newly minted osxpkg support.  Thanks to Tim Sutton’s recent contribution to fpm, you can now roll [...]

For running commands quickly on remote machines, nothing beats SSH.  It is quick and easy to open terminal and fire off the command.  Rich has a post outlining how to execute a command on a remote machine without the need for an interactive SSH session.  This makes running commands even [...]

Tim Sutton as an interesting post which outlines some interesting tricks you can do with flat Apple packages.  Check out the writeup here.