Archive for January, 2005

Ed. Note: This is a rather clever way of defeating the dreaded QuickTime registration dialog. However it does require access to the package before deployment. It also is a good example of some of the things that pre and post-install scripts do within packages.

Here at my University I deploy the QuickTime updates not via SoftwareUpdate but with rsync, cron, and the QuickTime.pkg. You can edit the preflight script inside the package where you find the following text.

"# Marketing (aka Amy Fazio) sez we don't need to bring up the registration dialog anymore
# but let's just comment it out for now in case they change their minds. - duano! 3/16/04
# ... see, QT BRB did change their minds on this. Putting it back until Gibson - duano! 3/17/04
# Putting it back in again for Legal reasons (QT5Pro users need to know they're gonna lose functionality)."

Delete the dialog crap underneath and there you go.

tbone

GeoCenter has deployed a new 100 node Xserve G5 cluster that will be used for running distributed processing applications from GeoCenter’s SeisUP� seismic processing system.

We have published information on our website describing the tools and techniques we used to setup and manage the cluster, including Radmind for managing system images, Apple’s Server Assistant for auto-configuring each node, and a number of custom Perl scripts written by GeoCenter developer Michael Beam. We also provide information regarding the differences between Mac OS X and other Unix platforms that we encountered while porting our code to Mac OS X. The techniques we developed allowed us to reduce the deployment process to a short process of booting each system from an external hard disk, which then imaged and auto-configured the system. All of these item have been packaged into one disk image (compressed .dmg) download available on our website.

The website can be found at:

http://www.geocenter.com/news/xserve_overview.html

Some of the information is still under development and will be updated soon. Please contact me for more information or any questions.

We are already seeing some pretty impressive results from the cluster and hope to provide some performance numbers in the near future.

Ed. Note: There are a number of ways of doing this, so I'm curious as to what people are using in their scripts?does anyone no of a terminal command that will reveal which network interface (built-in ethernet, AirPort, etc.) is currently in use? it can return en0 or en1. i'm not looking for whether the port is active, but the one that is currently being used.

thank you,

barton

A customer of ours needs to implement a simple accounting system for their printers. They are using a Mac OS X Server as a printserver for the users. That seems to work ok, but the problem is that there is no kind of accounting system. Neither the admin nor the users have any ideas of the users’ present quota situation.

Browsing the web we found two solutions; NINja seems to be overkill and PyKota doesn’t seem to be easy to implement.
Any ideas of easier solutions? A daily script thats gathers info from the appropriate logs and NetInfo records and puts it into a database would do fine.

We have a client that uses a few apple computers as kiosks.

When a person logs onto the machine they want them to let it be active for 30 minutes then to have it logout. They also wanted the machine to warn them when they had 5 minutes left. I wrote an applescript that will do this. If anyone wants to use it your more then welcome to.

You may have heard about the upcoming integration of theblojsom blog server in Tiger Server when it comes out.
I really like blojsom, and have been running it for a while now. It is far easier to administer for multi-user and multi-blog setups than anything else I’ve experimented with, and offers some awesome features.

The MacEnterprise.org group will be presenting a Webcast on the Digital Academic Television Network at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Tuesday, January 18 at 1:00 pm EDT.

This Webcast will discuss how the University of Wisconsin-Madison deployed an IP-based live television broadcast system using QuickTime technologies, replacing an aging campus coaxial cable system. The Digital Academic Television Network (DATN, and pronounced “Dayton”) currently makes a dozen local television channels, as well as specialty campus content, available on the university network. Future plans, such as a transition to the new H.264 video codec and expansion to 77 local channels, will be discussed. More information about DATN is available from http://datn.wisc.edu/about/

For more information on how to watch this WebCast, please visit the MacEnterprise.org website:

http://macenterprise.org/

The broadcast ID needed to view the webcast is ‘macenterprise’!!

Learn more about configuring diskspacemonitor in the second of our series of articles.

Running out of space on OS X is bad, like real bad.

Read on to find out more about the built-in facilities that will prevent you from running out of space.