Archive for September, 2009

This article is the outgrowth of some work I did for a customer in recent weeks.  Big companies are buying iPhones by the truckload to use in their architecture.  These same companies have enough employees to make centralized iPhone activation a little unrealistic.  Throw in a heterogeneous OS client environment and, well, system administrators want to know i) how to deploy iTunes for Windows so their users can activate their iPhones themselves and ii) how to enforce pre-configured parental controls on iTunes for Windows.

In Mac OS X 10.2.2 journaling was added to the Mac OS X Extended file system (I first read about it here on afp548). Journaling introduced a lot of great stuff, most notably improved resiliency to crashing. This resiliancy comes from the fact that a journaled file system uses part of a disk to write changes that are intended to go into the actual file system. This way if a crash occurs while a transaction to the file system is occurring the file system will usually easily and quickly recover by using the journal to bring the file system back into a consistent state.

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Snow Leopard comes with a great little new command in mcxrefresh, which as you might have guessed refreshes policy information. This allows you to request a new set of policies and provided the command returns with no errors the process has completed successfully (exit's 0). Use a UID using the -u option and use a short name using the -n option:

mcxrefresh -n cedge

You can also use the -a option, which prompts for authentication when dealing with Active Directory. There's not really a lot to mcxrefresh, but what there is turns out to be really useful.

The networksetup command is pretty useful for deploying static network information, which is otherwise tedious (to say the least).  In Mac OS X 10.6 there are three major additions to networksetup that have not gotten a lot of attention yet.  The first is that you can now use networksetup to import and export 802.1x profiles (and link them to certificates that you import from pkcs12 into Keychain), which will hopefully ease implementation burdens for environments with supported 802.1x setups.  The second is that networksetup can now be used to manage a Baseboard Management Controller (BMC), which is the chip that enables ipmi/Lights Out Management.  The third new option is the addition of network locations control from within networksetup.  This means that networksetup can now be used to configure basically the entire network stack. 

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