Articles by: Acidprime

Creating an Adobe CS3 Installer with pkgGen

For those who have yet to create one, here is a introductory guide on how to create an Adobe CS3 .pkg installer ( in lieu of the slient install ) with little to no fuss, and more importantly no real manual interaction with all the associated files. I have modified a perl script from Geoff Franks that was created for parsing Microsoft Office update log files to now parse the output of logGen

I encourage the community to send back code additions and bug reports. 

Here is the link to the pkgGen Article on my companies blog

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Elmer: Automated Deletion of Mobile ( Portable ) Accounts.

Clean up your PHDs and remove the trailer park of mobile homes you have lying around.

If you run a lab that uses mobile accounts , one of the problems that probably you deal with is the rabbit droppings effect: where users create accounts in the local netinfo database on your lab machines by virtue of logging in. Not only are their accounts cached locally but normally some part of the home directory as well. The normal reason for deploying such an environment is bandwidth concerns with using network accounts. You may re-image your lab enough that the effect is minimal but if your on say a quarterly system chances are these accounts are accumulating exponentially.

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Changing the root password from S.U.M.

I just finished up a small article on my companies new blog about gaining access to a server or client system via single user mode and resetting the root password without any deamons running using nicl. I provide a general outline of how the basics work for local account passwords as well. Hopefully an interesting read for those lab admins who are still on the fence about using Firmware Passwords, or those not familiar about some of the local DirectoryService basics.You can find it here

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Mail.app Configuration Script

Script to configure client mail settings

So I thought I would post this before I grow too old and forget about it. I have been working on a command line based configuration script for Mail.app, it does some fancy things like create Mail bundles and Package installers for deployment,it still has a couple of bugs so use it wisely. I haven't had time after MacWorld to work on it too much so if you have any bug reports, feel free to post them here as well as code additions. I would like to add some ssl certificate import support.

It's big, it's long, its BASH – enjoy and dont judge me too harshly as I know it needs some work.

Grab the script here.

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