Articles by: Nate Walck

The slides and videos for this year’s PSU MacAdmins is now available.  You can find them here. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and is one of the founding members of the ##osx-server IRC channel […]

MacSysAdmin is coming!  September 17-20 is shaping up to be a great year at MacSysAdmin in Gothenburg, Sweden.  Every year, the beauty of Gothenburg attracts great speakers from all walks of life in the Mac Admin community and this year is no exception.  For a full rundown, check out the […]

Here are some notes from my recent sessions at PSU MacAdmins: More Munki Tricks Slides Examples   Practical Python for Mac Admins Slides Bonus Material   It was a fantastic year at PSU MacAdmins and I look forward to next year. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, […]

Apple has pushed some changes to XProtect.  Rich Trouton has the details over on his blog. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and is one of the founding members of the ##osx-server IRC channel on […]

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. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, […]

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. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, […]

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. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, […]

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. […]