Articles by: Nate Walck

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 […]

Graham Gilbert has an official post declaring Crypt to be in beta status.  Crypt is a great alternative to many of the paid solutions for FileVaule 2 escrow.  Rich Trouton gave us an early look at Crypt when it was more alpha-ish and it was looking really good.  It has […]

With the recent CS6 serialization issues that popped up, many have been wondering how to fix this in a repeatable/deployable fashion.  Greg Neagle has some good links regarding this issue here and here.  Greg discusses the fix here and you can download a script that will generate a package to apply the fix here. […]

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 […]

Yesterday a new version of Flash Player was released and with it came some more challenges regarding the Flash Player installer.  Greg Neagle has compiled some information regarding the new installers which you can check out over on his blog. Nate WalckNate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc […]

A new FileVault 2 escrow app has been released recently and offers a good alternative to Califlower Vest.  The app is called Crypt and it is Graham Gilbert’s baby.  Crypt has both a client and a web app (which is django-based).  Crypt seems like a great solution if you do […]

Adding printers on multiple machines can be tedious if you have to manually setup all the duplexer and paper tray options that the printer supports. Thankfully there is a command line tool called lpadmn which allows you to configure the printer and all its options in one command. You can […]

  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 freenode.net. He loves being involved in the Mac Admin community and using Open Source projects […]

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

If you’ve moved away from an OS X-based infrastructure and towards Linux, you may be familiar with NetSUS, which is a linux-based appliance that can be used to NetBoot Macs.  This is a great solution if you are trying to move towards virtualized and/or non-OS X servers.  One problem is […]