Archive for category: Articles

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.

We all know about those little tear-off things in the bottom right hand corner of Server Admin, right? They're a very handy way of backing up your config before making a change. Just drag it off to your desktop, make your changes and if it all goes pear-shaped, just drag it back and sanity is restored. That's all well and good, but not exactly scriptable.

Enter serveradmin… 

Hidden deep in the bowels of the password server you will find some interesting, if seldom used, password policies that can be applied. Here Arek Dreyer takes a look at the weakpass_edit command and how it can help you refine your security policies.

Quota Monitor Menu

By Adam Gerson 

The Situation: You have a Mac OS X Server with network home directories and disk quotas enabled.
 
The Problem: The Mac OS Finder on client machines does not have very good support for warning users they are approaching their file quota limit. They end up all of sudden unable to save files with little or no explanation as to why.
 
The Solution: QuotaMonitorMenu places the user’s home folder quota status right in the menu bar. It will also pop up warnings at regular intervals. All warnings and text are customizable.
 
Download (Now with package installer!)
http://homepage.mac.com/agerson/QuotaMonitorMenu/QuotaMonitorMenu.zip
 
Screen Shot
http://homepage.mac.com/agerson/QuotaMonitorMenu/ScreenShot.png

If you would like the source code or have any questions please feel free to email agerson AT mac DOT com

Some tips and information on the AD plugin.

Read on for some ideas about setting up home directories and links to other resources.

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

There’s no doubt that the Command Line Interface can be a powerful way to control any machine. Many also call it fast, which IMHO isn’t always the case. Mundane tasks like changing directories and performing repetitive commands (as opposed to using keyboard shortcuts) and the lack of Undo/Redo can sometimes be anything but quick. Luckily with a few tricks, we can make the whole experience much more enjoyable…

10.4.9 brings some welcome improvements to rsync on OS X, but they might not be everything that you're looking for.

An exhaustive look at what is and what doesn't seem to be working with rsync through various iterations of OS X 10.4. Read on for the gory details…

(Ed. Note: It would appear that both versions of the 2007-004 Security Update re-breaks much of the rsync progress. This is corrected by the 2007-005 SecUpd, so be sure to test those patches!)

So a few people on the macos-x-server mailing list noticed that recent versions of OS X Server seem to be building up large numbers of Disabled/Asleep connections on their AFP servers, even with appropriate disconnection settings when users don't have files open.

 I'm even seeing this for servers where AFP session caching has been disabled, and this is as good a time as any to again point readers towards Apple's article on Understanding the "disconnect when idle" feature for AFP connections.

 I've been doing a little bit of work lately on scripts that parse out the result of serveradmin commands, so I thought I'd post up a script I put together that illustrates how you can do this with PHP command line scripting.  

Read on to download the script and read a brief description of how it works. 

I’ve been dealing with a rack-mount KVM that refuses to sync properly with any generation of Xserve on reboot. While reboots aren’t a common occurrence, I had a request to from The Powers That Be to “fix this”.

Since a regular display will sync correctly every time, I do blame the KVM. To me this is a complete non-issue: simply set the KVM to another unit, wait til the Xserve has finished booting, login via ARD and set the desired resolution. However, I still had a request to do something about it.

Read on for how I solved this…