Archive for category: Tips

As of 10.4.6, if you’ve got a GPT partitioned disk, you can use diskutil from the command line to resize volumes…

nigelkersten@zombie: ~ $ diskutil resizeVolume
Disk Utility Tool
Usage:  diskutil resizeVolume [Mount Point|Disk Identifier|Device Node] size
        <part1Format part1Name part1Size> <part2Format part2Name part2Size> ...
Non-destructively resize a disk. You may increase or decrease its size.
When decreasing size, you may optionally supply a list of new partitions to create.
Ownership of the affected disk is required.
Valid partition sizes are in the format of <number><size>.
Valid sizes are B(ytes), K(ilobytes), M(egabytes), G(igabytes), T(erabytes)
Example: 10G (10 gigabytes), 4.23T (4.23 terabytes), 5M (5 megabytes)
resizeVolume is only supported on GPT media with a Journaled HFS+ filesystem.
A size of "limits" will print the range of valid values for the current filesystem.
Example: diskutil resizeVolume disk1s3  10G
         JHFS+ HDX1 5G MS-DOS HDX2 5G
Valid filesystems: "Case-sensitive HFS+" "Journaled HFS+" "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" 
"HFS+" "HFS" "MS-DOS FAT32"  "MS-DOS FAT16" "MS-DOS" "MS-DOS FAT12" "UFS" "Linux" "Swap" 

If you are using the Server Admin GUI to update/replace an expiring certificate (say, from Verisign) with a newer one that has the same hostname/common name, here is tip so you don’t get stumped:

When looking to replace/update a certificate, you’ll need to delete the existing certificate before importing the newer one (using Server Admin is fine for that).

If you attempt to import the newer certificate an incorrect error dialog appears saying that the certificate data/passphrase may be wrong and to double check it.

The error dialog is wrong.

It should alert you that a certificate with the same hostname/common name already exists on the server and you’ll need to remove it before importing the current one (yes, bugs have been filed with Apple already).

The only tip off as to the real issue is in the system.log which reports an error from the server manager deamon stating a certificate with the same identity already exists.

Enjoy!

The MacEnterprise.org group will be presenting a Webcast on Demystifying the transition: System Imaging and Rosetta on Wednesday, March 22nd at 1:00 pm EST. Please note, the day for this webcast is different than normal. It is *Wednesday* instead of Tuesday.

Read on for a quick tip on using screen instead of zterm for serial line communications.

I’m not sure if this is already known news but it was news to me when I discovered it a month ago.

You CAN manage ‘byhost’ settings in 10.4.

Read on for more…

I believe this is new to SIU as of 10.4.3.

You can now, when choosing the source for a Network Install, after clicking the ‘Customize’ button, select install options the way you would during a local CD install.

For the enterprise this is pretty nice – for example, at the newspaper where I work we have roughly 10 ‘remote’ offices connected to our core network by T1 lines. Removing the enormous number of unneeded printer drivers in the base install is quite useful in this scenario.

The MacEnterprise.org group will be presenting a Webcast on the LANDesk Management Suite on Tuesday, November 15 at 1:00 pm EST. Kent Prows and Bill Smith from LANDesk will be presenting.

Hi all,

A tip for all who need to configure link aggregation on Mac OS X Tiger 10.4.2, Xserve G5 and 3Com Gigabit Switches (SuperStak III 4924 – 3C17701).

Install latest firmware from 3Com.

Enable LACP on the two ports connected to the Xserve G5 and don’t waste time to manually add the ports to link aggregation set.

I had a powerbook that was upgraded to tiger. The problem was that after the upgrade it was unable to do proxy authentication with our squid proxy, which is bouncing against Active Directory for access to the web.

I tried a few things to fix this, but ended up with NTLMAPS.

After upgrading my home system to Tiger, I noticed that my RsyncX backups to an external FireWire drive were no longer working. Much consternation and hair-pulling later, I realized that the Spotlight indexing was causing problems with RsyncX. I used mdutil to disable indexing on that drive, and the problem was solved.

Ed. Note: keep in mind that Spotlight indexing can make any type of file transfer take longer due to the overhead of indexing every file. This is especially true when you’re moving large amounts of small files.