Archive for category: Tips

Speed up SMB connections for Windows users

Help your Windows users love your Xserve as much as your Mac users do!

Read more

Xsan Deployment Advice

Xsan has been out for a few months now so it seems like a good time to go over some Storage Area Network (SAN) stuff and then go through a typical Xsan setup.

Read more

Resetting PCI RAID

If you are having trouble with ‘megaraid -destroyconfig’ run ‘megaraid -showdevices’ first to see drive status – stop rebuild processes with ‘megaraid -rebuild pd -stop’

(This only applies to situations where the RAID has failed so badly that rebuilding (which can take 8 or mor hours) is not an option. Proceed carefully!)

Read more

MacEnterprise.org Backup Solutions Webcast

The MacEnterprise.org group will be presenting a Webcast on Mac OS X Backup Solutions on Tuesday, February 15 at 1:00 pm EDT.

In this webcast, Thomas Weyer, a Senior Consulting Engineer at Apple, will show you how to look at your storage requirements and build a complete storage solution including tiered storage integrated into a SAN using Xsan. The session will also take you through how to size your backup solution.

For more information on how to watch this WebCast, please visit the MacEnterprise.org website:

http://macenterprise.org/

The broadcast ID needed to view the webcast is ‘macenterprise‘.

Read more

Preventing Login Window burn-in

Keep your monitors happy and ghost free

We have a number of machines here with colour calibrated monitors, and to keep this colour as constant as we can it means that power to the monitor can never be turned off. While modern monitors are certainly better than they used to be in dealing with burn-in, we noticed this was becomming an issue for us, so, here’s a tip on how to run the screensaver over the login window.

Read more

A better fix for the QuickTime Installer Dialog

Ed. Note: This is a rather clever way of defeating the dreaded QuickTime registration dialog. However it does require access to the package before deployment. It also is a good example of some of the things that pre and post-install scripts do within packages.

Here at my University I deploy the QuickTime updates not via SoftwareUpdate but with rsync, cron, and the QuickTime.pkg. You can edit the preflight script inside the package where you find the following text.

"# Marketing (aka Amy Fazio) sez we don't need to bring up the registration dialog anymore
# but let's just comment it out for now in case they change their minds. - duano! 3/16/04
# ... see, QT BRB did change their minds on this. Putting it back until Gibson - duano! 3/17/04
# Putting it back in again for Legal reasons (QT5Pro users need to know they're gonna lose functionality)."

Delete the dialog crap underneath and there you go.

tbone

Read more

Logout Script

We have a client that uses a few apple computers as kiosks.

When a person logs onto the machine they want them to let it be active for 30 minutes then to have it logout. They also wanted the machine to warn them when they had 5 minutes left. I wrote an applescript that will do this. If anyone wants to use it your more then welcome to.

Read more

LoginHook to fix Mobile User group membership bug.

Having issues with group memberships on mobile accounts?

Read on for one method of solving this.

Read more

Boot problems might be permissions problems

An Apple may not be the only logo you may see when you boot.

For those times when Disk Warrior doesn’t fix it…

Read more

Resurrecting Daemons with SystemStarter

Let SystemStarter do your dirty work for you

No need to remember how to start/stop a process on your own if a good StartupItem was written for it.

Read more