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: Quota Monitor Menu places the user’s home folder quota status right in the menu bar. It will also pop up warnings at regular intervals.

This is a general rewrite and cleanup of the code, and a few new preference options have been added. Tested on 10.6 and run in my organization for the last few weeks. You can download both the app and source at:

http://agerson.net/quota-monitor-menu-30

Serving Diskless Netboot for your Macs without OS X Server
 
With the official death of the Xserve, some of you may be looking at your future plans for services you currently provide. If you plan to migrate away from OS X server for some functions, NetBoot can be one of them.  Read on to find out how…

Ed. Note: This walks you through how to set up a NetBoot image without needing a local drive mounted on the client system. There is a distinction between this and what the Apple materials refer to as diskless NetBoot which is when you would use an AFP share to hold all of the read/write bits you need. Mac OS X Server can do both this method of using the RAM disk, typically used for NetInstall setups, and the later where you would use for an actual "live" system such as for a lab of machines actually in use by users instead of just for imaging purposes. For most admins just wishing to do deployments, using a RAM disk is all you'll most likely need.

I have been designing and perfecting a new piece of free deployment software for Mac OS X. The program is called StarDeploy, it is easy to setup and use.  All one needs is a network share and the client installed on a Mac. It can install packages or items that are not packaged. Software can be deployed on or off site because it uses AFP, FTP, SMB, WebDav shares.  There are some fun features like Growl and MCX support. Feel free it to give a try at www.stardeploy.com It is free to use. 

Folks,

Ok, so I've been quiet for a while, but here's a version of Policy Banner for Snow Leopard. 

<http://ps-enable.com/software/PolicyBannerPreLoginApp.dmg/view>

Open source, MIT-licensed, go have fun with it. 🙂

–Paul

Mac OS X Server's adaptive firewall (afctl) does a good job of catching brute-force login attacks on most services, but it doesn't catch PPTP attacks. The script below checks the system log for such attacks, and then uses afctl to block offending hosts for a week (you can, of course, change the parameters if you wish). I recommend using a cron job to run this script every 10-15 minutes.

Read on for the script… 

If you're not familiar with the Pymacadmin project – you should be.  Nigel Kersten and Chris Adams have created an awesome tool called crankd that will let you execute Python code or shell scripts in response to system events.

What does this mean to you?

Do you have laptop users that are bound to OD or AD?  Do they ever leave your network and get the spinning beachball as their computers try to authenticate or otherwise contact your LDAP servers?  Crankd can sense a network change, which will allow you to write code that removes search paths when your users are OFF your network, and add those search paths when your users RETURN to your network.  Awesome.

Do you have users that VPN to your corporate network?  Crankd will let you execute code to kill and resume the VPN when the computer sleeps or wakes.

Maybe you use a Configuration Management System like Chef or Puppet and you would like laptops to check in with your CMS when they connect to the network (think of laptop carts in education or infrequently used laptops elsewhere).  Crankd can make this happen.

All these problems can be solved by implementing and tweaking crankd.  It's not terribly difficult, and I wrote an article that shows you how to do it here.

A new release of libsrvrmgrd-osx is out which now includes Nagios plugins to monitor and restart (in the event of failure) the following services:

• AFP
• DHCP
• Directory Services
• DNS
• FTP
• Jabber
• Mail
• MySQL
• NAT
• Netboot
• NFS
• Print
• Quicktime Streaming Server
• SMB/CIFS
• Software Update
• Web

 There is basic installation instructions available at the main website, when used in combination with the excellent guide by Gary Larizza it should hopefully be fairly straight forward to install. Any comments, suggestions or bugs would be very welcome.

I usually get quite a lot of unsolicited feedback about Adobe's installers at MacWorld or WWDC (and even better, unguarded, feedback at the Thirsty Bear around closing time) but this year without an IT Track at WWDC (grrrr) I stayed home. Since I am not down there this year I wanted to know if anyone has had a chance to try out the new Creative Suite Enterprise deployment tool? It's now named the Adobe Application Manager Enterprise Edition and allows you to make a pkg for ARD and allows you to disable the EULA, product registration reminders, the Adobe Updater, etc. I can pass your feedback directly along to the product team. Anyone who attended the MacWorld 2010 Adobe CS Deployment and Provisioning talk/Q&A knows that they are aware of our pain as IT techs and I believe are moving in the right direction with this tool. 

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/creativesuite/enterprisedeployment.html

Jody Rodgers

Desktop Engineering, IT

Adobe Systems 

Whether you're a Mac Developer or Systems Admin, you've probably had to package up a bundle of files for deployment onto a number of machines.  There are many ways to do this with just as many software options; it's easy to get confused and make some simple mistakes.  The current trend away from deploying software into a monolithic "Golden Master" image and toward a modular package-based approach is pushing (or SHOULD BE pushing) Devs and DevOps folk to rethink the way they package. You can't automatically assume that a package will always be installed interactively on the boot volume through the GUI (could you ever really?), but that still doesn't stop certain developers from doing so.

Read on for more… 

Well, everybody seems to be asking why the iPad can’t print files, yet.

If you are looking for iPad printing solutions, you might have come across funny approaches like this one, but this article is about a serious solution.

 I wrote a little article, in which I explain how to use Mac OS X Server's mail services to provide printing services for the iPad.

You can find it here: http://www.andre-aulich.de/en/perm/ipad-printing-–-send-pdf-as-email-to-mac-os-x-server-10-6

Enjoy reading,

 André Aulich