Welcome to my blog
Join me on my journey as I share my insights and experiences on web development, business, and content creation.
Join me on my journey as I share my insights and experiences on web development, business, and content creation.
Theres no doubt that the security of our computers these days is a very sensitive topic. I have helped several of my clients protect their Mac systems by setting firmware passwords. But what if you have hundreds or thousands of computers you want to have a firmware password set on? What if you don’t have the luxury of a system like JAMF Pro or its predecesor the Casper Suite? Enter Munki, one of the most versatile, open source Mac Management tools. If your reading this you likely already have Munki....
I am always looking for ways to use Automator to make my life easier. Its a great tool that offers some impressive capabilities, my favorite of course is the ability to record UI events and convert that into a workflow or even a stand-alone app that you can then deploy and run via ARD. Sounds simple right? Well one little hitch, Apple wont let you run the automated UI apps made in automator without first adding them to the accessibility section of OSX. Creating an app that can run a...
If your like me your always looking for ways to be notified of things changing in your IT Environment. There are many tools that you can use to help do this. StatusCake is a great free online tool for monitoring website and IP level uptime and downtime with baked in email notifications. Zeonoss and NAGIOS are great tools that can offer the same with SNMP Monitoring baked in as well. But what about DNS monitoring. You heard me, what if you want to monitor or be notified on DNS record...
Binding a Mac to an AD is fairly straight forward. Most Mac Admin’s worth their salt, know how this is done, many know how to do this via the command line. Once your Mac is bound, authentication is easy, local authentication that is. But what if you want to use your secure AD credentials over an SSH or Apple Remote Desktop connection? Well thats when things need a bit more configuration. Having recently deployed a series of servers with this configuration I figured I would share some of the commands...
FontAgent Pro is a great font management solution for OS X. One of the best things about it is that its 100% cloud based. You can run the entire thing hosted in their cloud instance or you can run it on your own server. Its a great solution for font management, and does everything from managing your font licenses, users, libraries and sets. The one problem however is the fact that when deploying a new font solution you find yourself in a quandary over the right way to deploy that...
Apple computers recently have exploded in popularity, Apple stock is soaring and Apple computers are now and have been for some time prime real estate for sticky fingers. So what is an Apple user to do, keep your beloved computer locked up? With the threat of loss, or theft of Apple devices being a reality many companies and many solutions have emerged in the marketplace. While looking at the options out there for laptop security and recovery, and reviewing all the options, it seemed wise to take a step back...
If you are a network (or systems) administrator, you know how crucial it is to have the right tools for the job. One of the toughest tools to really nail down is a network monitoring tool. Although there are plenty of such tools out there, they range from the over-priced to the under-featured. Where do you look for any sort of middle ground where features don’t lose out to price? Zenoss is an outstanding, enterprise-ready network monitoring tool that includes all of the features you are accustomed to finding in...
If your like me then your happy that Apple has made several of their wonderful software titles free recently, specifically iLife and iWork for Mavericks. Apple has a defined workflow for deployment of these systems. Their method is to have companies enroll into their Volume Licensing Program once enrolled you can download apps from the app store and the iOS store and deploy these seamlessly to your devices with Profile Manager for Mavericks. All of this hinges on a few things. First your company has to be willing to enroll...
If your like me then you have an entire organization of users who are itching to get their hands on the latest Mavericks operating system and have been told to wait, we are testing. Truth is that its already been tested. I tested it all through the various developer builds and the issues have for the most part been very minimal which is great for a .0 release. However the issue really has been how are we going to deploy it. One option is to have everyone in my company...
Many years ago when I was managing a fleet of computer using 10.6 I thought that I a master systems administrator because I had all my computers managed by MCX it took me years to get MCX working properly across all my systems and it saved me countless hours of time and energy managing preferences and remote settings for new and existing systems made my life so much easier. Then 10.7 came out and with it the slow death of MCX and profile manager emerged. I was so excited but...
Your websites and your systems are only as good as the backup strategy that you have for them. While managing Mac’s you may think that having a strategy for website data backup is not relevant or important. Until you realize all of the technologies that you use on a daily basis that are actually moving to the web platform or cloud. For example OSX Wiki Server and Profile Manager 2 are all 100% web based technologies. If you use a web based ticketing system like Web Help Desk or Spiceworks...
Over the years I have stored a file that has many of the day to day commands that I use to administer the computers at my workplace. After 4 years of saving these commands I am giving back and creating the ultimate post to aid all new sys admins out there. The Adaptive Firewall The most basic task you can do with the firewall is to disable all of the existing rules. To do so, simply run afctl (all afctl options require sudo) with a -d option: afctl -d When...
Recently our Organization has grown to immense size and we are starting to outgrow the 10.6 Wiki server that we use primarily for our intranet. I have been looking at the 10.7 wiki server however it is not much better, our intranet has been plagued with bouts of corruption and plist issues that have caused slow load times, and extreme data loss. Its pretty clear that we need to move to a more stable information storage media. We have looked at WordPress and Drupal for this functionality however the biggest...
For the last two years, I have noticed a trend. From time to time Apple will release updates to its OSX Server environment, sometimes these updates go smoothly however the bulk of the time it causes several nasty side affects one of them being high CPU usage among rogue processes. One such was covered here the HWMOD bug which caused extremely high CPU usage. Sometimes these are easy to fix while other times these cause your system to crash and burn due to high CPU usage. On the flip side...
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