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Roll your own DNS monitoring with DIG, Bash & CRON

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...

Dec 13, 2016

bash-scripts microsoft osx-system-administration

Authenticate with AD credentials via ARD / SSH

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...

Nov 24, 2016

outlook-2016 migration microsoft osx-system-administration

Migrate Outlook 2016 Profile from one Mac to another Mac

I recently had to help a client move from one Mac to another, during the process one task proved more challenging than originally anticipated. I wanted to share my info in the event that it helps someone out there. In Outlook 2016 for Mac, Microsoft in its infinite wisdom, has changed the default location of the email profile folder. The new location is not well documented, and I stumbled upon it on an obscure forum post, the location is ~/Library/Group Containers/UBF8T346G9.Office/Outlook/Outlook 15 Profiles/Main Profile this folder needs to be copied...

Nov 23, 2016

rants crowdfunding

COIN 1 - Lockitron 0

For those of you who know me well, know that I love technology. Not just Apple products which I inherently love because of my love for creative pursuits but any new technology where I feel connected. A few such products hit the kickstarter / funding phase a while back, Lockitron and Coin. Many hear the words Lockitron and cringe, I know I do, because I paid for the product over four years ago, and have yet to see an actual product ship. Not seeing a product ship seemed inevitable for...

Oct 13, 2015

osx-server-configuration osx-system-administration

Migrate Open Directory 10.10

A few weeks ago I had an old 10.9 open directory master server crash on me and I was unable to restart, luckily I had a good backup of my server which I created using Carbon Copy Cloner on a schedule. If your not using Carbon Copy Cloner I highly recommend doing so its one of the best backup utilities for OSX Server as it runs in the background and can backup and clone multiple directories and or the entire hard drive. In my case I was using it with...

Apr 25, 2015

product-reviews ssl-encryption reviews

Securing Web Help Desk with SSL

After reading the Solarwinds WHD SSL Guide it was not obvious to me how to properly secure WebHelpDesk and so after many hours of trying different things, with some help from this guide, I will be demonstrating the ssl recipe that worked for me. At my company we already had a proper SSL certificate so I was able to skip a good third of the pdf that discusses in detail the proper way to generate the CSR and to create the certificate. WebHelpDesk recommends the use of a program called...

Aug 22, 2014

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