Jon Brown - Developer, entrepreneur, and Apple technologist

Web Help Desk on Amazon EC2

If your like me you have run several servers and you have learned that running your own servers and server hardware either locally or remotely is a huge commitment. A commitment of time, money and precious resources that many in the IT community can not afford. Since the inception of virtual environments people have been making their lives easier with simpler more disposable methods of hosting and that is what led me to the holy grail of virtual environments the Amazon EC2 server. We have been looking at several help...

Jun 4, 2013

migration wiki-server

Migrating a Stubborn Wiki Server 10.7 / 10.8

It is true that not all migrations are equal and even truer that issues always arise during a migration that seem to be unique to our server setup that are outside of the general advice put forth by Apple in their knowledgeable articles. Moving the wiki server either to a different operating system or to a different computer is no exception. While I admire Apples attempt at making a Wiki and integrating it with their services, the product itself has been unsupported and buggy from the beginning. Great for small...

Apr 19, 2013

bash-scripts osx-system-administration

Useful Commands for OSX Administration

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...

Sep 17, 2012

bash-scripts wiki-server

Export OSX Wiki Server to CSV

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...

May 12, 2012

bash-scripts osx-system-administration

10.7 Server throttle high CPU usage script

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...

Apr 8, 2012

Web-Server

10.7 Web Server Admin Alternatives

If you are using 10.7 server to administer any sort of website then you may have noticed that Apple has removed the bulk of the administration capabilities once found in the Server Admin app, and shifted a tiny fraction of that functionality to the Server app. Now one could speculate that if indeed Apple is shifting to a home server market, and it is currently frowned upon to run a robust website over a shared internet connection from ones living room that Apple may have done this to discourage users...

Jan 11, 2012

Welcome to my blog

Latest Articles