So after finding Andrew Pollock’s blog entry and Yasser Hamed’s info incredibly useful, I thought I may as well post some updates on a slightly more recent E-3 visa application experience.

For those of you who don’t know, the E-3 visa is a US visa that is only open to Australian residents. It’s essentially the same as the H-1B visa, apart from the fact that your spouse can also work in the US, it’s indefinitely renewable, and so far at least, you can’t apply for the green card while in the US on an E-3.

There’s a nice summary available on the Sydney US Consulate site. Things may be different with other companies, but Google seem to be rather familiar with the whole process and pretty much organised everything I needed. The two things that seem mandatory for the company sponsoring you to provide are a statement in support of your application and a Labor Condition Application approved by the US Dept of Labor, which is normally used for the H-1B applications. It looks like the bureaucracy has caught up with the existence of the E-3 now and it’s actually an option on the form, so you no longer need the company to scrawl E-3 across the top of it.

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Seeing as how half the visitors to this site still seem to coming here via AFP-related searches in Google… this is something I’d noticed a while ago, but simply started adding more RAM as I had more lying around.

Find operations on AFP servers can really slow down the system. Apple have now produced a nice techinfo article with a really simple fix.:

Mac OS X Server (Universal) 10.4.7 and later: May become unresponsive when clients search mounted network volumes

Short, and to the point, but I’m still not sure if there’s a decent reason why they’re not telling us to put this sort of a change in /etc/sysctl.conf instead…

So after a couple of people requested this on the MacEnterprise mailing list….

This is a really simple AppleScript Studio application that allows you to create a Mobile User Account with a local home directory other than “/Users/nigelkersten”.

To get started….

• Open up the Xcode project.
• Edit “ldapDomain” and “pathToHomes” to reflect your LDAP domain and where you want the home directories to go to.
• Make sure you leave the trailing slash in for ‘pathToHomes’, otherwise you’ll end up with home directories like: “/Volumes/Storage/Usersnigelkersten”
• Compile it and run it.

When you launch it, it will spend a few seconds collecting usernames so that you can auto-complete the combo box.
I’ve left a grep statement in there to illustrate how you can filter out unwanted usernames:

do shell script "dscl  " & ldapDomain & "  -list /Users | egrep -v '^(z|Z)[0-9]{7}' |egrep -v '^vpn_*' | grep -v admin  > /tmp/ldapusers.txt"

the section:
egrep -v '^(z|Z)[0-9]{7}' filters out our student ids, which are ‘z’ followed by 7 numbers.
If you wanted to pull that filter out, just change it to:

do shell script "dscl  " & ldapDomain & "  -list /Users | egrep -v '^vpn_*' | grep -v admin  > /tmp/ldapusers.txt"

and the same goes for the other filters, which remove admin accounts in my area and the vpn user accounts that get created.

No guarantees about this app. It’s a rather quick and dirty hack, and you’re welcome to do whatever you want with it. I’d appreciate seeing any improvements you make to it however.

You can download it here