mind the explanatory gap

So dre has done a great overview of the LKDC in Leopard, including a more detailed wiki page. There really isn’t enough info out there about the LKDC, and it’s quite awesome technology.

Posted on May 14th, 2008 under macosx. Comments: None

So as host, ping, nslookup, dig etc don’t use the same resolver path as the rest of the OS, we used to always use lookupd for this.
It’s not exactly the most obvious solution in the world, but since lookupd, netinfod and memberd were all rolled into DirectoryService in 10.5, we now use dscacheutil to do [...]

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 under macosx, macosxserver. Comments: None

After spending a little while banging my head against the wall over this one….

root@snicko [ ~ ]
# port install git-core +svn +bash_completion
—> Applying patches to perl5.8
Error: Target org.macports.patch returned: shell command ” cd “/opt/local/var/macports/build/_opt_local_var_macports_sources_rsync.macports.org_release_ports_lang_perl5.8/work/perl-5.8.8″ && patch -p0 < ‘/opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/lang/perl5.8/files/patch-makedepend.SH’” returned error 2
Command output: Get file makedepend.SH from Perforce with lock? [y]
Perforce client error:
Connect to [...]

Posted on March 23rd, 2008 under macosx, ramblings. Comments: 2

Longer article up at AFP548.com, but basically I’ve been playing around a fair bit with MCX in DSLocal lately, and there are a lot of interesting applications….
It’s so nice to be able to just manage plists now…. NetInfo I miss you not at all.

Posted on January 26th, 2008 under macosx. Comments: 2

So my webhost managed to mess up all htacess files and thus lock me out of my blog for a couple of weeks. I considered briefly posting via MySQL, but then dragged myself back into the realm of the sane and just waited it out. Apologies to the comments that were awaiting moderation…. [...]

Posted on January 25th, 2008 under macosx, macosxserver. Comments: 3

So I don’t know about any of you, gentle readers, but ‘defaults’ really gives me the shits sometimes.
Exhibit A:
/ $ defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
2007-11-21 13:12:04.288 defaults[97501:10b]
Domain com.apple.loginwindow.plist does not exist
/ $ defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow
(snip actual working output)
Exhibit B:
  / $ cd /Library/Preferences
/Library/Preferences $ defaults read ./com.apple.loginwindow.plist
2007-11-21 13:13:24.327 defaults[97540:10b]
Domain ./com.apple.loginwindow.plist does not exist
/Library/Preferences $ defaults read ./com.apple.loginwindow
2007-11-21 [...]

Posted on November 22nd, 2007 under macosx, software and scripts. Comments: 5

So we use NetBoot (well NetInstall really) a lot here for diagnostics and as a platform for radminding machines from.
I’ve recently been refactoring our entire Radmind setup here, mainly because we’ve been using it for so long that we’re not actually taking advantage of any of the features Radmind has introduced in the last couple [...]

Posted on October 30th, 2006 under macosx, software and scripts. Comments: 4

So I’m rather close to deploying a closed beta test of something that I’ve been working on in my spare time for a while now.
The basic idea is that you can browse a copy of the Mac OS X filesystem, and any registered user can attach “annotations” to a file or directory explaining what that [...]

Posted on September 28th, 2006 under macosx, software and scripts. Comments: 3

So I’ve been meaning to start using PlistBuddy for a while, and this morning I ran into a real need for it.
Unbeknownst to me, we had a problem with our imaging system where a machine would be freshly imaged, and it would retain the LocalHostName and ComputerName of the imaged machine until the next reboot.
(We [...]

Posted on July 14th, 2006 under macosx. Comments: 4