MacEnterprise is planning to partner with various other groups to get
a Mac IT focused conference started.

This is all very much up in the air, and at this stage we’re seeking
input as to how the community would like this conference to be
organized.

At this stage, we would like you to provide input on Google Moderator
as to ideas for the conference. You can submit ideas as well as vote
on other ideas here:

http://goo.gl/mod/4COQ

Additionally, there is some discussion going on on Twitter, under the
#MacITConference hashtag.

http://twitter.com/#search?q=%23MacITConference

Once we get a little bit better idea of the structure, we’ll be
calling for speakers and looking for sponsorship partners.

We have reasonable MCX controls to require a password for the screensaver, but nothing to actually activate it. There are a bunch of private API calls you can use to achieve this, but using private APIs makes me feel dirty.

When I first started poking at Automator again in 10.6, I was pleased to notice that we have a “Start Screen Saver” action. This means that we can save such an Automator workflow as a Service, and then assign a keyboard command to it such that we can activate it from any application.

Unfortunately this action is buggy. If you activate the workflow and wiggle the mouse around, you’ll get an error dialog after unlocking the screen.

Luckily we have another way of achieving the same goal. The System Events AppleScript dictionary contains the same functionality.


tell application "System Events"
start current screen saver
end tell


So you can simply create an Automator “Service” workflow and add a “Run AppleScript” action with the following code snippet.


on run {input, parameters}

return input
end run


Save it, and assign a hot key, and you can finally activate the screensaver from the keyboard.

In http://opensource.apple.com/source/CF/CF-550/CFBinaryPList.c

So really there’s no reason why we can’t have plistlib etc for Ruby/Python/whatever deal with binary plists on non-Mac platforms.

One of the reasons Greg is so awesome in our field is that he’s eminently pragmatic, with enough hacker mentality to make sure he simply gets the job done with a minimum of fuss. His recent post on the trials and tribulations of working with the Adobe Enterprise Deployment Kit is a great example.

Not only is he trying to come up with something flexible enough to actually use efficiently, he’s dug into the innards and explained exactly what’s going on.

I talked to a few people at Puppet Camp last week about large scale Mac management, and everyone seemed really excited about the Munki Project, which is all Greg’s work so far. Basically the idea is to provide OS X with an actual repository for package management, using native Mac packages, and attempting to reuse vendor packages as much as is feasible.

If no-one else does it, I’ll end up putting together a munki type and provider for Puppet. I’m really looking forward to being able to simply do stuff like:

package { "iWork":
  ensure => latest,
}

just like other operating systems, letting the repository handle dependencies. The way it should be….

This really could be one of the most important community contributions to large scale Mac management in the history of OS X in my opinion.

One of the major problems with working in Mac IT has been the lack of a space to discuss pre-release seeds of major OS X versions, ie the current state of Snow Leopard 10.6.

Things change a lot between major releases. Seemingly small changes by Apple can have an enormous impact upon workflow, and when you couple this with the fact that new hardware will often only work correctly on the latest OS X release, you often end up being forced to support 10.x.0 releases that simply don’t work correctly.

To get around this you stagger bulk purchases to avoid the periods when new OS versions are released, and you pay for ADC accounts that give you access to the pre-release seeds.

The problem is that testing is time consuming, and good bug reporting is even more so.  There’s nothing more dispiriting than spending several hours putting together a good bug report for Apple, only to submit it and get it marked as a duplicate.

Sure, there were the AppleSeed forums, but they’ve never really taken off, which I can only assume means that there really aren’t that many Mac IT people on the AppleSeed program.

Ta-da! https://devforums.apple.com/community/mac

Now we have a space we can talk in that is sanctioned by Apple. If it turns out that something fundamental is broken or works completely differently in a pre-release seed, we can share this information with each other, leading to more discrete bug reports to Apple, and leading to an OS that upon release hopefully works better in all sorts of deployments.

Well done Apple.

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 this.


$ dscacheutil -q host -a name www.google.com
name: www.l.google.com
alias: www.google.com
ip_address: 74.125.19.104
ip_address: 74.125.19.147
ip_address: 74.125.19.99
ip_address: 74.125.19.103


This is a much more appropriate way of debugging host problems if the *nix tools aren’t showing any problems but OS X components are.

This will fetch the result from the cache, and if it’s not there, fetch it and place it in the cache. If you want to make sure this is a fresh request, do:

dscacheutil -flushcache

and you can always do this:

dscacheutil -cachedump -entries host

to inspect the cache for hosts.

I was actually debugging a Mobile Account problem the other day where the user agreed to create a mobile account at the loginwindow, and yet it kept logging them in with the network account.

Inspecting the DirectoryService cache with:

dscacheutil -cachedump -entries user

showed that the /Local/Default entry for that user was never retrieved. Flushing the cache fixed it.

Turns out the user said no to creating a Mobile Account once, and then logged out without rebooting (and didn’t tell us they’d said no ;-) ). OS X kept the cached entry around and failed to update when creating the Mobile Account as it should have.

Need to get that one into radar….

Error: The following dependencies failed to build: p5-error perl5.8 p5-libwww-perl p5-compress-zlib p5-compress-raw-zlib p5-io-compress-base p5-scalar-list-utils p5-io-compress-zlib p5-html-parser p5-html-tagset p5-uri p5-svn-simple subversion-perlbindings apr apr-util db44 sqlite3 gawk gmake readline neon subversion bash-completion p5-term-readkey rsync popt
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.


I finally found Jack Palevich's post talking about exporting the POSIXLY_CORRECT environment variable as follows.


POSIXLY_CORRECT=1 port install git-core +svn +bash_completion


Of course now I’ve run into an issue with tcl…. *sigh*, but I’ve seen the patch issue above crop up a few times, and this certainly seems to be fixing it.

It’s bad enough that MacPorts and Fink can’t depend upon Apple to provide sane libraries and headers in OS X, and thus you end up with most of another whole freaking operating system in /opt/local or /sw, but I simply refuse to have both installed, no matter how frustrating it is that I can’t get all the software I need working via just one of them.

It’s so nice to be able to just manage plists now…. NetInfo I miss you not at all.

Another Macworld is over. To be honest, this one was a bit too hectic to really enjoy as a pure punter, and besides, I missed what was a brilliant match where India broke Australia’s record equalling winning streak in Perth.

Schoun Regan and I did the two day PowerTools conference on Advanced OS X Server, then Jeff McCune and I did a shorter presentation and demo on Puppet that seems to have provoked some interest in the MacEnterprise crowd.

The few other talks I managed to make it to were quite good, even given the difficulty of catering to the very wide range of technical ability in a Macworld crowd… I thoroughly enjoyed Andrina Kelly’s Lucid System Administration presentation, some of our Google techs were inspired by Kevin White’s Neutered Admins talk, and I heard lots of good reports about Greg Neagle and Philip Rhinehart’s System Imaging and Deployment two day session.

The two highlights of the week for me were firstly that Joel managed to work the optical inch into his Directory Services talk. Nice work….

Secondly would have to have been seeing Devo in the flesh. Thanks to Dave Pugh (you need to get that blog going Dave…), I now have much better photos than my mediocre camera gave….

Devo were simply awesome. I was prepared to have all my illusions shattered… but they put on an awesome performance….