mind the explanatory gap

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 I really thought I’d done this before… but I’ve had someone want to try and actually work on SirAdmin, and I hadn’t published the source code.
 You can download the source here.
I really have no time to work on it at the moment, and there really isn’t an itch to scratch since I started work [...]

Posted on August 9th, 2007 under software and scripts. Comments: 6

In response to some queries on the os x server mailing list, I’ve put up a new article on afp548.com with a script that will automatically disconnect disabled/asleep AFP sessions that have been idle over a certain time threshold.
Best to comment over there.

Posted on April 18th, 2007 under software and scripts. Comments: None

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 something I find that I need to do quite often is to log in as a specific user, and I don’t always want to reset their password.
While AFP has a really useful function where you can allow admins of an AFP server to masquerade as a specific user by using the admin password, no [...]

Posted on October 24th, 2006 under macosxserver, software and scripts. Comments: 6

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

Edit: Version 0.86b2 now available. (22/03/2007)
I initially wrote SirAdmin as a diagnostic tool, so that when users reported problems with certain mailboxes, my IT support staff who were not comfortable with the command line interface of cyradm could assign themselves an ACL to view such mailboxes in their own email client in order to quickly [...]

Posted on May 13th, 2006 under software and scripts. Comments: 9

So we never keep our user’s local home directories at /Users, primarily so that we can always blow away the boot partition with our imaging system without worrying about user data.
We’ve started using Mobile Accounts for some of our desktop users due to some limitations in the OS X Server AFP server, and it was [...]

Posted on February 9th, 2006 under macosx, software and scripts. Comments: None