If you administrate a number of Mac clients you’ll no doubt be familiar with Apple’s Remote Desktop. As is the case with most software additional functionality becomes available in new release and ARD is no exception. Hence the ARD client version is a relevant piece of information and when I needed to get the information from a user without using Remote Desktop itself I came up with the following code. (more…)
Archive for the ‘sysadmin’ Category
Selectively emptying a Postfix mail queue
One of the mail servers I manage was blocked up to the hilt with sixteen thousand emails sent to a specific recipient. This meant no one could send or receive email in the office until Postfix had delivered the messages. Only problem was these messages weren’t going anywhere. To make matters worse, the queue contained important emails that had to be delivered! (more…)
Enabling Apache’s mod_deflate
If you’re running an Apache web server and you want to speed up your visitor’s browsing you can enable mod_deflate, which has replaced mod_gzip in Apache 2.
You’ll probably find your mod_default module is already installed and available with just a couple of lines of configuration. (more…)
Plists in Ruby
I’m currently working on tweaking Apple’s lazy GUI design by alphabetising VPN connections in both System Preferences and the VPN Connection menu. This is definitely only intended for Leopard and I wont be testing it in Tiger or supporting it. It’s just for my own personal use as I have 40 odd VPN connections. The initial proof of concept code is below. I still need to work on getting things to work reliably and smoothly. (more…)
Installing yum and git on a MediaTemple (dv) 3.5
I recently decided to install Git on my (dv) 3.5 and found an article written by the guys at MediaTemple, my hosts, with instructions on how to do it (isn’t it nice when someone else does the hard graft for you?!) Unfortunately, the article was old and inaccurate. Luckily, with a bit of digging around I managed to get yum installed, updated and ready for Git. (more…)
Repair permissions on network home folders
I had a problem to fix a few months back where by something like 1000 users had totally bricked their home folder permissions. Trying to propagate permissions from Workgroup Manager (it was a 10.4.11 server) kept hanging and would only fix home folders up to the letter “d.” It was at this point I was called in to write a script so a colleague could repair the permissions without running the risk of annihilating the home folders from the command line. (more…)
SSH Remote Desktop Selection
A while back I was asked by a colleague if I could automate starting a number of SSH connections based on the current selection in ARD. This may seem pointless given that you can run UNIX commands in ARD but it is not. With SSH you get an interactive shell; quite different from just being able to send commands and receive a sample of the response! (more…)
ARDAgent version
I needed to display the ARDAgent version on a Mac the other day without sending anyone (else) in to the command line. Without any remote access I decided a quick Applescript would do the job. It’s very dirty, nothing more than a quick hack really… But it worked. Here’s the code in case you ever need to do the same. (more…)
