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Archive for the ‘Mac OS X’ Category
Screen Saver for Background Video
Friday, January 29th, 2010“And Now For Something Completely Different”
Thursday, January 28th, 2010This week, Apple launched their newest product: the iPad. The sleek iPad is a revolutionary new look at the NetBook, but able to run most of the 140,000 applications that are in the App Store for the iPhone. Given the popularity of the App Store so far and the new development methods introduced for the iPad you can rest assured that even more feature rich applications will be developed for the iPad as time goes on. Not that Apple hasn’t led the charge in using the new iPad APIs: iWork has been ported to the iPad. This means that you can create rich Pages, Numbers and Keynote presentations in addition to interacting with a number of cloud based services and leveraging those existing iPhone applications.
The iPad is aluminum and glass, comes with up to 64GB of space, a multi-touch LED screen, 802.11n, Bluetooth and can have a 3G data connection for only $29.99 per month. All of this in a secure, easy-to-use interface that we’ve all grown accustomed to!
Want help integrating the iPad into your Enterprise? Let 318 know if you have interest with mass deployment, purchasing or development: our developers are on hand to work with you on commercial and enterprise applications as needed!
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ACLs and NFS
Thursday, January 14th, 2010The permissions that a user obtains for NFS shares will boil down to effective permissions. NFS doesn’t support ACLs, but it does honor them for Mac OS X NFS clients when bound to the directory.: if a user is granted read/write via an ACL, they WILL have read/write access via NFS. However, there are a few things to note here.
First and foremost, granular ACL’s won’t translate completely. Secondly, although you might have effective write privileges via ACL’s, if you don’t have write privileges via POSIX, it will *look* like you don’t have privileges when you do an `ls` on the mounted NFS volume, however, if you try to read or write a file, it will work without issue. Poorly written software might inspect the POSIX permissions and determine that you don’t have access when you really do. Most software will attempt to read/write an asset and will report errors when encountered (as it should). Lastly, ACL inheritance IS honored over NFS as well, so any files/dirs your users will create will have the appropriate ACL’s assigned on the backend, though displayed POSIX permissions once again won’t be especially accurate.
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Mighty Mouse Unleashed!
Thursday, December 31st, 2009If you have been wondering what more you can do with that shiny new Mighty Mouse then get ready. MagicPrefs, from Vlad Alexa allows you to do the following:
- It features the ability to bind a variable number of finger clicks, taps, swipes, pinch and other gestures to functions like Middle Click , Hold Down Both Mouse Buttons , Spaces , Expose, Dashboard etc.
- Touch Sensitivity implements a single point control for a number of factors impacting the algorithms of the taps, swipes, pinche and other gestures.
- Tracking Speed adds the ability to increase the maximum mouse speed by a extra 200%.
- Also featured is a real-time display of the fingers touching the surface of the mouse that you can enable to test and monitor the way the mouse sees fingers.
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MergeSafBookmarks Now Open Sourced
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009318 has open sourced our mergeSafBookmarks python script. This tool can read in a pair of property lists and merge them into a single resultant bookmarks file for Safari. This takes a lot of the work out of pushing bookmarks to existing users as part of your deployment. You can find it here:
http://mergebookmarks.sourceforge.net
Note: The script also looks at existing bookmarks and doesn’t merge in duplicates.
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318 Open Sources the ASR Setup Tool
Monday, December 14th, 2009318 has decided to open source our ASR Setup Tool under GPLv3. The tool can now be found at http://asrsetup.sourceforge.net. The ASR Setup Tool is built as a wrapper for the asr command line suite from Apple. The description from SourceForge:
Developed by 318 Inc., ASR Setup Toll is an application for setting up Apple Software Restore (“ASR”). In the context of the ASR Setup Tool, ASR is used for setting up a multicast stream that can then be leveraged for imaging Mac OS X computers.
We hope you enjoy!
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Screen Shots & ARD
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009For what it’s worth, we take ours from the command line. It helps keep proper track of the names screens. Simply open up a terminal window on a remote server via Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) and run the following command:
sleep 3; screencapture -iw ~/Desktop/filename.png
When you run that full string as a command you’ll have 3 seconds after hitting enter to highlight your target window, at which point your cursor will switch to the photo in window selection mode. Alternatively, you can run:
sleep 3; screencapture -iwc
Which will capture the picture to the remote machines clipboard (and can then be copied via ARD, and opened in Preview (File->new from clipboard).
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OmniGraffle Tips & Tricks
Tuesday, December 1st, 2009Here are some great OmniGraffle Tips and Tricks!
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Mac OS X 10.6.2 Now Available
Monday, November 9th, 2009For those considering a migration for Snow Leopard or those who have already moved into Snow Leopard, you will be interested to know that Apple has released the 10.6.2 update that has been in progress for some time. Updates and issue resolutions that are included (from Apple):
- an issue that might cause your system to logout unexpectedly
- a graphics distortion in Safari Top Sites
- Spotlight search results not showing Exchange contacts
- a problem that prevented authenticating as an administrative user
- issues when using NTFS and WebDAV file servers
- the reliability of menu extras
- an issue with the 4-finger swipe gesture
- an issue that causes Mail to quit unexpectedly when setting up an Exchange server Address Book becoming unresponsive when editing
- a problem adding images to contacts in Address Book
- an issue that prevented opening files downloaded from the Internet
- Safari plug-in reliability
- general reliability improvements for iWork, iLife, Aperture, Final Cut Studio, MobileMe, and iDisk
- an issue that caused data to be deleted when using a guest account
Mac OS X 10.6.2 represents Apple coming another step to making Snow Leopard ready for mass integration in most any environment. If you have not already done so, consider contacting your 318 representative now to start planning for your migration!
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Reading Virtual Memory Stats
Thursday, October 29th, 2009The vm_stat command in Mac OS X will show you the free, active, inactive, wired down, copy-on-write, zero filled, and reactivated pages for virtual memory utilization. You will also see the pageins as well as pageouts. If you wish to write these statistics routinely then you can use the vm_stat command followed by an integer. For example, to see the virtual memory statistics every 5 seconds:
vm_stat 5
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318 on Metadata
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009Link To:
senuTi
Monday, October 19th, 2009Ever lost the data on your computer and then realized that your media library was on your iPod or iPhone but not on your computer? Or maybe you had some data backed up but not your massive media library? Well what you need is iTunes backwards: copy the media files from your iPod or iPhone to you computer. Luckily there’s Senuti, which is iTunes spelled backwards because it does just that; it copies data from your mobile device into the iTunes library. This should not be used as a backup tool but it does make for a nice recovery path in some cases!
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The iPhone USB Jump Drive
Tuesday, October 13th, 2009When you plug in the iPhone, iTunes opens up automatically as does iPhoto if you have any images in your Photo Roll. But what if you want to use your iPhone as a regular old USB jump drive? Run this little program:
http://code.google.com/p/iphonedisk/
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Open Directory Auto Archiver
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009Have you struggled with Open Directory backups? Do you open up Server Admin and click on the Archive button when an alarm in your calendar tells you to do so? Well, we’re gonna’ help you out then. We’re going to automate backing up your Open Directory. We’re going to invoke the backups through launchd and we’re going to keep them for an amount of time you determine and automatically prune the old ones. We’re going to let you choose the location to store them and the password to unlock them. And we’re going to let you do all this through a graphical package called the 318 Auto Archiver.
Originally written for our own staff we now open it up to you as well.
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318 & MacWorld 2010
Thursday, September 24th, 2009318 is proud to announce that we will have 3 speakers doing a total of 4 sessions at the upcoming MacWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco in February. Speakers will be Beau Hunter, Zack Smith and Charles Edge.
We will also be announcing some events as the conference gets closer. If you are planning to attend then you can sign up here. We hope to see you there!
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The VPN
Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009Virtual Private Networks, abbreviated “VPN” is technology that that allows users to connect from one place to another securely. What makes it secure is that the connection between point A and point B is encrypted. An encrypted tunnel is built between Point A and Point B, and then data is passed through that tunnel.
VPN’s come in many different types (protocols). Some of the most common include the following:
PPTP
Often called “dial up VPNs”, it technically extends the functionality of PPP. It was originally started by Microsoft, US Robotics, Ascend Communication, 3Com, and ECI Telematics. Their first draft of their IETF document for the protocol extension was submitted in June, 1996. The protocol extension is supported by Linux, Mac and Windows workstations.
Current versions of all three operating systems include the VPN Client application pre-installed in the operating system. All three operating system server versions can also be setup to allow PPTP connections. A Microsoft Routing and Remote Access Server (RRAS) typically uses Microsoft Point to Point Encryption (MPPE) which is based on RSA RC4 and supports up to 128 bit encryption.
IPSec
IPSec is short for Internet Protocol Security. It works on Layer 3, and is often called “Site to Site VPN”. It is usually used to connect one LAN to another LAN, most times using two hardware VPN units at each side communicating with each other. It can also be used to connect a workstation to the corporate LAN, typically using proprietary software from the VPN manufacturer/developer (although you can sometimes use the built in software in the operating system – as is the case with Windows). The protocol can function in two modes (Transport and Tunnel) and provides end to end security by authenticating and encrypting the packets between parties. It can support up to 168bit encryption with 3DES.
SSL VPN
SSL VPN is a type of VPN that allows communication to happen over https via web browsers. The main advantage of SSL VPN is that no additional client software is required besides a web browser. Since no software needs to be installed on a computer, a user can access the corporate network via VPN from just about any computer (i.e, Public Computer, kiosk, etc.). The disadvantage is that because it tends to make the applications you would normally use a web type of application, you often lose some of the intended user experience of those converted applications.
L2TP
L2TP is short for Layer 2 Tunneling Protocol. It doesn’t do any encryption on it’s own, and is often used in conjunction with IPSec (L2TP/IPsec VPN). The biggest thing to remember about L2TP is that it allows more types of applications to communicate through the VPN connection that otherwise are not supported in a standard IPSec implementation.
In a nutshell, deciding which VPN protocol to implement depends on your budget, the hardware that you have, what will be connecting (workstation/user, or LAN to LAN) and the ease of use. Please feel free to contact us, and we will be happy to help plan out your VPN infrastructure, or answer any questions that you may have.
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New Video on System Image Utility in Snow Leopard
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009Now that NetRestore has been moved into Mac OS X Server (kinda), we have created a new video on creating a NetRestore image for Snow Leopard.
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Screenshots in Snow Leopard
Monday, August 31st, 2009In Mac OS X 10.5 and below, the default behavior was to take screenshots (command-Shift-4) by creating a file on the desktop automatically named Picture 1.png. The second file would be created as Picture 2.png and so forth. In Snow Leopard though, the screen shots are named Screen shot followed by the date (YYYY-MM-DD) and then the time (HH.MM.SS). So if I took a screen shot at 3pm today it would be called “Screen shot 2009-08-31 at 3.01.05 PM”. This keeps them showing up in the same order they otherwise would have. At first I wasn’t sure whether I liked this change, but now I’m sure that I do. The defaults commands that were used to change the default image type and the location are still applicable.
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Video on Using Archive and Restore with Final Cut Server
Friday, July 31st, 2009Link To:
Video on Integrating MobileMe With AirPort Disks
Thursday, July 30th, 2009Link To:
Video: Creating a Device on Final Cut Server
Wednesday, July 29th, 2009Link To:
Video: Increase MTU on Mac OS X
Tuesday, July 28th, 2009Link To:
BRU Server 2.0 Now Available
Friday, July 24th, 2009BRU Server 2.0 was released this week, offering a long anticipated update to the popular cross platform backup suite of applications. The main two features that the TOLIS group is highlighting include Encryption of backup target sets and client initiated backup.
Whether you are a BRU, Atempo, Bakbone, Backup Exec or Retrospect environment, 318 can assist you with planning, testing, verifying or restoring backups. Contact your 318 account manager today for more details.
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Office 2008 for Mac SP 2 Now Available
Monday, July 20th, 2009Microsoft Office 2008 Service Pack 2 for the Mac is available as of 10am today. Microsoft lists that the update first and foremost provides more “speed, stability and compatibility.” There are also new features in applications. For example, PowerPoint has new animation features and you can create new default themes.
But one of the larger overall features is the addition of Document Connection, which allows users to access and browse documents located on SharePoint servers and in the Microsoft Office Live Workspace. Microsoft is clearly not forgetting about the Mac in their new Software+Services model. They even announced official browser support for Safari 4 as a part of this overall strategy.
And the software is faster. In our tests, each of the office applications opened at least one to two seconds faster than before installing SP2.
Download and start testing it out today at http://www.microsoft.com/mac/downloads.mspx or click here to download the dmg file directly.
For more information on this specific update:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/973254
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Final Cut Server on the Cheap
Monday, July 13th, 2009At 318 we see a number of Final Cut Server installations. And for most of those jobs you should use an Xsan, have editors edit-in-place and develop custom automations. But Final Cut Server doesn’t have to be super complicated; nor does it have to be super expensive to integrate. At the end of the day it’s all about what a customer is expecting to get out of the product – and that’s how the product is developed and priced: to scale with the customers needs.
One of the most marketable and best features of Final Cut Server is that it is a way to catalog assets. These assets can be stored anywhere you want, provided that they are reliably accessible by the server. Given a username and password, users of Final Cut Server can then access the assets whether or not they can actually get to them using server shares or flat file systems. This allows Final Cut Server to bring logic to an otherwise chaotic form of storing data.
Once catalogued you can then tag assets with metadata. This means that when you go to find assets in the future you can do so quickly and easily. You can preview, annotate and then download those assets, no matter where they are stored – even on a Drobo or some large Firewire media sets. And if you decide to edit-in-place in the future, the fact that assets are stored in a logical space (called a Device) means that if you see the value, that you have an easy upgrade into more online media, such as an Xsan volume – but you don’t have to do it all at once to start seeing value.
And value is the key aspect of Final Cut Server. You can spend as much or as little as you need in order to get value out of the product. Sometimes the smallest features are what organizations will derive the most value out of. Not always, but sometimes… And when you see the value of the smaller features you can then make a decision based on your organizations goals and workflows what else will be of value. If you’d like to discuss a Final Cut Server implementation, whether it’s the basic initial installation, complicated workflow integration or custom scripting, contact 318 for more information. We’re here to help, whether or not the implementation is on the cheap.
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Google Apps and BlackBerry
Friday, May 15th, 2009Google Apps has taken another step towards the capacity for enterprise integration. Google Apps Connector for BlackBerry Enterprise Server will be available in July. Google was fairly quick to release a product that allowed for interaction with the iPhone and has recently added an ActiveSync option to connect to their mail services, allowing for the synchronization of contacts, mail and calendars to devices running Windows Mobile and the iPhone. This additional step simply completes offering up Google Apps to the major smartphones on the market. And with recent directory services integration offerings, Google Apps seems more than ever like a viable option in the enterprise space.
As partners of Research in Motion, Microsoft and Apple, 318 would be happy to work with you to formulate a unified strategy for managing, application development and application delivery for your mobile enterprise – no matter the platform.
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Safari Browsing and Sonicwall Enhanced
Friday, May 15th, 2009Thanks to one Ed Marczak we had a fix for a SonicWALL issue that was bugging us from awhile back. With SonicOS Enhanced and Content Filtering Service, Safari experiences errors trying to load pages that require a login, such as store.apple.com and www.amazon.com. This even occurs when CFS is not enabled on your Sonicwall.
To fix this, you need to uncheck the “Enforce Host Tag Search with for CFS” feature on the SonicWALL. In order to uncheck “Enforce Host Tag Search with for CFS”, you have to login to sonicwall console and then go to diag page, which is accessible by logging into the sonicwall and replacing the webpage name with diag.html.
For example, if you log into http://192.168.1.1/main.html you have to replace main with diag; that is: http://192.168.1.1/diag.html
This page will bring the internal settings page of the SonicWALL, and from here you can uncheck “Enforce Host Tag Search with for CFS”.
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Citrix Receiver for iPhone
Wednesday, May 13th, 2009Deploying the iPhone into the enterprise has a number of pain points. Two that we continue to hear are a lack of full disk encryption and developing software. For environment who cannot obtain enterprise developer accounts, we also continue to work through problems with regard to application provisioning. Many companies are also getting tired of trying to deploy applications to too many operating systems. One answer we’ve taken for some of this is to introduce web-based applications with small wrappers around them that are specific to each application/device. But Citrix has stepped up and released Citrix Receiver for iPhone and Dazzle.
Within the Citrix product line you will now be able to provision a thin client-based application and achieve the agility that business units want without the commitment to a specific platform. This means that if your users want Windows Mobile or an iPhone you can publish an application, tailored to their screens and with Dazzle, you can give them the option to choose which applications they want to access, making application provisioning easier for many environments. Because a thin client leaves all of its data on the server, the lack of full disk encryption becomes less of an issue with the iPhone as you can choose to sandbox your business critical data into thin client environments. And finally, you can go to market with solutions that can enhance your business faster in many cases, by leveraging existing efforts and resources.
Overall, we’re happy to add Citrix Receiver in our own portfolio of product offerings. We can now go into any development opportunity with even more options: begin a new application (fat client), deploy a mobile-specific web-based application or bring a thin client solution to the table. From an application lifecycle, being able to look at the iPhone in a similar fashion to how we look at Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X is key to maximizing the capacity an organization towards their the business potential.
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Retrospect 8.0.733
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009Retrospect 8.0.733 is now out and available for download. If you are using version 8 and experiencing problems then you should run it as it fixes a number of bugs. Bugs fixed in the Retrospect 8.0.733 release:
18925: Keep backup sets and scripts associated when catalog rebuild is necessary
20075: General UI Feedback: Okay/Apply
20131: Able to enter text in fields that should only accept numbers
20146: Log Limit doesn’t verify for valid value range
20156: Prefs >Media > media request timeout should check for valid values
20229: Scripts Icon backwards in details view when no script is selected
20258: Copy assistant should not allow you to select same volume for source and destination
20276: “More Backups…” is disabled in Restore Assistant
20332: Restore Assistant: script starts when you select ‘Save’
20343: Error backing up Win XP client – error -3043 (the maximum number of Snapshots has been reached)
20373: Sources icons display as usb removable drives
20437: Past Backup lists wrong date
20475: Disclosure triangles in volumes and scripts
20504: Remove all local volumes: Need to restart Engine to repopulate
20528: Servers displaying in the Sources list
20538: Improve column sizes and layout
20555: Verify Script: Options lists backup sets
20585: “Pause Server” should change to “Unpause” or “Resume”
20598: File Media Sets: remove option to change ‘Fast Catalog Rebuild’
20604: Volume Type not correct
20634: Script Schedule > refresh > auto deletes schedules
20640: Creating a new schedule item does not select the new item
20719: Console: DAG memory leaks
20729: Possible Small Memory leak in Engine when [Backupset EditWithPassword]
20735: New Backup Script: using Tag from previous script
20849: Creating a New Media Set does not accept some characters
20896: “Please update your server” dialog should be more informative
20919: Media Sets: Tape not display Used/Free/Capacity
20945: ScriptProperties::TransferMode seems to have incorrect values
20953: Need to be able to defer scheduled activities
20971: Use Small Icons setting lost after closing UI
21015: Sources: Clients duplicate in the Multicast list
21039: License Manager UI Issues
21087: Starting activity negates activity scope buttons
21124: Desktop: no license challenge when adding a 3rd client
21174: Smart Tag UI problem
21302: Disk Media Sets: when only one member – remove should be disabled
21382: Dev: ArcDiskInfo/ArcDiskFileInfo’s persistent logic is wrong, blocking ppc feature
21463: Need a way to change console’s server password on existing server
21487: Sessions and Snapshots get into state with different volume names
21510: Search for files restore not working across multiple Media Sets
21544: Launch engine at startup authentication broken
21552: Sources: Erase a local drive the disk used / total not updated
21562: Restore Files: Assistant – Search for files in selected Media sets
21590: Need to store extdFlags EXTD_HASACL and EXTD_HASMETA in trees
21603: File Media Set: during backup .rbf.rfc file displays as unix executable
21618: Unable to successfully restore IIS on W2K3 Server
21625: Rules not updating correctly
21628: Unable to add multiple device members
21644: Cannot change member location in Edit Member, throws error
21663: Bad value for Compression field in Activities
21712: Assert during first backup
21737: Crash with DLT1 drive
21740: Media creation time is wrong
21746: Crash trying to add NAS device
21752: Crash copying library directory
21755: module.cpp-825 assert
21764: Console crash while backing up NAS (tag-related)
21775: wrong password adding clients
21782: Restore Assistant: Assert at module.cpp-845
21783: Sources: Local Volumes displaying multiple times
21785: Restore Assistant: When Clients volumes selected unable to ‘Continue’
21791: U Mich. assert
21797: Klingon server assert during client backup
21800: RefBackupset::Search needs Progress object
21803: Error -703 unknown when trying to access a Media Set
21804: Firewire Lacie D2 AIT not responding
21812: Engine crash with invalid object
21813: Incorrect free disk space displayed
21815: Can’t stop engine on 10.4.11
21822: Search for files – manual selection is ignored
21824: Wrong Client Errors being displayed
21825: Client Test button missing
21826: Client connection strangeness
21830: Rules UI different in different parts of yeti
21837: Source’s ‘Last Backup Date’ field doesn’t roll up
21838: assert while trying to rebuild a disk media set
21846: Improve how compression data is displayed
21849: Editing script with many sources not easy
21852: Crash proactive backup to tape library
21856: Console crash with 8.0.608 (tag-related)
21858: Restore Assistant: Selected Media selector set jumps to top of list
21863: Restore Assistant: Restore files from which backup – no date displaying
21864: Restore Assistant: Preview for multiple media sets – only displaying files from first
21866: Assert during local restore: restore drive out of space
21868: better errors needed when license is required
21876: Assert: tree.cpp-3095
21877: Smart Tags not working with Clients set to Startup volume
21878: Assert: module.cpp-825 and others when adding clients
21879: Can’t erase 6.1 VXA-320 media
21881: Hang with 2 proactive backups running
21901: Selecting tape in slot during add member tries to add tape in drive first
21902: Grow the UI elements for all non-English language XIBs
21908: Can’t create a Size rule with more then 3 numbers
21911: Restore Assistant: Not restoring correct files (search restore restores too many files)
21915: Rule: Rules using ‘is not’ switches back to ‘is’
21916: Rules: unable to use Rule ‘Volume drive letter is’
21917: Rules: Files system is Mac OS switches to Windows
21922: Rules: unable to use ‘Date accessed’ rule
21924: Add Media Set: changes to catalog path in text field are ignored
21925: Add Media Set: Browse window should be a sheet
21926: Client browse cause engine crash: module.cpp-845
21934: Assert module.cpp-825 adding tape members
21939: Assert: tmemory.cpp-275 and Crash Reporter logs
21945: Restore Assistant: Unable to use ‘Search Media Set’
21960: VXA-320 FireWire loader issues including assert at intldrdev.cpp-4483
21961: Sources: Last Backup Date – local dmg files
21969: Find Files doesn’t always find the right media sets
21973: Sources: cannot remove local favorite folders
22002: Restore Assistant: issue with preview
22005: Restore: crash when accessing backup with a yellow icon
22006: Restore Assistant: FindFiles with mutiple found sets but not all checked doesn’t run
22013: Copy Backup: MD5 check some error
22024: Unable to change rules condition
22046: Script > Schedule > Text cutoff “F” for friday
22056: Restore Assistant: Restore files – Where do you want to restore: allows multiple selections
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Mass Deploying Firefox Preferences for Mac OS X
Friday, April 24th, 2009Firefox has a number of preferences. Not all are available in the GUI. To access these preferences, you can simply open Firefox and type the following in the address bar:
about: config
This will allow you to customize preferences, whether or not they’re otherwise known, line by line. These can then be copied between users, by inserting lines into the preferences file.
Like with most applications on Mac OS X, the preferences for Firefox can be deployed en masse. It is a bit more complicated than deploying preferences for some other applications. The reason for this is that the path to the preference file isn’t the same for all users. The file is located in the ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles directory. It is an 8 character string followed by .default. For example, lzwntwo9.default. In this folder is a file called prefs.js, which contains all of the preferences for Firefox. For example, the following line will disable the check for whether you wish Firefox to be the default web browser for a user:
user_pref(“browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser”, false);
Once you know what preferences you’d like to push out there are two options to do so (there might be more, but these are the two we’ve used):
- The first is to edit items in the Firefox.app bundle. Most of these can be edited using the /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/defaults/profile/prefs.js file, although the home page will be set using the /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/browserconfig.properties file. One note is that when you go to customize the prefs.js file it will give you a fairly nasty warning, but then it will push changes out to new accounts; however, don’t make any changes while the application is open. Additionally, this method requires deleting the existing preferences, so if you simply want to push out updates you’ll need to resort to the second method.
- For the second method, we look at a script that finds the name of the directory located in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles for the user (or all users for computer-based policies) of the system. We then set that as a variable. For example, using the output of ls ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/ as a variable called FFPREFSFOLDER would then be used to alter the contents of the js file using ls ~/Library/Application\ Support/Firefox/Profiles/$FFPREFSFOLDER/prefs.js as the actual path of the file for a user.
Now you can insert (or replace) the line that makes up the specific preference. This isn’t nearly as clean as using defaults to push out Safari preferences. But it does provide a way to push out Firefox preferences, be it as a file drop to replace the preferences in the application bundle or as a line edit to alter settings of an existing users browser.
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