Mac Geekery

There are a plethora of hacks to change the translucent menu bar in 10.5. While I doubt the sanity of the UI designers at Apple with this release of the operating system, it is relatively easy to change this behavior without installing third party hacks. There's more »

A complaint I’ve frequently encountered on some Mac OS X Server related forums and mailing lists is that there is no documentation on how to enable VNC access in the Terminal. A good number of former Windows-only businesses have purchased an Xserve G5 without a video card because they needed to use both PCI slots for other components or they naturally assumed that a computer would come with a video card. Some people familar with Mac OS X Server might read this and say, “Hey, just run the server administration tools on your Mac desktop or laptop. Er, you don’t have another Mac?” There's more »

A colleague has posted an interesting set of steps to his .Mac home page on creating a bootable diagnostics CD for the Xserve G5. What’s the big deal on this? Since the default configuration of the Xserve G5 is without a video card, Apple made the diagnostics for the Xserve G5 in a NetBoot image rather than a CD like the standard Apple Hardware Test for other computers, like the iBook or PowerBook. There's more »

System Events, introduced with Mac OS X 10.3, is what assistive devices use in Mac OS X. It also allows AppleScript to control GUI applications directly through UI Scripting.

With the release of Mac OS X 10.4, Apple includes the ability to adjust the behavior of the modifier keys on the keyboard in the Keyboard & Mouse system preferences. This becomes useful if you use a PC-style keyboard with your Mac, like I do with my iBook.

We’re combining the two to do something useful for switching between a PC style keyboard and a Mac style keyboard. There's more »

I just thought I would share a discovery that I made the other day and have played with a little. There’s a nifty little tool called Pashua that you can use to provide a graphical interface to your shell or perl scripts for user input. The way you set up the calls to Pashua is a little clunky (in my opinion), but straightforward and easy to read. While I would prefer a more progmatic approach, Pashua does the job well enough. Additionally, Pashua comes with copious examples and suprisingly well-written documentation. There's more »

As everyone here should know, Mac OS X ships with a nice little graphical utility to troubleshoot networks: Network Utility. One feature that this tool provides is the ability to scan open ports on remote hosts. Used properly, this can be a beneficial aid to a network or systems administrator. However, in the wrong hands this can be used for black-hat style system cracking (or “hacking” as it is labelled in the popular news media.)

Well, this post contains a tip for system administrators either looking to lock down the port scan facility of Network Utility (but leaving the other functions usable), or a way to increase the power of the port scan facility for their legitimate purposes (I will be the first to admit this could be used by a system cracker, but they probably wouldn’t dirty their elite, script kiddie hands with a GUI app.)

Like most Mac OS X (Cocoa) applications, the Network Utility “application” is actually a folder named “Network Utility.app”, which is treated by a single file by the Finder. Inside this application bundle, are various files and resources used by the program to carry out its functions.

Port scan, like the other facilities built in to Network Utility calls a command-line program to do the work. However, unlike the other facilities, the command line program to do the port scan is “hidden” within the application bundle.

Ok, enough of the chatter. Network Utility calls a program called “stroke”, which resides at /Applications/Utilities/Network\ Utility.app/Contents/Resources/stroke. As per standard UNIX behavior, the program gives its usage if it needs arguments:

ebi:~ unixgeek$ /Applications/Utilities/Network\ Utility.app/Contents/Resources/stroke 
2005-02-16 21:10:15.265 stroke[374] stroke address startPort endPort
ebi:~ unixgeek$ /Applications/Utilities/Network\ Utility.app/Contents/Resources/stroke 192.168.1.10 0 110
Port Scanning host: 192.168.1.10 There's more »

 
	

Here's a nifty hack to automatically mount NFS filesystems at startup via Startup Items. (Yes, I know you can do automounts in NetInfo, but this way you can more easily recover the system if your NFS server or network goes south for the winter.) There's more »