10.3 Use CUPS Classes to Elegantly Handle Different Locations

Adam Knight — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 23:53:41 -0600

CUPS is the name of the service that handles printing in Mac OS X 10.3 to 10.5. It has a lot of features that aren’t really pushed in the GUI in Mac OS X, but users are able to get at those features by using the special administrative interface at http://localhost:631/.

One of those features is classes. A class, in this context, is a group of printers that can be made to look as if it were one printer. This is great in lab settings where you have half a dozen printers of the same type as you can add them all to a class on a print server and have everyone print to that queue. Then whichever printer is free (or round-robin) will print the job. There's more »

For the Tooltip Guy

Adam Knight — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 13:57:17 -0600

I went to the GUI feedback session at WWDC last year and in the midst of all the yelling and screaming over the new dock and menu bar there was one guy with a wholly different mission: be able to turn off tooltips. His complaint (a valid one, I feel) is that every time he wants to sit and think about what’s on-screen, a little yellow box comes up where the mouse is, and there’s no real “safe spot” for the mouse that doesn’t do this in most applications.

So, I present a little tip I discovered shortly afterwards and appear to have not written up. I dedicate this to Tooltip Guy, wherever he is.

defaults write -g NSInitialToolTipDelay 99999

You now have 99.999 seconds to think at a given time. Replace -g with the ID of any application to change it in that application.

Change 10.4 Finder's "Secure Empty Trash" Options

biovizier — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 20:44:33 -0500

So I’m paranoid, but not THAT paranoid.

Sometimes I feel like using “Secure Empty Trash”, but that uses ’/usr/bin/srm’ with the ’-m’ option (7 passes), which can take a while to complete. Most of the time, I only care about what might turn up with simple file recovery tools in case my drive gets stolen (as opposed to covering my tracks from say law enforcement or a foreign government) so really, a single pass should be plenty for my needs. I could always use ’srm’ directly, but the convenience the built-in tool offers in handling the Trashes on various volumes, and having a built-in menu item is nice.

It turns out the ’srm’ option used by “Secure Empty Trash” in Tiger is specified in the file: There's more »

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DesktopServicesPriv.framework/Resources/Locum

Managing the Startup of Unixy Services

Adam Knight — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:20:54 -0500

Adding Items to Login Items From the CLI

Adam Knight — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 13:50:04 -0500

It’s a question we get every now and again that simply doesn’t have an easy answer: “How do I add items to the Login Items from the Terminal?”

Well, that’s hard, and mainly because the defaults command is limited in that it cannot nest collections and the folks that made the plist for loginwindow decided on an array of dictionaries, thus tossing that command out the window as a solution.

==$ defaults write foo test -array-add -dict Hide 1 Path /Applications/TextEdit.app There's more »

Creating a "Power Users" group in OS X

Sketch — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 13:19:19 -0500

One of the great dillemas of Mac admins is how to give users the ability to actually USE their machines, without the monkeys gumming up the works constantly. One of the easiest ways to do this is by using Open Directory. But what if you don’t have an Open Directory server?

Create a Power Users group. It gives users the ability to install the applications they want, without letting them modify things like network settings.

Working off of this tip from Mac OS X Hints, I created this method: There's more »

Download the server tools, and put Workgroup Manager either local on your machine or on an external drive (I use my Shuffle)
Open Workgroup Manager and edit the local directory

Sneakily Killing the Trackpad

Adam Knight — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 12:26:53 -0500

Software Update and Package Installation From the CLI

Adam Knight — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:33:23 -0500

For those of you that didn’t know (and it’s an honest omission of knowledge) Apple’s Installer and Software Update tools have CLI tools that do their dirty work for them, and you can use them to remotely administer your machine (or do so more directly than the GUI lets you).

The Installer’s CLI command is, shockingly, installer. The basic syntax is:

$ installer -pkg GoshIHopeItsNotATrojan.pkg -target /

You can also have a little fun with it with its myriad options.

Software Update is similarly called softwareupdate and you can get a list of suggested updates with:

$ softwareupdate -l

Or install all pending updates with: There's more »

$ sudo softwareupdate -i -a

Tips for Using Windows-Centric Keyboards in Mac OS X

Adam Knight — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 17:18:36 -0600

Adding Items To The Dock

JC — Mon, 29 Jan 2007 20:27:12 -0600

As an admin, sometimes you want to tweak the dock a bit when you can’t sit at the Mac or VNC in to it. Luckily, the Dock is governed by a plist that’s a bit cryptic, but is otherwise fairly easy to tweak. I used this quite a bit, back in the day, but when a friend asked me for it recently, I had to dig around quite a bit to find the darn thing. There's more »