Mac Admin Corner

Leopard Active Directory Integration Headaches

Patrick — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 11:00:33 +0000

Ever since Leopard came out, we have been having a heck of a time trying to get Leopard to bind and/or authenticate to Active Directory reliably. We use Active Directory sites and our Leopard macs were trying to authenticate to Domain Controllers in the wrong site. I’m reminded of something Joel Rennich said in a [...]

Disabling Automatic Updates for Office 2008, Apple Software Updates and Adobe CS4

Patrick — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:47:29 +0000

Over at the Make Mac Work blog, Ellis has a very informative article about how to disable automatic update notifications for Apple Software Update, Microsoft Office 2008 and Adobe CS4. It’s generally a good idea to do this if your users are not admin’s of their own machines and/or you are centrally managing these updates with [...]

Allow Non-Admin users to Manage Printers

Patrick — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 22:00:59 +0000

Apple added a "feature" to Leopard which restricts non administrator users from managing printers on their Macs. While this is desired behavior on a public machine such as a classroom, it is a problem for single user machines such as faculty, staff and 1:1 deployments. By default in Leopard, a non-admin user can not add [...]

Securing SSH on Mac OS X by limiting who can log in

Patrick — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 13:59:05 +0000

This post will describe two different methods for securing SSH that work on both Tiger and Leopard (client or server). These tips can be done as needed on machines that will have ssh enabled, or as part of your deployment image(s). Personally, I make these changes to our images because if a machine is bound [...]

slapd error in system.log every 10 seconds

Patrick — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 04:01:13 +0000

I had 2 Leopard servers (one with 10.5.5, one with 10.5.6), both displaying the following messages in the system.log every 10 seconds. com.apple.launchd[1] (org.openldap.slapd[283]): Exited with exit code: 1 com.apple.launchd[1] (org.openldap.slapd): Throttling respawn: Will start in 10 seconds These messages went on for days. As far back as all my rolled system.logs went so I couldn’t track it [...]

New Pages ‘09 now supports Endnote

Patrick — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:49:24 +0000

Today at MacWorld, Apple announced iWork '09 and MacResearch just reported that the new Pages now supports Endnote and MathType citations. I know I have quite a few faculty that will be very glad to hear this. Especially the ones that absolutely refuse to use Microsoft Office.

Browser Market Shifting to Open Source?

Patrick — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 03:01:58 +0000

News is spreading about the NetApplications report showing IE has dropped below 70% market share with Firefox taking just over 20% and Safari at over 7%. I must not have been paying attention because I was assuming IE still had 80-85%. Looks like we're well on our way to having Open Source dominate browser usage

Welcome to the new site at macadmincorner.com

Patrick — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 21:17:54 +0000

I hope you all had a great holiday! I decided to move from blogger to WordPress because I wanted to use something that was more extensible and open source and I didn’t want to be tied to a hosted platform. I migrated everything from my former blogspot site and I think I got everything, though some [...]

PPC Not booting from NetBoot Across Subnets package

Patrick — Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:37:00 +0000

NetBoot Across Subnets from Mike Bombich has a problem setting the startup disk on a PPC machine when the target is a Leopard NetBoot set. You may see this in your system.log on your NetBoot server: Dec 29 10:42:08 server tftpd[781]: adding RRQ to cache: 170.140.xxx.xxx,NetBoot/NetBootSP0/DS_MP_2008-12-29.nbi/booter Dec 29 10:42:08 server tftpd[782]: file not found, trying [/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/DS_MP_2008-12-29.nbi/boote] Dec 29 10:42:08 server tftpd[782]: file not found, trying [/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/DS_MP_2008-12-29.nbi/boot]

NetRestore End of Life

Patrick — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 01:08:00 +0000

Mike Bombich has offically stopped development on NetRestore. Read the story here. I’m very sad to see it go, though not surprised. NR has been open source for years, but no one ever contributed besides Mike and it was in need of a rewrite. Now that it is EOL, several people on the Mac Enterprise list are [...]