Adobe Lightroom Installer

John Welch has written passionately about Adobe installers many times over the years. Here’s another to add to the list, though not as colorfully as Mr. Welch might have done…

Energy Saver scripting

Here’s a version of a script we use on all our machines in an attempt to reduce energy usage with a minimum of visible impact on users. Our machines are set to not sleep during the day. This script runs hourly, and if it’s after 7pm and the machine has been idle for 20 minutes or more, it tries to sleep the machine if someone is logged in, or shut it down if no-one is logged in.
The machine is also set to automatically startup or wake at 6am M-F. The net result is that most of our desktop machines go to sleep or shutdown a little after 7pm each weeknight and wake up at 6am each week morning, and our users are none the wiser.

Leopard, MobileAccounts, and NFS homes

On the MacEnterprise maillist, Arjen van Bochoven wrote of problems with automatic HomeSyncs under Leopard with NFS home directories. Manual syncs worked fine, but the automatic background syncs would fail with errors that looked like this:

1:: [228] Peer "network" is unable to sync. (-[SPeer_FS_PHD mountPeerVolume] (Peer-FS-PHD.m:140): "'((homePath))' is nil")
0:: [228] [2009/02/19 10:45:10.640] Peer "network" is unable to sync. Not enough peers will be available to continue syncing.
0:: [228] [2009/02/19 10:45:10.640] Aborting sync of "HomeSync_Mirror".

I saw the exact same problem in my environment. This also affected login and logout syncs. Here’s the (ugly) fix.

Image cleanup script

UPDATE 1/23/09: some commenters asked about cleanup of the LKDC (new in Leopard) – I’ve added that to the script.

At the Macworld Expo 2009 Power Tools System Imaging and Deployment session today, I was asked to share a “checklist” of cleanup steps I use when building images the “classic” way. (The InstaDMG methodology of image building makes cleanup steps unneeded.)

Here’s a cleaned-up version of the script I use, with site-specific stuff removed for the most part.

Network and Portable Home slides

Here is a slightly modified version of the slides I used at presentation earlier in 2008 on the topic of Network and Portable Home Directories.

Macworld 2009 MCX presentation

Here is a PDF of my presentation at Macworld SF 2008 on Managing OS X Clients with or without Open Directory.

Firmware Updates Redux

Mac firmware updates generally need some sort of user intervention in order to apply them.

This makes it very difficult to automate the process. I did manage at one point to automate SMC updates, but EFI updates and other hardware (keyboards, trackpads, graphics) each have their own issues.

So I finally decided to just punt on the issue. Here’s what I do now: a script runs at login and checks softwareupdate, looking for available firmware updates. If there are any, the user is notified to call the help desk.

iTunes preference management

Workgroup Manager/MCX supports managing some iTunes preferences if you use the Preference Details and add the Managed Client preference managements.

It turns out there are a few more things you can manage if you look here.

These additional items include:

• disableCheckForUpdates
• disableAutomaticDeviceSync
• disableGetAlbumArtwork
• disablePlugins

and more. These also seem to work as regular default keys. For example:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes disableCheckForUpdates -bool YES

turns off and disables automatic checking for updates. You might want to do that if you manage installation of iTunes updates yourself.

Firefox default settings

Something I see pop up now and again is questions on how to define certain default settings (proxies, home pages, etc) for all users of Firefox. I was surprised to find that I had never posted on this topic before.

It turns out that you can edit a few files inside the Firefox bundle to set default preference values.
Here’s what I do…

Radmind: converting to case-insensitive transcripts

Radmind, being a set of UNIX tools, originally supported only case-sensitive transcripts. Mac OS X’s HFS+ filesystem, developed by Apple pre-NeXT purchase, is a case-preserving, case-insensitive filesystem.

Support for case-insensitive transcripts was later added to the radmind tools.

As it turns out, it is perfectly possible to use radmind with case-sensitive transcripts to manage an OS X HFS+ filesystem. There are sometimes a few annoyances, but it generally works OK. Worst case, you might have to run the radmind tools twice to get the filesystem update when there is a case change: the first run might remove the lowercase version of the file, and the second run would install the uppercase version. Or a sharp radmind admin might be able to avoid the problem altogether by renaming files in troublesome transcripts.