Jeff Johnson's List: OS X Management

Every Monday, we'll show you how to do something new and simple with Apple's built-in command line application. You don't need any fancy software, or a knowledge of coding to do any of these. All you need is a keyboard to type 'em out!

You can create and edit documents in the command line with nano, but what about printing? Well, the CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) is built into every Mac, and includes the ability to print files directly from the command line. This week, we'll show you exactly how it's done.

You as the OS X and/or iOS Administrator want your devices to do something. It may be install a Configuration Profile to "lock down", OR provide a feature such as Email configuration, Wi-Fi Access, or something else… but you want it down NOW! You login to your MDM management page/console, select what devices you want to perform some action.

Using sar you can monitor performance of various Linux subsystems (CPU, Memory, I/O..) in real time.

Using sar, you can also collect all performance data on an on-going basis, store them, and do historical analysis to identify bottlenecks.

Almost everything can be done with the Terminal. At least that's what the experts tell you. We find glorious "Terminal Hacks" which unlock some special features of the Mac. While for most part it's fine not knowing, it wouldn't hurt to know what exactly is going on behind those lines. Here's a short crash course in using the Terminal, from a total newbie at that. Though I did do my homework, my less than exceptional knowledge of the Terminal might produce some errors in this guide. I have tried all the commands myself, so I don't suppose anything should happen to your system, but do always backup before messing around with your system. Always.

Command used in this video:
sudo /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app/Contents/Resources/createi­nstallmedia --volume /Volumes/Untitled --applicationpath /Applications/Install\ OS\ X\ Mavericks.app --nointeraction

Advanced users may need to add a user account to the sudoers file, which allows that user to run certain commands with root privileges. To greatly simplify what that means, these newly privileged user accounts will then be able to execute commands without getting permission denied errors or having to prefix a terminal command with sudo.

Mac users who prefer to have a more traditional Unix toolkit accessible to them through the Terminal may wish to install the optional Command Line Tools subsection of the Xcode IDE. From OS X Mavericks onward, this is now easily possible directly and without installing the entire Xcode package first, no developer account is required either. The Command Line Tool package gives terminal users many commonly used tools, utilities, and compilers, including make, GCC, clang, perl, svn, git, size, strip, strings, libtool, cpp, what, and many other useful commands that are usually found in default linux installations. We've included the full list of new binaries available through the command line toolkit below for those interested, or you can just see for yourself after you have installed the package, which we'll walk through here.

Many advanced Mac users spend a lot of time at the command line of OS X, accessed through the Terminal app. While generally the Terminal is fast and efficient, sometimes it can slow down over time, or suffer from some performance degradation due to user preference settings. If you feel that Terminal app is being sluggish and could use a speed boost in OS X, use these handful of tricks to speed up the performance of Terminal app and your command line experience.

One task that has always seemed to me to take more time than it should is the process of packaging applications like Firefox, Google Chrome or other applications which are self-contained and can be copied as-is into /Applications. While tools like AutoPkg have helped a good deal by automating the download and packaging of various self-contained applications, this approach still requires some setup work and requires a recipe to be written to handle the application.

Mike Kaply recently released a new version of the Firefox Client Customization Kit, CCK2.
Head over to his blog to read all about it!

One cool new feature of the new version is that it can create AutoConfig files.
This allows you to disable the annoying "Import Wizard", among lots of other options.

Get started by downloading CCK2 and starting it from the Firefox menubar.

Of course it would be possible to deploy the Mavericks installer as it is from the App Store.
However, as we learned, upgrading to Mavericks removed Java from your Mac, and the user would be greeted with the iCloud sign-in dialogue once the upgrade is completed.

Maybe you don’t want that. And maybe you want to add a “postupgrade” script to the installer to make Mavericks fit your environment. Maybe you want to tweak the authorization database since /etc/authorization is deprecated in Mavericks…

Lots of reasons not to go with the standard installer.
I’ll try to explain how to do this.

It is possible to package up the Mac OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion or Mavericks installers in order to install (or more accurately, upgrade to) Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks using Munki. Once you've packaged the OS X installer in this way, you may use Munki to install Lion, Mountain Lion or Mavericks in the same way you install, say, Microsoft Office.