Before you read any further, take note: altering your EFI boot partition is not supported by Apple and The Mac Admin takes no responsibility if you render your computer(s) unbootable by mounting and modifying this partition.
If you work with, support, or own iOS devices (iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch), you probably have or will encounter a situation where you have a locked device but have lost, forgotten or never knew the passcode. Using Device Firmware Update (DFU) mode, you can get the device back to a factory state. This will wipe [...]
In Mac OS X, the default paper size is a setting that determines the size of paper that applications will try to print to unless the user chooses otherwise. For most systems and applications this defaults to US Letter. In order to provide a positive user experience, especially for end users outside of the United States, it may be desirable to set a different default paper size.
There are two bills currently in front of the United States Congress; the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act (PROTECT IP). Like most undesirable legislation, these bills carry names that are hard to argue against without seeming like a bad person. Also like most undesirable bills, their effects have little to do with their titles.
In the previous article, we discussed the consumerized model of IT. Now let’s have a look at a locked down model, and some guidelines that will help maintain sanity both for the IT group and the user community at large.
On any given day, I’m likely to have some form of conversation that includes a discussion of why no one should have administrative privileges, or why everyone should have them and IT shouldn’t care. To paraphrase Mr. Kenobi, both arguments are correct, from a certain point of view.
The core of the issue comes down to determining what is most important to an organization.
Here’s a compilation of user interface changes in Lion and how to revert them back to familiar behavior for your changephobic charges.
Now that Lion has been released, some of you may have noticed the new scroll behavior. Whether you love it or hate it, you may be called upon to change it.
In the previous article we discussed using grep and awk to harvest information. The final example in that article may have left us wanting. In this article, we’ll discuss some additional options that the cut command can give us.
As sysadmins, we often need to write scripts that will interact with hard disks or other volumes on a client computer. These scripts usually need some information about the volume(s) being worked with, such as a device identifer, UUID, etc..










