The Mac Admin's Blog

Security has always been a concern for all of us, specially when we are in our office. For which it is necessary that we lock our machine whenever we leave our workstation. Were you been on a PC, you would have tried Ctrl+Alt+Del and clicked on Lock Computer or Windows+L can do the job. Being on Mac very few of us actually know how to lock the machine using shortcut. Let’s learn it here Open up the System Preferences and open the Security section.  Now make sure that you have set you computer to require a password once the screen saver begins or once the computer has woken up from sleep as below. Now when you hold down the keys Control+Shift+Eject your screen will go black and after 5 seconds your computer will then require a password to log back in.

To run this command line, first open up Terminal from Applications > Utilities. Within Terminal type the following: sudo softwareupdate -i -v -a This script will run and do the following: First it will invoke the software update tool, it will then install any available updates using the -i modifier, it will also install all of them using the -a modifier. Finally the -v modifier will tell you what is happening. In short, look, download, install. If you want to use this tool but you don’t want to install anything. You can let the tool list any downloads available to you. To do this type the following: sudo softwareupdate -l The, -l, modifier will list any updates. It may take a while for anything to appear, its best to let it run. You will get something similar to the image below if any updates are available. A simple and useful command, that is quite interesting. If you want more information on this tool, type the following into Terminal. man softwareupdate

Don’t know how useful this command would be for an end user but yes, if you are good at Terminal, you would love to use this. So lets start, launch the Terminal. Navigate to the zip file you want to have a glance at, by using the “cd” command and type the path to your file. For example cd ./downloads , this file can be any any where on your Mac. downloads can be replaced by the folder on your Machine. Here comes the magic bit, copy and past the following into Terminal. unzip -l "$@" MyFile.zip Where text.zip is the name of you zip file you want to view. You need to have the at and dollar symbol for the text to be displayed on screen. You should have something similar to the image shown below. Very handy where you can see the size of the file in bytes, the date is was created and the name and location of the file. You can send the information found in the screen shot to a text file. You can use this to keep a log of a text file or as a backup to send to someone els...

Here is life cycle of the most successful Mac ever - iMac

We all know the great app created by Apple, that is Time Machine. It is a brilliant application that every user should have and use it. In case you can’t manage to use Time Machine as your backup tool, you might want to try an alternative way to take one time backup. Here is another way of taking backup of your Mac using Disk Utilities. We will use this tool to take image of your current volume which has OS in it and can be used for back up. This backup is better if you don’t have a dedicated hard drive but use it once a week or so. As soon as you get this drive, you take a backup and then can replace where you got it from. Taking backup of your machine is way enabled you to use the newly taken image as OS whenever your machine crashes or you get another machine and you want all the files to be as it is on your older one. Great feature, lets try and explore more.

Once you delete the item (files/ folder) it is moved to Trash bin. Now if you want to delete those items permanently, you can click Secure Trash in the latest version of Mac i.e. Snow Leopard. In the earlier versions of Mac OS X, this feature was termed as Empty Trash. Its the same process that you do by when you select Empty Recycle Bin on a Windows Operating System. The purpose of this post is to focus on how safe your data is, once you delete is permanently from your machine. As we all are aware of the data recovery methods available in the world of IT today where you can use third party utilities and recover the data even after it is deleted from the machine. Taking this into consideration, the security of your deleted data is too low which might cause loss of business or integrity. In order to tackle this, Apple has added a feature of 7-Pass Erase using which you can securely delete the data from the machine. In this process, it writes random data on the hard drive and dele...

Mac OS X server is combination of Power and Style. It derives power from its strong UNIX base and the style comes from well known Apple GUI. This combination makes Mac OS X Server one of the robust server available in present time. Mac OS X Server is built on a fully compliant UNIX foundation. This battle-tested core provides the stability, performance, and security that organizations require. And full UNIX conformance ensures compatibility with existing server and application software. Mac OS X Server is the ideal platform for deploying groundbreaking enterprise applications and services. The kernel in Mac OS X Server provides superior thread management and affinity algorithms for efficient handling of multithreaded applications on the latest generation of Intel multicore processors. It also provides precise control of real-time processing requirements, allowing a user-level thread — even an unprivileged one — to precisely specify its requirements for time-sensitive operations...

SlingPlayer Mobile for iPad was looking pretty slick when we saw a preview a couple weeks ago, and now, just like that, it's arrived at the App Store. Folks who already invested in the iPhone app might be a bit disappointed to find they need to fork out another $30 for the iPad version -- although they can keep using the iPhone app in "Compatibility Mode" if they'd like -- but Sling is touting new video quality levels for the iPad, that your iPhone can only dream of, to sweeten the deal. There's also a new program guide UI and other iPad-friendly tweaks. Check out that video preview after the break to learn more, or just hit up your local App Store and start downloading (it's rolling out in typical App Store fashion, which means it might take a few minutes to pop up in your particular iTunes). SlingPlayer Mobile for iPad is exactly what you think: a new iOS app that lets Slingbox Solo and Pro-HD owners watch and control their home TV and DVR from an iPa...

Quite honestly, I think you’re putting the cart before the horse. Before tossing out the Keychain Access application I’d run through the steps necessary to cure whatever ails your keychain. For those tuning in at home, the first step is to launch Keychain Access and from the Keychain Access menu, choose Keychain First Aid. In the same-named window that appears, make sure the Verify option is enabled, enter your administrator’s user name and password, and click the Start button. If any entries appear in red, click the Repair button and click Start again. With a measure of luck, the red entries disappear and you’re left with nothing but black entries and keychains that perform as they should. If this doesn’t happen and you continue to have keychain problems, quit Keychain Access, go to your user folder /Library/Preferences, and move the com.apple.keychainaccess.plist file to the Desktop. This is Keychain Access’ preference file. If it’s corrupt it could be causing the problems you ex...

Be it MUD folder or other folders, you can hide them using the following command provided you are registered as a Developer. Some applications like MS Office, Final Cut X etc create their own user data folder inside your Documents folder, which at times is irritating. Here are the steps that you have to follow in order to hide the folder. This command has to be executed in Terminal: SetFile -P -a V "~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/" Now once it is hidden all the apps which require those folders or files in those folders will be able to access it, it just that it is hidden. You can replace the path of the folder from what is mentioned above. If you want to see that folder back in your Documents folder, try following command in Terminal: SetFile -P -a v "~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/" This command works well, but the only drawback with this application is that it needs you to be a developer to use this. For any query / suggestion, Tweet on http:/...