The Mac Admin's Blog

If you dont know what would be the use of this article and what can be done by tracing packets, then probably this article is not for you. :) So lets begin! Find out what is the BS Device ID of your WiFi by going to System Profiler. Let me grab a screenshot here: Now lets use the command  tcpdump  to get what we are looking for. Also, there is another command  airport  to do similar job but we will cover details of that tool in upcoming post. sudo tcpdump -i en0 -s 0 -B 524288 -w ~/Desktop/TracePacket1.pcap It should display the details as - tcpdump: Listening... Once this is complete, close down the process. You have a TracePackage.pcap ready with the packets. Now we need to read what has it got. So we will leverage tcpdump again: tcpdump -s 0 -n -e -x -vvv -r ~/Desktop/TracePacket1.pcap Using this you can do network troubleshooting, debug a network problem. If you find yourself dumb enough to do this, you have some helpers out there, watch out for these tools, the...

Today morning I got a request from Green IT folks to enabled SSH on all the Macs that we have in Enterprise. Currently SSH is not enabled on clients and not even the Admins are allowed to do so. As it was against InfoSec policy of the client, they needed a solution that ensures SSH is not enabled for anyone except couple of Service Accounts that does background job. So what I proposed was simple, to create a Security Group in AD and add all Service Accounts to that Group and grant SSH access to that group. Now, no one else will be able to access via SSH except the members of this group. So here is what I wrote for them. In this script Joulix is the AD account and HM Admin Mac SSH is the AD group that needs SSH access.:   #!/bin/bash   # To add the User / Group to be able to do ssh. # Created by Laeeq Humam | 10.10.2014 | for HCL # Wrote for Green IT via Cisco Joulix. UN="Joulix" MACSSHGROUP="Admin Mac SSH" # Will use this group and user probably once or twice. Varia...

  Hello Again! I have 99 folders inside /Documents/Scriptology/ and I wanted to see the size of all folders and see what can I delete from there. Unfortunately, by default, Finder does not show you size of a Folder on Mac. So had to find out alternative to get the information. Its pretty simple command that unix folks already know. Try this:  du -sh /Users/laeeqhumam/* | sort -n Very practical and very useful, you will get the information as the image below:

If you ever, for any reason wanted to get more information and do a network diagnostic of your WiFi connection, you can do it just by a click. Hold down Option key and click / tap on WiFi option in the menu bar at the top. It would show you following window: You can see details of the WiFi network you are connected and also would give you option to 'Open Wireless Diagnostics' at the bottom of the menu.

So, if you already know about Safari, you might be knowing how to Reset Safari and probably that's how you delete the cache while troubleshooting. Right? Well, lets learn beyond this. Let the Helpdesk do Reset Safari for deleting Cache. Today we will cover the advance and more accurate ways that will just delete the Cache and not touch anything else. Let's begin: Launch Safari Go to Safari Menu > Preferences Under Advanced tab you will see a check box for Show Develop in menu bar Close this and go to Develop menu and select Empty Cache - you are done. Let me know if you need screenshot for this post :) If you want to take this Cache deleting thing to the next level, I have more to show you. Navigate to this location:  /Users/Library/Cache/com.Apple.Safari/Cache.db This Cache.db file should be trashed and there would not be any cache left over. Relaunch Safari and it will create a new Cache.db file. Drop a line if you are interested in learing more about handling Cache on Mac...

I will make this a quick post with three options of  shutdown  command. There are different command for this purpose but  shutdown  is cool to remember. In order to shutdown, type the following command: sudo shutdown -h now On enter it will begin the shutdown process. It is a rather severe shutdown process. It will not tell you to save documents if they are open. You can replace the word ‘now’ with a time in the 24 hour format. To restart use the following command: sudo shutdown -r now To put your Mac to sleep use the following: sudo shutdown -s now You can do more by entering time in 24hrs format. Do a  man shutdown  to learn more.

If you are reading this post, I assume that you know what is FileVault and when you need to enable or disable it. When free, I would try to write a post explaining FileVault. How to Check Status To check the status of file vault within Terminal type the following: fdesetup status This should tell you the status of FileVault How to Enable Filevault To enable FileVault type the following: sudo fdesetup enable You will need to enter your admin password. After this you will be guided through steps to complete it. This key has to be written somewhere as this key will help you to recover your disk incase you forget your password. Once done, you can reboot it. This is to create on a specific user account. How to Disable Filevault If you want to disable FileVault you can. Type the following into Terminal: sudo fdesetup disable This will disable FileVault. So if you are interested to know more about this command, do a man check: man fdesetup

I try to mention the situations and issues that I face in my daily life to ensure the knowledge is spread in fixing real time issues. I was in a situation where I had to turn on Remote Management from CLI. My colleague turned off the Remote Management and he lost the remote session while troubleshooting and there was no one to turn it ON at user's end. Fortunately, we use BOMGAR (remote support tool) and it is capable of running commands on user's machine even Remote Management is turned off. So in order to turn Remote Management On, I ran the following commands in the Command Line of BOMGAR: cd /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources and then: sudo ./kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -privs -all -restart -agent and you are done. The Mac will be ready and you can take remote session again. You can run this command directly on the Mac to enable 'Remote Management'.

Last week I came across this problem and deleting the default keychain did not fix it but somehow could not devot much time to fix it. As the solution was not available on Google, I thought to post it here. The error was:  Microsoft Lync wants to use  OC_KeyContainer_username@company.com . Please enter the keychain password  prompt appeared. Unfortunately I forgot to take the screenshot of the error message but it somehow looks like the regular keychain popup window. Worst thing about this error was that Keychain login screen was not accepting any password that I could think of, even though it was the correct one, which actually made it a strange issue for the people who are into the world of Troubleshooting Mac OS. So lets have a look at Root Cause and then at the Fix. The Cause: Microsoft Lync creates a keychain file to store encryption keys. The file is physically stored in  /Users/username/Library/Keychains  and is named something similar to  OC_Ke...

Some of iOS 7's features -- including hidden settings -- could be killing your phone's battery life. Here's how to make sure your iPhone makes it through the day. Thing is, it's not the standout features like AirDrop or the Notification Center -- it's the stealthy settings buried beneath a stack of menus. If you're noticing a quickly draining battery, or just want to get more juice out of your battery, make changes to these settings. Background app refreshing This welcomed feature finally lets background apps stay active while you multitask. The trouble is that by default  all  apps are set to refresh, uselessly stealing precious battery life. To fix that, go to Settings > General > Background App Refresh. Here, you can choose to disable the setting altogether, or just turn it off for the apps that don't need refreshing. Automatic updates A time-saver no doubt, iOS's automatic updates keep your apps up-to-date so you don't have to. According to...