Alan Siu's Blog

Tag: mac

  • Packaging Starry Night College for Munki

    The following tutorial is just a more step-by-step version of Multiple guest users on one PC – How to register Starry Night, and with Munki in mind. Find the Starry Night app in your /Applications folder, right-click it, and select Show Package Contents. Then, go to Contents > Resources > Sky Data > Resources and…

  • Restoring a deleted recovery partition on a Mac

    Update This is only one method to restore the missing recovery partition. Check out Recreating a deleted recovery partition on a Mac for another method. The Missing Recovery Partition Problem I don’t actually know how a recovery partition gets deleted, but I’ve come across a few Macs with the partition deleted, and I’ve been looking…

  • Running a post-uninstall script for a Munki package

    Much as I love editing text files and entering commands into Terminal.app, I do also appreciate a good GUI frontend. Apart from munkiimport, I mainly manage Munki using MunkiAdmin, as I referenced in Absolute beginner’s guide to setting up Munki (not monkey). Of course, I got a bit too comfortable with the GUI frontend, and…

  • Configure Mac Remote Management from the Terminal

    On a Mac, if you want to remotely manage the client machine using ARD (Apple Remote Desktop), you can go to System Preferences > Sharing > Remote Management. What if you want to configure a user to remotely manage the machine but you have only SSH access (or you want to run a script instead…

  • Using MySQL with MunkiReport

    By default, MunkiReport uses its own embedded sqlite database, which apparently isn’t as robust as MySQL (the sqlite website has more information on sqlite’s appropriate uses and limitations). If you are extremely unfamiliar with MySQL databases, you may want to just stick with the default sqlite database until you are. I have a basic tutorial…

  • Restoring a Mac partition to its full size

    Usually, when you add a new partition to a Mac using Disk Utility, you can then just (minus sign) delete the new partition and Disk Utility will automatically expand your first partition to take up the free space. Occasionally, Macs will act weird and not fill up the free space and, more importantly, not let…

  • Packaging FileMaker Pro for Munki

    If your organization, school, or company has volume licensing for FileMaker Pro and want to make your package Munki-able, this is how you do it (based on Assisted install for FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced). Older: Find your FileMaker installer .mpkg file. This installer file will likely come on a read-only medium (read-only .dmg…

  • Changing the Energy Saver schedule via the command line on a Mac

    You can find a far more comprehensive tutorial at Power Management & Scheduling via Command Line, but if you want to change just the basic options, a command like this should do it: sudo pmset repeat shutdown MTWRFSU 22:00:00 wakeorpoweron MTWRFSU 6:00:00 That’s the equivalent of going to System Preferences > Energy Saver > Schedule…

  • Troubleshooting Mac “printing – printer is in use” error

    I haven’t seen this a lot, but it’s common enough that you can find it in a Google search. Here are some of the top results: HP 7520 – Printer in Use – won’t print from MAC I have a new iMac running OS X 10.8.3. I am adding a Windows network printer by IP…

  • Permanently add a self-signed certificate to Chrome on a Mac

    Here’s a great tutorial on how to do so. The only thing I had to change was importing the certificate from Keychain Access instead of double-clicking the certificate. Otherwise, it works fine, and the screenshots are very helpful! If you prefer the terminal, you can save yourself a few steps at the end by using…

  • Deleting keychains at user logout

    Update: The easiest way to do this is actually to install Offset and then put a RemoveLastUserKeychains script into /usr/local/offset/logout-every (make sure it’s owned by root:wheel and has 755 permissions). Backstory This is a sequel to Deleting Mac Keychains in an Active Directory Environment, which talked about a way to delete keychains at logout using…

  • Restore Failure: An error (32) occurred while copying. (Broken pipe)

    The problem If you are cloning an image using Thunderbolt and Disk Utility (or even using Firewire instead of Thunderbolt), you may come across this error message: I’ve actually never experienced that with Thunderbolt (not saying it can’t happen), but I’ve had it happen twice using Firewire. At first I thought it was the cable…

  • Enabling https for Apache server on Yosemite

    I found a bunch of different instructions, but these are the instructions that actually worked for me (regular Mac running Apache server) to get https working (self-signed certificate, so you will get the certificate warning from your web browser): Step 1 Self-signed SSL Certificate on Mac Yosemite Step 2 Enable HTTPS in Apache on Mac…

  • Prevent a partition from mounting at boot time

    Cheating a bit here, because I’m just linking to an excellent blog post on the procedure: OS X Tip: Prevent a Volume From Mounting at Startup It’s very helpful if you’ve set up a Boot Camp dual-boot with Windows, and you don’t want to have the Windows partition automatically mount when you boot into Mac…

  • One working fix for “filter failed” printer message on a Mac

    There seem to be several “working” (your mileage may vary) fixes for the “filter failed” message when you try to print on a Mac (may happen in Linux, too, since Mac uses CUPS for printing), and they all seem driver-related: ‘Filter’ failed error when printing from EPSON Yosemite and a printer driver that broke The…