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Computer Info #1 from the Command Line

Part of my client management process involves using the “Computer Info #1″ field in Apple Remote Desktop 3 (ARD) to store the physical location of each machine on my network.  This helps me quickly identify a machine when I’m looking at a list of several hundred Macs.  Currently, I enter this information manually on each computer when they’re re-imaged over the summer.  I’m always looking for ways to reduce the number of steps in my imaging process, so I’ve been trying to find a terminal command that I can use to push out this setting to multiple machines at once through ARD.

After much searching, I found my answer:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -configure -computerinfo -set1 -1 your info goes here

Use ARD’s ‘Send UNIX Command’ feature and send this to the machine(s) you wish to update.  Enter the information you’d like in place of your info goes here. If you’d like to enter a space between words, use a backslash and a space like this: First\ Word

ARD allows you up to 4 fields of computer info, so just follow the convention for those as well (-set2 -2, -set3 -3, etc).  I’ve tested this with OS X 10.4, 10.5 and 10.6 with success.  It was unsuccessful on a machine running OS X Server 10.3 (an old eMac running as a CD-ROM server, serving up disk images).  To find out more command line options for setting up and configuring Apple Remote Desktop, enter the following command in a terminal window (you’ll be asked to authenticate as an administrator):

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -help

Even though doing this manually only takes a few seconds, it certainly adds up when you have to do it a few hundred times.  I can also now do this at the time of imaging, or any time without having to control the remote screen through the GUI.  I may eventually automate this and incorporate it into a post-flight script as part of my imaging workflow.  If I do, I’ll be sure to post the script.

I’m hoping to find out what you are all interested in reading, which in turn, will help me post more frequent updates.  Feel free to use the sidebar widget, or fly-out suggestion button on the right.

UPDATED: It appears that Western Digital has released a firmware update and a utility called VCD manager, which will prevent the Virtual CD from mounting.  Both pieces of software are Windows only, and are available here.  Thanks to robert and Section8 for posting this in the comments below.

I recently purchased a 1TB Western Digital MyBook Essential from Amazon.  It comes pre-loaded with WD’s StupidWare SmartWare software, which is their cross platform answer to Apple’s Time Machine.  A decent effort, but of no concern to me.  I wanted to use the drive my way, so I partitioned and formatted it, but could not get rid of the SmartWare partition.  I did some research and found it’s a part of the drive’s firmware and mounts as a virtual CD every. time. the drive. is. mounted…After trying gparted in Ubuntu Linux, Disk Manager in Windows XP and a host of boot/partition live discs (Easeus Disk Copy, Ultimate Boot CD, Hitachi Feature Tool), I gave up on being able to access that ROM portion of the disk and thought of alternate solutions.

I remembered that I have the simple, but very handy DoSomethingWhen system preference pane installed.  DSW allows you to perform a few basic actions when a volume is either mounted or unmounted.  I use this to automatically run an automator workflow I wrote to back up my primary flash drives when they are inserted.  I created a new rule that will automatically eject the WD SmartWare virtual disc (VCD) when it is mounted.

It’s not the optimal solution I was looking for, but at least it takes the burden of always ejecting the VCD, off of me.  I’ve contacted Western Digital and asked if they have plans to publish a firmware update with the ability to remove this software.  If I ever get an answer, I’ll be sure to post it.

[Download DoSomethingWhen]

However, OS X 10.6 ‘Snow Leopard’ was released a few days ago and with it, a new graphic for me to update my ARD Leopard icon!  Good timing Apple, thanks.  Enjoy!

[Download]

I use Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) to connect to my servers at work.  I have another copy of ARD installed on one of the servers as well, and occasionally I’ll need to use ARD on my local machine to connect to a server remotely, and then run another instance of ARD on the server, all within the instance of it running on my desktop.  If you’re having trouble following, that’s like calling someone and telling them to call other people for you.

There’s a security preference setting in ARD to disable you from doing exactly this, so as to prevent someone from controlling or viewing your screen when you are using ARD.  Somehow, this setting managed to enable itself.  You’ll be presented with a window stating “You are not authorized to control this computer.  Apple Remote Desktop or another administration application is currently running.” This is highly irritating since it kills your remote session and the only way to fix it is to issue a killall “Remote Desktop” terminal command remotely to that machine, or to get physical access to the machine and quit ARD.

After a little digging in .plist files, I found the entry I was looking for.  Right click (or control+click) on the Remote Desktop application and select ‘Show Package Contents.’  This will open a new Finder window.  Open the ‘Contents’ folder, and then open the file called ‘Info.plist‘  Find the entry in this property list called “LSMultipleInstancesProhibited” and change its value to “No.”  Save the file, relaunch ARD and you should be good to go.

I realize the topic of this post may be a bit specialized, but I would surely have liked to had something like this as a guide when I recently had to overcome this challenge.

Most of our entire campus is still running OS X 10.4.11, for the sole reason that login times for a .local Active Directory domain STILL take 2-3 minutes (as of 10.5.6).  Our Lower School purchased some Lego robotics kits which came with new software called WeDo.  The minimum requirements are OS X 10.5, and the installer will not run on OS X 10.4.

To get around this, I did the following:

1. Install WeDo on a machine running OS X 10.5
2. Copy the ‘WeDo Software’ folder out of the applications folder, to a flash drive or network location, to later install on your 10.4 machine
3. Copy the ‘WeDoi386English.pkg’ package from /Library/Receipts/ to your flash drive

Copy these items from your flash drive to the same locations on your 10.4 machine and that will get the software running on your Tiger machine.  To get around the annoying Flash security warning, we need to tell Adobe Flash Player to trust this application by doing the following:

1. On your 10.4 machine, access the Flash Player Global Security Settings by visiting the settings manager here
2. Add WeDo to your list of trusted locations by Edit Locations>Add Location>Browse for Folder> and browse to /Applications/WeDo Software/
3. Click Always Allow

There is a second disc of optional activity templates that came with the software.  To get that content running, do the following:

1. Install the Activities software on a machine running 10.5
2. Copy the the /Library/Application Support/WeDo/ folder to your flash drive
3. Copy it back in the same location to your 10.4 machine
4. Install Pacifist from Charlessoft
5. On the Activities installer disc, right click on the ‘WeDo Activity Pack 1.0.pkg’ and select Open With>Pacifist
6. Click the ‘Resources’ tab, and click the disclosure triangle next to ‘activities.pkg’ to expand its contents
7. Do the same for the ‘Scripts’ folder
8. Click the ‘postinstall’ script and click ‘Extract To…’ from the menu bar, to extract it to your flash drive
9. Copy the script to your 10.4 machine and run it in Terminal

If you launch the WeDo software, the activities will now be enabled (the Lego man’s head will now be yellow and clickable instead of grayed out and non-clickable).  If you need to do this on a larger scale, I used Apple Remote Desktop to copy the necessary files and run the python post install script.  One note on the Flash global settings:  you must copy ‘~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/macromedia.com/support/flashplayer/sys/settings.sol’ to all of your user accounts on the Tiger machines you’d like to run WeDo.  Instructions for doing that are outside of the scope of this how to.

As always, your results may vary but this has worked flawlessly for us so far.

Since my CS3 folder icon has been my most popular blog post, I decided to create a new one for the CS4 suite of Adobe applications.

I debated sticking with the ugly black font Adobe uses for the application icons, but I’m a sucker for consistency. Feel free to download and use, and as always, please leave a comment if you like the icon.

[Download]

I accidentally discovered that in OS X Leopard, if you have dock magnification turned off, you can temporarily enable it by holding Shift and Control while moving your cursor over the dock.

This does not appear to work at all in Tiger, and I’ve only tested it in OS X 10.5.6, so it’s possible it may not work below that.

Twitterrific by The Icon Factory

We have a web filtering appliance installed as part of our network at my place of work.  Among the many functions it performs, packet shaping and filtering is one of the most important, and most annoying.  In our setup, port 443 (https) isn’t heavily restricted, so I use port 443 where available for any software I want to bypass the appliance and its rules.

Mail.app, iChat, Mailplane, etc all have options in their preferences to set alternate ports, while Twitterrific does not.  However, through a simple .plist hack we can tell Twitterriffic to use https traffic.  Navigate to and open the following property list file:

~/Library/Preferences/com.iconfactory.Twitterrific.plist

If it does not already exist, add a new Child property and call it “protocol” (all lower case, no quotes).  Set the class to String, and the value to “https://” (again, without the quotes).  Quit Twitterrific if it’s open, relaunch and voilá, you’re now connecting to Twitter over the secure http protocol.

Your results may vary if your LAN administrator blocks Twitter packets, or has other means of restricting traffic on port 443, but it’s worth a shot.

I got a little icon happy today and decided to merge the outer space image you see in Time Machine (called Vortex) with it’s default disk icon, to create the Time Machine Vortex icon.  I got a little lazy so there’s no drop shadow and the part of the Vortex image I used looks almost black, but I think it’s subtle enough without going overboard.

Replace the default OS X Time Machine disk icon with this one for some customized interface goodness, and as always, if you like the icon leave a comment and let me know.

[Download]

I’ve tried managing the mouse preferences to prevent Dashboard from opening when users click the scroll ball, but I can’t seem to get it to work for the life of me.  The same applies to disabling the Dashboard application and all accompanying applications through Workgroup Manager.

I came across DashOff, an application for enabling and disabling Dashboard, but it requires user interaction and I want this to be automated.  I finally gave up and decided to create an Applescript application called KillDash to run at login, to issue a “defaults write” command to disable dashboard.

I’ve set the application to run in the background so the only thing users will notice is their Dock relaunching when the script executes the “killall Dock” command to apply the preference setting.

I used ARD to copy the KillDash application to the /Library/Scripts/Finder Scripts folder, since I didn’t want users to easily find it, and that location seemed to make the most sense.  I then used Workgroup Manager to add it as a login item to all of my computer groups.

Hopefully this will help if you’re in a similar situation.

[Download Application]

Google Notifier lets you choose from the Mac’s standard notification sounds, or two custom tones that Google supplies.  We’re simply going to replace one of these tones with our own. Since we don’t want to start messing with the OS sounds, we’re going to replace one of the Google Beeps (as they’re called).

I decided to use the classic “You’ve Got Mail” email notification sound from way back in the glory days of AOL.  Once you’ve decided on your sound, save it as an .mp3 and name it Google Beep 1 (including the spaces).

Navigate to the Google Notifier application which is typically located in your Applications folder, unless you put it somewhere else.  Right click (or control click for those still using a single button Apple Pro Mouse) and choose Show Package Contents.  A new window will pop up showing the contents of the Google Notifier package.  Open the Contents folder, then the Resources folder.

Scroll down until you see Google Beep 1.mp3. Drag your custom sound into this folder and when prompted, click Replace.  It’s not necessary, but if you’d like to keep a backup of the original Google Beep 1.mp3, rename it to something like Google Beep 1 BACKUP.mp3 before dragging in your sound.

Lastly, go to Preferences in the Google Notifier menu bar item and choose Google Beep 1 as your sound.  Maybe Google will include the ability to select your own sound in a future release, but until then this should get the job done.

Set Gmail Notifier to use Google Beep 1

What sound are you using for your notifications?  Are you using a different sound for Google Calendar notifications too?

For a few months now, I’ve been wondering when Cupertino is going to put out a new version of Apple Remote Dekstop (ARD).  Partly because I want new features, mostly because I’m tired of looking at the Aqua Blue desktop background on the application’s icon.

I was bored tonight and decided to take care of that last part myself.  I present to you, my second ever OS X icon, ARD Leopard!  I took the binoculars from the current ARD icon and combined them with Leopard’s desktop sidebar icon.  The imperfections of my horrible Photoshop skills are barely noticeable and I think it looks pretty good.  Feel free to download, and if you like and use it, please leave a comment.

[Download]

This would be useful for something like a small office setting with one scanner, which all users could access from their Macs rather than having to use the one machine the scanner is connected to.  This works for almost any imaging device, including the iPhone.

With your iPhone connected, launch Image Capture and select Devices>Browe Devices… from the menu bar.  Select your iPhone and click the Sharing… button at the bottom of the window.  Next, check the Share my devices and Enable Web Sharing boxes.  Provide a shared name, a password (optional) and click OK.  You’ll now notice a Shared checkbox for your iPhone.  Check it to share your phone.

Click Sharing.. once again.  You’ll now notice an IP address underneath the Web Sharing check box.  Open your web browser of choice and type in the IP address, including the port number (the numbers after the colon).  You are now browsing the pictures on your iPhone (and any other devices shared with Image Capture) through your web browswer!  Note, this is an internal IP address and will only work on your local network, but it’s a great way to share your pictures with others on your LAN.