Slides from Penn State MacAdmins Conference 2012

Sunday, May 6th, 2012

This year, I gave me first presentation at the Penn State MacAdmins Conference: Introduction to Mac Triage and Troubleshooting.  Here’s the description:

In this session, we’ll go over the basics of component isolation and hardware/software troubleshooting. We’ll cover common fixes and methods for diagnosing a problem quickly and accurately.

The video should be available soon on iTunes U (I’ll post again when it’s up), but in the meantime, my slides are available here.

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Allow admin users with no password to use sudo

Saturday, April 28th, 2012

Although Apple discourages it, users can create Mac OS X accounts without passwords.  Starting with Mac OS X 10.5, Apple prevented these types of accounts from being able to use ‘sudo’ via the command line.

Why might this be a problem?  In my case, I built a diagnostic OS (accessible via NetBoot) that sometimes needed this kind of access.  If I wanted to install MacPorts, for example.  The original reason was that I was required to get CopyCatX working in the diagnostic OS, but I really don’t want to come across as endorsing this product.

Anyway, the fix is pretty easy – you’ll need to edit the file /etc/sudoers.  Although it’s recommended that you use visudo (as it does sanity checks on the file), I tend to use TextWrangler.  Carefully.

Change the line that reads:

%admin ALL=(ALL) ALL

to say this instead:

%admin ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL

(I’d recommend against copying and pasting – Bad Things can happen if this file is damaged.)

Save.  You may need to reboot, as well.

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Time for a fresh start

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Welcome.  Due to various circumstances, I’m starting over again with this blog.

Let’s start with the theme.  Jonathan Calloway mentioned this theme on the MacEnterprise mailing list, though it was a bit outdated.  Thankfully, the WordPress.com team overhauled it, and Matt Mullenweg pointed me to the new version in their theme repository via email.

The final puzzle piece was the header image.  Last night, I stumbled upon a mention of the Atkinson Dither, which Bill Atkinson developed for HyperCard.  Thankfully, this is easy to replicate using a free program called HyperDither.

My goal with this blog is to document what I’m doing and have done.  I haven’t quite figured out GitHub just yet, so code will go up here in the meantime.

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