Silent-install Adobe Flash Player with Apple Remote Desktop

Adobe has a package installer made just for us System Administrators. You can find it here.

Bind Macs to OD Server via Command Line

These command-line tools can bind your Mac to any open directory (LDAP) server.

UPDATE 1: You can do an authenticated bind by adding the -u and -p options. Its extremely useful when managing lots of Macs since it automatically creates the corresponding computer accounts in Workgroup Manager.

UPDATE 2: Use the -N option to assume “yes” when prompting to add certificates (OS X 10.9+ only).

sudo dsconfigldap -sfa server.domain.com -n "server_name" -u diradmin -p "p@ssw0rd" -N

STEPS:

1) Open Terminal

2) Run:

sudo dsconfigldap -sa server.domain.com -n "server_name" -N

WARNING: REMOTE HOST IDENTIFICATION HAS CHANGED!

This usually happens when you SSH into a different computer, reinstall the OS on that computer, and try to SSH into it again. In order to fix it you’ll need to delete a line of text from the “known_hosts” file.

Reveal Mac OS X Firmware Password

Forgot the firmware password that you recently setup on your Mac? Look no further. The king of OS X himself, Topher Kessler posted an article on how to crack Mac firmware passwords using Apple’s stock Calculator (assuming you have admin access). However, if you don’t feel like reading so much, you can simply copy and paste this Python script created by davidwtbuxton (and edited by Kessler) into Terminal and it’ll do all the work for you:

python -c "print ''.join(chr(int(c, 16) ^ 170) for c in '`sudo nvram security-password`'.split('%')[1:])"

Use your iPhone as a Mac keyboard & mouse

Answer: HippoRemote Pro from the iOS App Store

You might ask, “Why would anyone want to control their Mac with…an iPhone?” Allow me to explain. My wife usually gives our 7-month old son to me while she gets ready for the day (putting on makeup and all that stuff). However, I’m usually on the computer doing research and can’t really use the keyboard with baby on my lap. Enter HippoRemote Pro.

Delete a user account in OS X

STEPS:

1) Click on the Apple logo at the far left of the menu bar and select “System Preferences”.

View user login history via OS X Terminal

This command-line tool displays a history of user accounts that were logged into the computer as well as the time and date of access from up to 2 months prior. It will even tell you the amount of time users spent logged in. I’ve had to use this method several times to catch high school students who were using their college friend’s usernames and passwords to login to our lab computers. So here’s how, its really simple..

Remove ‘Other’ account at login screen in OS X

The “Other” account option at the mac login screen is enabled by default. Networked users can login via Active Directory (AD) or Open Directory by choosing this option. However, in some enterprise situations it’s safer to hide the “Other” option. For example, our Art Department’s file server uses AD to manage student access to its its network sharepoints. One day I noticed a student was logged into the server itself (it’s located in one of the labs and looks like any other computer…don’t ask). Not good. By hiding the “Other” option from the login screen I was able to prevent students from locally accessing the server.

Adobe Flash CS6 – AIR SDK version 3.4 is missing

This error came after installing CS6 on the lab computers manually (one-by-one). Usually if you’re in a local account like “admin” the error should fix itself the first time around, but when you’re dealing with user templates and student accounts, it’ll keep popping up every time Flash is opened. Definitely not what we want.

Disk Utility – Couldn’t unmount disk

I came across this problem while trying to erase a partition on one of our file servers. After an hour or so of intense frustration, I came up with two ways to fix this..