et lux in tenebris lucet

Because I like cats:

A lot of people ask me where I get my cables; the answer is almost always Monoprice, unless they don’t happen to have it.

After migrating the home directories on Windows and Mac to network mounts at $dayjob, Word for Mac started behaving badly when someone tried to save a file, giving vague errors about incorrect permissions or file naming. It turns out that Word wants to write temporary data in a folder called “/.TemporaryItems” for each user, and since the root that contained all the home directories was read only, it was failing. The solution for $dayjob was to create the “.TemporaryItems” folder, chgrp it to a user group everyone is part of, and chmod 770 it. No more Word file save errors!

Here’s some references where I found out about Word’s lust for a “/.TemporaryItems” directory.

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302979
http://word.mvps.org/Mac/CantSaveToServer.html

Since all my Mac users auth using LDAP, and Windows auth is through Samba->LDAP, $dayjob already has globally unique UIDs on all platforms. All I had to do was create the directory it was looking for and make it group writable.

I found this little trick to split a string in bash, so I’m sharing. Maybe it’s obvious to some people, but I don’t do a lot of shell scripting, so it was helpful to me.

BASH: Split a string without ‘cut’ or ‘awk’

I just came across this today; it’s great to see someone finally made a GPL PV driver for Windows on Xen. Although it’s highly alpha as of this writing, hopefully the community will rally around it and start patching it into something that’s production quality. I’m using Windows on Xen at $dayjob, and it would be wonderful to reap the performance benefits of this.

http://www.nabble.com/First-release-of-GPL-PV-drivers-for-Windows-tf4723006.html

I normally don’t post stuff like this online, but this made me really sad, especially since I have a soft spot for cats:

“According to veterinarian Patrick Proctor, the PETA people told North Carolina shelters they would try to find the dogs and cats homes. He handed over two adoptable kittens and their mother, only to learn later that they had died, without a chance to find a home, in the PETA van.”

Read the whole article: Better dead than fed, PETA says

An official fix has been merged into Postfix for spools that are mounted with the “noatime” option:

– On backup MX servers where the queue file system is mounted with “atime” (file read/execute access time) updates disabled, the flush daemon would trigger mail delivery attempts once every 1000 seconds, thus rendering the maximal_backoff_time setting useless for backup MX service.

This is likely a result of my “Backoff not working?” thread on the postfix-users mailing list. (Although I’m still going to recommend leaving atime enabled, as I mentioned earlier.)

I’ve been building an LDAP single sign-on system (for Linux, Mac and PC via Samba PDC) at $dayjob and I hit a wall with my MacOS X clients: it seemed that admins had to be specified locally. However, I finally found this solution which boils down to running this as root (or sudo) on each of your MacOS LDAP clients:

niutil -createprop / /groups/admin groupmembers ""

dseditgroup -o edit -a it -t group -n /NetInfo/DefaultLocalNode admin

Now, anyone who is in LDAP group “it” automatically has local administrator rights on the Mac, and thus can change settings and install software requiring authorization. Since I’m also running a Samba PDC out of the same LDAP, I could make that “Domain Admins” as well so the same admin group has admin rights on every Mac or PC client. Or you can fancy it up and create groups of administrative users for different groups of Mac clients, but since I’m the only IT person at $dayjob, I don’t have any use for that.

Also, I like having the “traffic signal” network status show up by default on the login window:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow AdminHostInfo DSStatus