Managing a large number of Macs at an institution often requires a hodgepodge of tricks and tools. While Apple packages some useful stuff os OS X server, many of the most useful things are hidden, created by the community, or rely on OS X’s UNIX underpinnings. One of the tricks that I came up with a couple years back that I have found invaluable, is a system where by I can create and manage a set of scripts on a server, that get run on each client at login. Read on for details and some snippets.
Entries from March 2009 ↓
Managing Macs with centralized login scripts
March 19th, 2009 — Technology
setting up denyhosts to block ssh attacks on Leopard
March 11th, 2009 — Technology
Deny hosts is a clever python script that will monitor your ssh log file for repeated failed login attempts, and then add the offending hosts to a system blacklist. While you can disable ssh entirely, or move it to a different port, there are reason you may want to keep it available and on a standard port and this tool will help keep the bad guys out.
- download and unpack tarball
- su as root
cd to the unpacked distribution folder and enter the following in terminal:
python setup.py install touch /etc/hosts.deny cp /usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg-dist /usr/share/denyhosts/denyhosts.cfg cp /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control-dist /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control chmod 700 /usr/share/denyhosts/daemon-control
read on for configuration
Voice to OmniFocus, revisited
March 9th, 2009 — Technology
9/2/2009 Updated to work with now longer Twitter ID numbers
back when Jott was free I was one of several people who were using it to get quick voice notes into OmniFocus (OF). A couple of limitations of the Jott solution was that:
- It sometimes had trouble understanding the recipient of “who I wanted to Jott”
- You never got a chance to proofread or edit the transcription before it got sent
There are just times when I think of something on the go, and firing up the iPhone OF app and tapping it in won’t work, so when a friend told me about vlingo for iPhone and twitter, I thought – hmm I’ve been playing a bit with the twitter API and that might be a good route for me to get stuff from voice into OF.
So here are the steps (updated with more detail):