Articles tagged with mac os x

1. Restart Brother ControlCenter

   Posted on November 06, 2012 in System Administration

   On your Mac, the Brother ControlCenter software that let's you scan an image from your Brother MFC to your computer is started at boot by launchd. Therefore, it can be restarted from the command line.

   For example, here is a list of processes controlled by launchd:

   $ launchctl list | grep brother …

2. Lion + Cisco VPN DNS Workaround

   Posted on November 07, 2011 in System Administration

   When I upgraded to OS X 10.7 (Lion), I started using the built-in IPSec VPN client rather than Cisco's VPNClient. I experienced problems immediately. At first it appeared that the connection was being made, but no traffic was passing. When I tried pinging by IP address, I found that …

3. Mac OS X terminal and GNU screen scrollback

   Posted on October 11, 2011 in system_administration

   If you're a frequent user of GNU screen on your Mac, you are probably tired of using ctrl-a [ to enter scrollback mode. Adding the following lines to the .screenrc configuration file in your home directory in order to scroll with your mouse:

   defscrollback 5000
   termcapinfo xterm* ti@:te@
   

4. Convert MOD Movies with VLC on Your Mac

   Posted on July 11, 2011 in Software

   My wife uses a Canon FS100 for taking home videos of the kids. If you aren't familiar with it, it's a fairly light-weight camcorder that uses SDHC cards rather than tapes. The only real grievance I have with it is that the video codec it uses is not compatible with …

5. Installing Unison 2.27.57 via MacPorts

   Posted on June 13, 2011 in System Administration

   I've mentioned before that I use Unison to keep a few important directories synchronized between my various workstations and file server. I made the switch to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS recently, and started using its unison 2.27.57 package. This breaks all of my Macs that use unison 2 …

6. rsync: on remote machine: --extended-attributes: unknown option

   Posted on May 27, 2011 in System Administration

   rsync: on remote machine: --extended-attributes: unknown option
   

   If this is the output you get when running rsync, you are almost certainly running the Mac OS X version of rsync -E on the client with something else on the server side. The fix is to install the MacPorts version of rsync …

7. Adding Windows Shared Printers to Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)

   Posted on March 29, 2011 in System Administration

   I was recently struggling to add a Windows shared printer to my MacBook Pro (running Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard)) until I ran across this post which gave me two important hints:

   1. You need to use the Advanced tab in the Add Printer dialog. You can find this …

8. tshark Fails: Interface is Not Up

   Posted on July 20, 2010 in System Administration

   This problem happened on a Mac Mini running OS X 10.4 (Tiger) not too long ago. The user was trying to run tshark against interface en2 — a USB <acronym title="Network Interface Card">NIC</acronym>. The tshark command produced the following output.

   # tshark -w /tmp/slap -i en2
   Capturing …

9. Minicom: device /dev/ttyS0 is locked

   Posted on July 12, 2010 in System Administration

   It seems like I have been working with Mac OS X serial ports a lot lately. Since the Mac in question is hundreds of miles away, I've been doing all of this via the command line using tools like kermit and minicom. One error that we ran into recently was …

10. Set Mac OS X Time Zone from the Command Line

    Posted on May 11, 2010 in System Administration

    Viewing and changing the time zone in Mac OS X via the command line uses the systemsetup command:

    $ sudo systemsetup -gettimezone
    Time Zone: US/Eastern
    $ sudo systemsetup -listtimezones
    <snipped>
    $ sudo systemsetup -settimezone US/Central
    Set TimeZone: US/Central
    $ sudo systemsetup -gettimezone
    Time Zone: US/Central
    

    This command is available both …