IT

I'm extremely happy to say that I'm in the process of writing one of the official reference guides for Apple's high level ACSA certification: Advanced System Administrator, v10.5.

Microsoft got into the 'blog thing' pretty heavy about two years ago and I still keep finding some Microsoft blog that I haven't stumbled across quite yet. Most of them are quite good, too. This particular entry is useful, and more in line with what I tend to handle: How does Entourage Work? It steps through the various ports and protocols that Entourage uses when connecting to an Exchange Server.

As mentioned in my initial posting, full video of Macworld sessions would be made available. Well, it looks like certain sessions have been made available. Thus far, only my collaboration session has been made available:

IT812: Using Collaboration Services on Mac OS X Server

Thank goodness for good sense! The US Patent system is unfortunately broken, handing out patents in this digital age that make little sense, and show little understanding modern technology. Barracuda, as a company, is trying to stop Trend Micro, a patent troll.

Trend was granted a patent that covers scanning files that pass through a proxy. Huh?

Help Barracuda show prior art. Story here:

Linux World

At a session, people always ask if I'm going to be posting the slides. While I always do, I have long said that slides without the talk are typically of little use. Apparently, this year, all sessions but the "Power User" sessions will be available for download - slides and audio - for free! Exciting!

If, however, you just can't wait, I have both of my session slides available here:

LI222: Learning the Terminal ("Basic Foundation in Command-line Skills as it Relates to OS X")

Oftentimes, I see the word “belief” or even “thought” on tech mailing lists. Interestingly, technology and “belief” don’t go together. That’s not to say that there’s no place for it. You do need an initial belief to follow the time-honored scientific method, something all tech-types should be familiar with.

The scientific method has four steps, and seeks to sidestep the scientist’s biases. The four steps are (short version):

1. Define the question or statement.
2. Form a hypothesis (a “belief”).
3. Experiment/analyze results.

Mac OS X v10.5 ("Leopard") contains vast changes under the hood.  One of the greatest additions is Sun's dtrace.  The November issue has a fantastic introduction to dtrace, and we were able to put it online this morning!  Go check it out at:

http://www.mactech.com/articles/mactech/Vol.23/23.11/ExploringLeopardwithDTrace/index.html

Recently, some networks that I've implemented Sonicwall devices on had a peculiarity. Mac clients running Safari wouldn't load certain pages. Any other browser would be fine. Knowing that Safari links itself to frameworks in OS X that others do not, I thought I'd start there - particularly with lookupd. That was a dead end, though. So, I started some packet captures.

From there, I could see the requests and responses (SYN, ACK, SYN/ACK) and then, the Sonicwall itself would drop the client conversation. What the heck was going on?

Looks like I have another speaking date: Tuesday, the 10th of July at the Apple Market Center in Mid-town Manhattan.  The topic this time is OpenDirectory.  I'm just starting to put the slides together now, so, if you'll be there and want something covered, let me know now.

This will be a presentation for the tri-state chapter of the Apple Consultants Network, so, members or by invite only.

Again:

Tuesday, 10th of July
Apple Market Center
(153 E. 53rd Street @ Lexington Avenue, 29th Floor)
6:00 PM

Here are QuickTime movies of the presentation that I gave on February 27th to the Tri-State chapter of the Apple Consultants Network.  The topic was "On Logs: How to make the most of the logging data that your machines generate".  I created two different sizes of the preso:

On Logs, 320x240 58.6MB, suitable for iPod
On Logs, 720x480 105.5MB, much better quality