IT

I'll be giving a presentation at the Tri-State meeting of the Apple Consultants Network titled, "Dev Tools for Sys Admins." I'll be recording this talk and have attached some resources here for those attending. Bring a laptop as portions will be hands-on.

The devil (angel?) is in the details. However, so many don't see this. If you're reading this blog, you're likely a tech-type. It's the techies that need to heed this creed as much if not more so than most. Well, I hope health care professionals follow this a bit more, but I digress. Technology only follows the rules we tell it, and has no way of doing as we simply expect.

I was reminded of this after seeing the following sign:

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?