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Careful with that iPhone Data

Posted June 30th, 2008 by Edward Marczak

For everyone getting ready to rid themselves of an iPhone (for whatever reason), please remember: inside the iPhone is simple flash memory. This memory is fairly recoverable, even when a restore is run to "wipe" the contents. WIth the ability to "jailbreak" an iPhone and access the filesystem, the problem of leaving sensitive data on the device becomes a little more problematic.

At this stage, I'd recommend waiting until the version 2 software ships and seeing if there's a true secure wipe before flipping a used iPhone.

1 Comments

OS X 10.5: Important Leopard Docs

Posted November 10th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

Two of the best/most important docs I've found that discuss changes in Leopard:

Daemons and Agents

and

What's New In Mac OS X

Enjoy!

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OS X 10.5 Leopard Utility update: sort

Posted November 8th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

As tends to happen between milestone releases, utilities get changed in oh-so-subtle ways. This time, sort broke for me. That's right, sort! Of the things...

10.4 sort accepted the "plus notation" for denoting the position of the key that you wanted to sort on:

ls -l | sprt +5

(OK, terrible example as you can do this completely with ls itself, but, you get the idea).

In OS 10.5, that is gone, and you need the more formal "-k" switch:

ls -l | sort -k 4

Note that the plus notation is zero-based, and the k switch starts at 1.

Be aware!

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OS X Leopard Utility: createmobileaccount

Posted November 7th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

Possibly one of the best additions to a scripter's arsenal: createmobileaccount. Buried way down in /System/Library/CoreServices/ManagedClient.app/Contents/Resources is where you'll find this little gem.

Once on (or ssh-ed into) a machine that's tied to OD, simply:

./createmobileaccount -e -v -s -n username

The "-e" switch creates a FileVault home....exceptionally cool. Just "./createmobileaccount" for help.

Thanks again to the engineer that put this one together!

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OS X 10.5 Leopard Utility update: syslog

Posted November 7th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

Ah..."syslog -w" also now dumps the last 7 lines of the file. That's a nice touch and improvement over Tiger, which showed nothing until new entries were added to the asl database. Thanks to whichever engineer took care of that!

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OS X 10.5 Leopard Utility update: tail

Posted November 6th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

In OS X 10.5 ("Leopard"), tail can now follow multiple files! Look:

bash-3.2# tail -f *

==> DirectoryService.error.log <==
2007-11-06 12:30:52 EST - T[0xB0103000] - Attempt #1 to initialize plug-in PasswordServer failed.
Will retry initialization at most 100 times every 1 second.

==> DirectoryService.server.log <==
2007-11-06 12:40:19 EST - T[0xB0289000] - Registered node /Cache
2007-11-06 12:40:19 EST - T[0xB0289000] - Plug-in Cache state is now active.
2007-11-06 12:40:19 EST - T[0xB0185000] - Plugin "Active Directory", Version "1.6", is set to load lazily.

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OS X and Kerberos

Posted November 4th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

OS X Server has used Kerberos as a single sign-on technology for some time now.  It's rare, though, to find a Kerberos server on a workstation, but that's precisely what you'll find on each and every OS X v10.5 workstation.  Single sign-on with no infrastructure.  Very, very cool.  However, it's not really documented very well.  Apple just put this kb article on-line, though:

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=306723

Here's hoping to further implementation details!

3 Comments

MacTech DTrace Article

Posted November 4th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

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

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OS X 10.5 Leopard Hibernate Options

Posted November 4th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

The auto-hibernate ("Safe Sleep") feature in Tiger and Leopard on newer Macs really needs the ability to be fine-tuned.  It's one of the first things I typically turn off.  While not perfect - there should be a GUI component - imagine my surprise when I went to dump my Safe Sleep and sleepimage from my newly-installed GM version of 10.5.  pmset's hibernatemode still allows turning the feature off altogether.  But look at this new mode:

4 Comments

Safari and Sonicwall

Posted October 16th, 2007 by Edward Marczak

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?

5 Comments
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