Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Snow Leopard: Allowing standard users to add printers

In Snow Leopard standard users are not allowed to modify the print queues.  Apple has a work-around in this KB article:  http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3511

Run this command:

dseditgroup -o edit -n /Local/Default -u admin -p -a student -t user lpadmin

Where "admin" is the short name for the local admin account and "student" is the name of the user

Monday, September 5, 2011

How to configure a hidden account that has ARD access and also must request control from the user

I was asked to create a hidden account that had remote control access through ARD but that also had to request permission from the user before being allowed access to the computer

Running the following in ARD/Unix using the root account will create a hidden standard account called "hidden", set the password to "Hidden123", turn on "request permissions to observe/control" and add the account to the Remote Management "allowed users" list:

dscl . -create /Users/hidden
dscl . -create /Users/hidden UserShell /bin/bash
dscl . -create /Users/hidden RealName "hidden"
dscl . -create /Users/hidden UniqueID 499
dscl . -create /Users/hidden PrimaryGroupID 1000
dscl . -create /Users/hidden NFSHomeDirectory /Local/Users/hidden
dscl . -passwd /Users/hidden Hidden123
/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -users hidden -privs -none -clientopts -setreqperm -reqperm yes

A "UniqueID" lower than 500 will create a hidden account.

To remove the account (run as root through ARD):

dscl . -delete /Users/hidden

This works for Leopard and Snow Leopard

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Cannot exit Snow Leopard Screen Saver with AD credentials

On bound Macs there is a problem where a computer that has been left on, with the screen saver active, for more than 10 hours has its Kerberos ticket expire.  If this happens a user is unable to unlock the screen saver using their AD credentials.

Here is the KB article from Apple on how to fix this problem:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS3287


Thursday, July 28, 2011

How to display the DHCP server in OS X

It has always frustrated me that I could never find a way to display the DHCP server on a Mac- something like ipconfig /all on a PC.  I finally discovered a way:

ipconfig getpacket en0 (en1 if you are on wi-fi)

Look for the line that says "server identifier" and that is the IP of your DHCP server