OS X Tip - Target Mode

Have you ever wanted to quickly copy data from one Macintosh to another Macintosh? Let’s assume you purchased a new Mac and you want to copy all your data over to your new Mac and did not want to hassle setting up a network.

While booting your old Mac, hold down the ‘T’ key, which stands for target Mode. In a few seconds the Mac will display a Firewire Icon (above) on the screen. Next, connect your Old Mac to your new Mac together with a firewire cable.

On the new Mac, you will see your old Mac’s hard drive appear on the desktop. From there, you can copy data around. Think of it as the old ‘Target’ Mac is treated as an external firewire drive. In fact, if you were to put a CD or DVD into the old Mac, it will appear in the desktop on the new Mac also.

One last thing. You will notice when you install OS X, you have the option to migrate from another Macintosh. This is what you will do to connect the two computers together.

How Leopard displays Windows machines

Leopard has a new feature in which it will discover other shared resources on the network and display them on the side bar in a Finder Window. Apple computers will appear as the icon of that computer. For instance, a Mac Pro will show a Mac Pro icon, a Mac Mini will have a Mac Mini icon and so forth.

When Leopard discovers a Windows machine, it will display a Monitor with the Blue Screen of Death.

Funny.

OS X Tip - Change Time Machine Backup Intervals

Time Machine, by default performs an incremental backup every 60 minutes. To change this interval, simply open up a terminal Window and type: (Single Line)

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 7200

OS X Tip - Mighty Mouse

If you own a Macbook Pro or a Powerbook and use an Apple Bluetooth Mighty Mouse, you may have experienced an issue when you put your laptop to sleep it wakes up while the lid is closed when you move the mouse. Unless you power off the mouse, you could inadvertently wake up your laptop in your bag, drain the battery and not even know it.

The fix is simple:

1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
2. Click Bluetooth to open its preferences.
3. Click the Settings tab.
4. Deselect the “Allow Bluetooth devices to wake this computer” checkbox.

OS X Tip - Stacks

If you want to add an item to your Dock that will show you a list of your recent Items, it’s easy. Open a Terminal Window and type: (All in one line)

defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

To disable this, simply use the defaults delete command, for example:

defaults delete com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add ‘{ “tile-data” = { “list-type” = 1; }; “tile-type” = “recents-tile”; }’

OS X Tip - Monitor Hung Applications

If you ever experienced an application that keeps crashing or hangs, you know how frustrating this could be. There are a number of reasons why an application will unexceptionally quit or not respond. These include:

Lack of system resources , such as RAM
OS compatibility of the Application
A corrupt Application preferences file
Bad or corrupted system fonts installed
Faulty system memory
Failing hard drive, or bad blocks on the drive
Application conflict with another application
Lack of required patches installed

If the application unexpectedly quits, most of the time a dialog box would appear and you should have the option to generate a report where you can perform a preliminary forensics and look at all the system calls during the time the application crashed. Generally, this is most of the data that is contained in the system memory.

If the application is hanging, you can inspect what the application is doing in the background by using the fs_usage command.

Open a Terminal Window and find out what the PID is of the hung application:

% ps -ef | grep -i Microsoft

Once you get the PID, then simply run fs_usage against that PID which must be ran as root:

% sudo fs_usage PID

This will output all of the open files that the Application is accessing, or attempting to access. Chances are that if the application is attempting to open/close the same file, or is timing out, then perhaps that file is the culprit. Upon a deeper, more thorough diagnostics, you can drill down and resolve what may be causing your application to stop responding.

You can also use the Activity Monitor in the Utilities directory to perform some mid level troubleshooting as well.

Parental Controls in Leopard

Parental Controls in Leopard is a really cool feature. I have this set up at home for the kids. I set up a special account for them so they can use the computer. Configuring Parental Controls is simple. Here are some screen shots:

OS X Tip - Highlight Stack Items

Leopard has a little hidden feature in it where you can highlight stack items when you hover over it. By default, this feature is disabled. To enable it, simply open a Terminal window (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal)

In the Terminal window, type:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean yes

killall Dock

To disable this feature, type:

defaults write com.apple.dock mouse-over-hilte-stack -boolean no

Open Directory in Leopard Server - Part I

One of the benefits of having an Open Directory is that you are able to centralize the management users. OS X have a tremendous amount of features that you can take advantage of when provisioning user accounts. Even setting Parental Control restrictions on certain accounts, among other things I will be writing about in further discussions.

Setting up a Open LDAPv3 directory in Leopard is simple. I have created the step-by-step screen shots of configuring an Open LDAPv3 directory in Leopard Server.

OS X Tip - Use the CLI for Spotlight

Spotlight is a cool feature in 10.4 and 10.5 that allows you to perform really quick searches for files or words in a file, such as a PDF or a document or even a email message. Since the entire OS X filesystem is indexed, you can search using the CLI rather than the Magnifying Glass in the Finder. What is the benefit? A couple of reasons.

Firstly, I think that it is a bit faster. Secondly, You can script out routine searches or use standard Unix commands such as grep.

Let me give you an example. I am looking for a file that has the word SBS in it. Open a terminal window and type:

greg[citation] % mdfind SBS

It will return a list of all the files that match that search string that either contain the word SBS in the file name or the word SBS is found in that file. If you get an exhaustive return on your find, you can get more granular and do a grep. Let’s assume I am looking for any Excel document.

greg[citation] % mdfind SBS | grep xls

This will search out only Excel files. Once I found the file I was looking for, I can use Quicklook from the CLI to view that file. Here is an example:

greg[citation] % qlmanage -p “/Users/greg/Documents/SBS/Spreadsheet.xls”

This will open up a Quicklook window the same way you would from the Finder.

Enjoy.