OS X Recovery through authenticated proxy

Posted on December 3, 2013 by Noel B. A. — No Comments ↓

According to the article http://support.apple.com/kb/ht4718 using Recovery is not supported through proxy from the local Recovery System (pressing alt key and selecting the Recovery Partition) nor from the “pure” Internet Recovery (command+r on newer hardware).

Well as it turns out Apple does include the proxy functionality in the recovery partition environment but does not include the UI for it. So you can use the networksetup command and make the installer work through an authenticated proxy. Here is how you would do it.

-Open a terminal window from the utilities menu

-Run networksetup with the following syntax. All options are required. The on is included to specify that we need the authentication to be on

networksetup -setwebproxy <networkservice> <proxyserver> <port> on <username>

For example I would run

networksetup -setwebproxy Ethernet proxy.pretendco.com 80 on nbalonso

-Then it prompts for the user’s password

-The keychain pops up in the UI asking you to access the credentials. You accept providing no password, because the keychain has a blank password in the install environment.

-Now you do the same thing for the https traffic

networksetup -setsecurewebproxy Ethernet proxy.pretendco.com 80 on nbalonso

-It prompts for the user’s password once again

-Quit terminal and continue installing as usual

PS: I have not tried to make the “pure” internet recovery work through an authenticated proxy. If you are going to try it check out the bless and nvram  commands and their options. I doubt you can make it work but who knows

Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in IT and stuff

Bandwidth usage from terminal

Posted on December 1, 2013 by Noel B. A. — No Comments ↓

Last week I had to keep an eye on a computer’s network usage while the user was using her computer to troubleshoot something.

Initially I ssh’ed into the machine and used the common ‘nettop -m tcp’. But still I wasn’t quite satisfied with keeping my session open and one eye continuously on the terminal.

I searched some network analytic tools for OS X but all of ‘em required compilation and some extra bits.

So that next time it is easier and faster to deploy and use this tools I have put together an installer that includes three of these tools already compiled for OS X

  • bwm-ng : very simple small tool with simple UI that monitors both network and disk IO. Very useful for totals by interface
  • iftop : a bit more advanced with a more detailed UI. You can see ports, sources and destinations.
  • vnstat + vnstatd : useful tool to get the total usage of each interface by time. Includes the daemon but you need to build the launchDaemon yourself. It is quite easy

To download the package click the screenshot of it’s content.

click to Download

PS: post inspired by Ed’s article in this month MacTech magazine

Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in IT and stuff

New MunkiReport-php 2

Posted on November 29, 2013 by Noel B. A. — No Comments ↓

I may or may have note said clearly in the past that, in my opinion, the Munki project is one of the best open projects in Mac Admin community. It is a great open source project with very capable people.

One thing that extends Munki’s capabilities beyond just a way to manage software is it’s ability to run pre/post-flight scripts. This allows reporting data about the clients and you most likely would want to store that in a web server so that you can review the client status. Much like puppet’s facter.

Back in the day when I rolled out Munki to our client base I used MunkiReport to collect this information. The product was very good but not easy to tweak. It was based on a python .egg which I never dealt with in the past.

Then Arjen ported this to php and created MunkiReport-php. This was much easier to play with and implement features as you needed. I added a feature to report local administrator accounts plus some other reports needed in my company.

Yet Arjen has done it again. He recently launched the second version of his tool MunkiReport-php 2 . In this case the project is a (almost?) complete re-write. The idea is to base the tools on modules that collect data as needed and puts it together in a dashboard that you can show you boss and he/she can easily understand. I was on holiday last month eager to come home and start playing with this!

We have not yet put this fully in production (I plan to do this next week) but even during the testing it has helped me to identify some issues in our workstations. We have upgraded the ram for some computers that had few GB, replaced some drives that were reporting SMART failure, chat with some users about freeing space in their drives and even started discussing which updates we should force install thanks to the widgets.

I have put together a demo site on my RedHat’s OpenShift so that you can check out it’s features and decide whether it can fulfill your needs. The project is open and most probably it’s author welcomes your contributions.

https://munkireportphp-nbalonso.rhcloud.com

PS: A firm competitor of this is MunkiWebadmin, which is also a great project and gives you a chance to administer your Munki server from a web interface. Also Simian and MunkiServer do similar tasks with different approaches. If you want to discuss the differences between them feel free to use the comments below or jump into the ##osx-server IRC channel where you could find me Sun-Th

Tagged with: , , , , ,
Posted in IT and stuff