Mac OS X Admin tips and tricks

Personal notes that maybe can be beneficial to others. Use them as they are and please think before you execute any commands you may find here.

ARD

The other day I found my self locked out of ARD (Apple Remote Desktop), while lucky I had a SSH service running on my box, so I SSH’ed in to my machine and executed the following:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -configure -allowAccessFor -allUsers -configure -restart -agent -privs -all

http://ss64.com/osx/kickstart.html

SMB

New statshares Option in the smbutil command For OS X 10.9 Mavericks which also works with Yosemite.

In OS X 10.9 Mavericks, a new option for smbutil appears: statshares. The statshares option has an -m option to look at a mount path for showing the path to the mount (e.g. if the mount is called krypted this should be something like /Volumes/krypted):

smbutil statshares -m /Volumes/krypted

When run, you see a list of all the attributes OS X tracks for that mount path, including the name of the server, the user ID (octal), how SMB negotiated an authentication, what version of SMB is running (e.g. SMB_1), the type of share and whether signing, extended security, Unix and large files are supported.
Additionally, if you’d like to see the attributes for all shares, use the -a option after statshares:

smbutil statshares -a

Overall, this is a nice health check type of verb to the smbutil command that can be added to any monitoring or troubleshooting workflow.

hdiutil

I sometimes find my self wanting to convert a sparsebundle or sparseimage to a dmg or vice versa. This can be done using hdiutil

hdiutil convert -format <format> -o <output-file> <input-file>

Format can be the following:

• Image Formats:
  UDRO – read-only
  UDCO – compressed (ADC)
  UDZO – compressed
  UDBZ – compressed (bzip2)
  ULFO – compressed (lzfse)
  UFBI – entire device
  IPOD – iPod image
  UDxx – UDIF stub
  UDSB – sparsebundle
  UDSP – sparse
  UDRW – read/write
  UDTO – DVD/CD master
  DC42 – Disk Copy 4.2
  RdWr – NDIF read/write
  Rdxx – NDIF read-only
  ROCo – NDIF compressed
  Rken – NDIF compressed (KenCode)