MikeSpike.org » Technology

Happy 35th Birthday Apple

Michael — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 19:43:58 +0000

Photo by pingiwingi: flickr.com/photos/pammb

I almost forgot another significance to April Fools’ Day, today is Apple’s 35th birthday. I can’t say that I remember them from day one since I wasn’t even born but I can remember the first computer I laid my hands on. This was a Franklin ACE 1200, with a $2,200 price tag, dual 5.25″ drives and 48k of RAM. WOW that was a machine!! I can’t even recall how to work the machine but I do remember my dad teaching me the basic syntax to make games execute. That was enough to ignite my interest in computers for years to come. The rest is history… To many more years of Apple innovation, just be careful not to become “the man.”

Thanks dad for making me a tech addict and Happy birthday Apple.

How to reset the WebGUI password for a Highpoint RocketRAID 3522 Card

Michael — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 00:23:12 +0000

Here’s a recipe to reset the IOPController password to access the WebGUI of a Highpoint RocketRAID 3522 Card running on OSX.

1. Go to the Mac driver/firmware download page for High Point Raid cards. You will need to get the flash utility that is contained in the EFI Firmware update download. Within the dmg look for a file called ‘flashelf_mac’, this will allow you to flash the bios using OSX.

Driver/firmware Download Page: http://www.hptmac.com/US/product.php?_index=43&viewtype=download

2. Next, go to the main Highpoint Global website and download the Firmware/BIOS driver for the RocketRaid 3522 card (see link below). This download will have the flash utility for the PC but it also contains flash files which can be used in conjunction with the mac flash utility. The file that we’re looking for is called ’3522fs.blf’. Using this file with the mac flash utility will set the firmware back to its default settings.

Firmware/BIOS driver page: http://www.highpoint-tech.com/BIOS_Driver/page/rr3522_U.htm

3. Once these two files have been acquired I basically used the flash utility in Terminal and specified the flash file. Below is the syntax to get it to work. I also noticed that unless I rebooted the server it wouldn’t allow me to log in with the default password. The default username/password should be RAID/hpt.

./flashelf_mac 3522fs.blf

Background information:

What got me into this situation in the first place was the fact that out of all the passwords that I try to remember I couldn’t recall what I set the webgui interface for the RAID card. I’m running an Intel Xserve with a HighPoint RAID 3522 card connected to a Proavio 6TB R8-MS array system. I scoured the net for solutions but I could only find bits and pieces of the answer that still didn’t add up to the solution. I found one answer but it wasn’t clear where the flash file was retrieved. This will hopefully help some other person out there who’s trying to desperately get back into their web RAID management system. Good luck!!!

Selecting audio ports on Mac Pro’s in lab environments.

Michael — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 23:04:55 +0000

Where I work, Apple computers is the standard for Communications majors. That being said, we’ve got a few labs with Mac Pro’s and 13 individual editing suites. The edit suites provide the students with a cubical shunned away from the world by a sliding glass door allowing their video creativity juices to flow. In the labs, there is a desktop at the front of the room dedicated for the teacher with wall-mounted speakers and a projector. Although all this hardware looks great on the outside, one issue that came up was audio. Since the change to Intel chips, the three audio sources (headphone, audio speaker and line-out) which if you remember, would auto-switch based on what was plugged in, has now changed to three independent sources. What this means is if a user wants to make any changes to how audio gets routed they must make the change manually. To add to this issue, my environment consists of users logging in individually every time they use a machine whether it’s in a classroom or in an editing suite. If the audio changes were a global change, I wouldn’t be having this issue; but because it has a default value (front speaker jack) for each person that logs in, I’m stuck with another problem. Which if you are thinking, I’m leaving all my grunts and complaints about OSX’s “features” in a lab environment for another blog post.

Software named Soundsource made by Amoeba makes the change pretty simple by adding an icon on the toolbar. This is a pretty slick piece of software, but this still doesn’t fulfill the user login for teacher stations in the classrooms and the editing suites which have rear speaker input. You can suggesting plugging the speakers into the front plug, but give it a day and someone would have pulled it out.

In my search for solutions, I pondered if there was any way to change the audio configuration via command line. This would at least make it a viable option to use a launchd user agent once the user logs in. Scouring the internet, which I must say I do a pretty good job, I found a utility called Switchaudio. This small utility is just what I’ve been looking for. It adds a way to select the input or output audio sources from the available sources (as shown on the right). After this, everything else fell into place. I ended up putting this file in the /usr/bin directory to make the utility easily accessible. Then I created a launchd user agent using Lingon so whenever a user logs on, the output audio changes to whatever I want (in this case “Built-in Line Output”).

Lastly, to make the changes in the affected labs and 13 video editing suites, I made a package installer and pushed it out using Remote Desktop.

Pretty simple once I figured it out…

Log into a mac using ARD’s “send unix command.”

Michael — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 20:43:16 +0000

I stumbled across this useful little tidbit of knowledge. Have you ever needed to log into several machines in a lab but hated going to each one and typing in your credentials. Well thanks to “David Kahn3″ and others for coming up with the following script,

osascript < tell application “System Events”
keystroke tab
keystroke (ASCII character 8 )
keystroke tab
keystroke (ASCII character 8 )
keystroke return
delay 0.5
keystroke tab
keystroke “username”
keystroke tab
delay 0.5
keystroke “password”
delay 0.5
keystroke return
keystroke return
keystroke return
keystroke return
end tell
EOF

I was able to push this script out using Apple Remote Desktop (run as root not admin) to my macs while they were at the login screen window. Just a few changes for the account username/password fields and bam the computers logged in without me having to even touch them.Beautiful

Original Post from Apple Support

OSX Leopard, Deep Freeze and Active Directory… oh my

Michael — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 02:25:06 +0000

With the never ending roadblocks I encounter at work, my task this year was to utilize the new 10.5 Leopard operating system (and then some) for a local private university. I’ve used Deep Freeze for many years and it has proved to be a great asset in keeping lab machines consistent. What the Macs haven’t utilized was a way for users to log-in with their username and password. Being a predominant PC campus, Active Directory (AD) will be the choice of Mac’s Directory Service. With all the bad rap Leopard got with Active Directory not working, I luckily was able to get 10.5.4 to bind fine with AD. Glancing into Directory Utility the light was green, all is good.

I then sent out the command through Remote Desktop to freeze the machines with Deep Freeze. Moving on to other labs I noticed after 10ish days people started reporting that they could no longer log into the computers that I had initially setup. Going into Directory Services it showed a red light with the message “This server is not responding.” Grrrrrr

Unbinding the machines then rebinding the machine solved this problem but doing this every so often across the campus would be crazy.

After searching the net, I found from my PC coworkers that they had to modify the registry on the window machines to set DisablePasswordChange to 1 in order to keep the trust between the bind to AD. Keep in mind this is all because of Deep Freeze protecting the drive from modifications. I looked hard into dsconfigad on the Macs and stumbled across an attribute called -passinterval days. This basically allows you to change the amount of days the computer will trust an account password bound to AD. By default, the amount of days the passinterval was set to change was 14, explaining why my machines were no longer connecting to the Active Directory on campus. So I sent out the command to the labs that I’ve completed so far thus this should fix the issue. One problem down…..

Hopefully this will help anyone else that is stuck in the same situation as me.

Trippy Photo plugin

Michael — Fri, 02 May 2008 15:52:48 +0000

So with the endless amount of new things that I get to encounter at my job I was shown the coolest photo plugin for firefox. A professor who is always scouring the infinite corners of the internet just to find things that students have not yet discovered stumbled across a plugin called Piclens. This little small 2MB plugin turns your facebook or google image search pages into a 3D frontrow like environment of picture bliss. The best thing about this clever plugin is that it’s totally free! What I’ve found particularly helpful is when I’m searching in google for a specific photo, using Piclens I can scroll into what seems an endless 3D wall of pictures. Find the one you want, just click on it and it immediately zooms into view. The picture’s resolution then becomes magically crisp. Brilliant!!

On thing I love about the way it interfaces with the broswer is that whenever you mouse over a picture on an approved site that it works with (google, facebook, myspace…and some more) it will show a small blue icon in the lower left corner of the image. So if you don’t want to view the picture(s) in Piclens, its so easy to bypass it. I definitely will put this on my list of favorite plugins for firefox. For Safari users, I believe at the current moment they are trying to work on making it compatible with the current version. Good luck..

Apple coming soon to Greensboro, NC

Michael — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 06:10:46 +0000

After playing phone tag all day with a friend, Jen was trying to be the bearer of good news. She told me Apple was soon to come to The Shops at Friendly Center. Not that there’s enough stuff there already, but it will fit in perfectly with the feng shui.

I searched and found two listing already in Craigslist for store positions. Has Apple grown so large that it can put a store in Greensboro, North Carolina? Apparently this will be store number four in this state, sorry Winston-Salem, ya missed out. But when you come visit the Apple store at Friendly be sure to try out Jay’s Deli, they have great ham and cheese omelette’s.