The Cool-ade Blog: Mac-Windows, Information Security and Technology. » Leopard

Apple 10.6 updates from Apple 10.5 Software Update Server

admin — Fri, 21 May 2010 09:00:02 +0000

Your running a 10.5 server with (SUS) software update services and you’ve got 10.6 clients on your network. You want to patch your 10.6 clients but they won’t with 10.5 SUS. The Apple solution is to upgrade the server to 10.6 so it can serve 10.6 updates. An alternative solution is to hack the 10.5 SUS. This hack has been taken from a thread from Jan Uschok on the Apple Support Discussion page: http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2169042&tstart=15

1: Stop SUS

2: Download http://swscan.apple.com/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist and copy it to /usr/share/swupd/html/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist

3: Change it to look like this:

PrimaryCatalog
http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog
CatalogsList

http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog
http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog
http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog

4: Edit /etc/swupd/swupd.plist and change the metaIndexURL entry to look like this:

metaIndexURL
http://myserver.com:8088/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist
portToUse

5: Start SUS and wait for it to download the catalog files and to generate the local versions thereof.

6: Once it has generated the local catalog files add some symlinks like this:

cd /usr/share/swupd/html
ln -s /usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog .
ln -s /usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog .
ln -s /usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog .

7: Just in case restart SUS

8: Wait for SUS to download all the updates

9: On your 10.6 client go in the Finder to /Library/Preferences and open com.apple.SoftwareUpdate.plist. Change the CatalogURL entry to point to http://myserver.com:8088/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog

10: Launch Software Update on your 10.6 client and be happy

It should behave like a 10.6 server now as it is serving the catalog files according to the 10.6 server documentation as described on page 89 here: http://images.apple.com/server/macosx/docs/System_Imaging_and_SW_Update_Admin_v10.6.pdf

Snow Leopard Ditched Resource Forks

admin — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 11:00:40 +0000

Yes, the dot underscore (DS_Store and ._ AppleDouble files) are gone. They have been replaced using SMB Alternative Data Streams (ADS) also known as NTFS Streams. See http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/windows-ntfs-alternate-data-streams for detailed information on ADS.

As a network administrator, I welcome this but it may have repercussions. For example, you have a bunch of Quark files without extension names on an SMB share in the AppleDouble format created by a 10.4 client. By default a 10.6 client wouldn’t be able to read the Quark files because it doesn’t read the AppleDouble dot underscore file and there are no extension names. Therefore, Apple have made it easy to re-enable the feature. This is possible be editing the nsmb.conf file.

To disable named streams as a default for your Mac OS X client user account

Execute these two commands in Terminal:

echo "[default]" >>  ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf
echo "streams=no" >> ~/Library/Preferences/nsmb.conf

To disable named streams as a default for all Mac OS X client user accounts on a Mac

Log in to Mac OS X with an admin user account if you aren’t already logged in as an admin, then execute these two commands in Terminal:

echo "[default]" | sudo tee -a /etc/nsmb.conf
echo "streams=no" | sudo tee -a /etc/nsmb.conf

See the man page on nsmb.conf for more details about how to configure it.

To re-enable streams on 10.6 or to enable it on 10.5 change streams=no to streams=yes

Mac Leopard not saving resource forks on Isilon OneFS

admin — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 09:00:27 +0000

MacOS X Leopard (10.5) doesn’t save resource fork information (._ hidden files) on the Isilon by default. Leopard uses the Isilon SMB Alternate Data Streams (ADS) feature which allows metadata such as resource fork data to be stored. However, MacOS X Tiger (10.4) cannot use ADS. Therefore, files (without extensions) written to the Isilon from Leopard(10.5) cannot be identified by Tiger (10.4) unless ADS is disabled.

To disable support for ADS for all shares in a cluster, edit the file /etc/mcp/override/smbd.xml and add the following text to the file immediately after any line that begins :

This has to be done via the command line so you will need to SSH into the isilon cluster. Once you have made this change, wait 60 seconds for it to propagate to all nodes in your cluster, then run following command to restart all SMB connections to the cluster, in order to take advantage of this change:

isi_for_array -q ‘killall smbd’

If the change made to the global smbd.xml file doesn’t work, edit the file /etc/mcp/override/smbd_shares.xml and add the following entry into the individual share. See the example below: -

Once again when you have made this change, wait 60 seconds for it to propagate to all nodes in your cluster, then run following command to restart all SMB connections to the cluster, in order to take advantage of this change:

isi_for_array -q ‘killall smbd’

Please DO NOT atempt this if you are not familar with the command line environment.