breednet

While I have owned a Macbook Pro for almost 2 years now, I did dabble (and occasionally still do) in trying to run various flavors of Mac OS X on Intel hardware. I successfully had the Kalyway version of 10.5.2 running on my Dell Latitude D610 laptop, though I could never get the external VGA monitor to work, even with a rigged paper clip to short the pin out.

Anyway, I came across this link at osx86project.org to run OS X under VMware. This was immediately interesting to me, as I have been on a mission to eliminate hardware as much as possible, thereby cutting my electricity bill and carbon footprint.

If you use Windows Servers and Mac OS X in the same environment and share files, more than likely you have encountered seeing a bunch of .DS_Store files and files that start with ._ on your Windows file servers and SMB shares.

There are several ways you can take care of this on both the Mac OS X client and the Windows Server side.

On your Mac OS X, you can prevent creation of .DS_Store files by opening Terminal and typing the following command:

defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true

You will need to hit return and restart your Mac for changes to take effect.

More information is detailed in the following KB article from Apple Support.

On your Windows Server, there are a variety of tools, scripts and utilities you can use to both run through your drive and delete these files or even monitor in real-time for their creation and deletion. One easy way to do this is to write a simple batch file to delete these files.

The batch file would look something like this, assuming you wanted to clean up Drive H:

@ECHO OFF
:: DotClean version 0.1
:: 9/20/2009
:: breednet.net – any rights reserved, but free to use and enjoy
::
:: Deleting DS_Store and dot underscores from removable drives H: and I:

ECHO Cleaning up Mac DS_Store files on Drive H: …
del /q /s “H:\*.DS_Store”

ECHO Cleaning up Mac “dot underscore” files on Drive H: …
del /q /s “H:\._*”

You can also run a VBScript on your Windows server to detect and delete the file creation in real-time. There is a great article here that covers this, as well as the source code for DotUnderscore.vbs.

Great article here on how to go about shrinking your virtual disk size for Windows images running under VMware Fusion on a Mac.

Being a UNIX/Linux user for years, one of the first things I usually need when administering a system is root access, or at least su to root to run certain commands, like update software, reconfiguration of network adapters, and so on.

By default, Mac OS X ships with the root user account disabled. You will need to follow a very specific set of steps (outlined here) in order to enable root access.

Since making “the switch” from Windows to Mac as my primary OS of choice, I have become a big fan of Cyberduck. I needed a fast and simple GUI method to edit and move files from Mac to my other UNIX systems. I have used WinSCP and PuTTY for years on Windows, so I really liked the idea of a GUI based SFTP tool. Cyberduck fits the bill (pun intended).

Here are some screenshots of Cyberduck: