breednet

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.

I recently had a need to migrate all of my Outlook Contacts over to Apple Mail/Address Book and Microsoft Entourage for Mac. Since the Outlook PST format is proprietary (direct export/import from Outlook to Entourage is not supported), I needed to find a way to do this. I decided I had 3 options:

1.) I could spend $10 and buy Outlook2Mac.

2.) I could setup an IMAP server on a Linux box and copy all of my contacts to the IMAP server and import from there to Mac email programs, which would populate the Apple Address Book.

3.) I could export my contacts into vCard format (*.vcf) and import into Mac.

Since I was planning to later convert the physical machine to VMware, I chose option 3.

To do this, I found a great VBscript online here (thanks to Dave Moats). I created a new folder on my WIndows XP PC at c:\vcards and ran the script as follows:

cscript exportContacts.vbs c:\vcards

Hope you find this link and script helpful, I sure did, and have added it to my arsenal for