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A place where new Mac users can find comprehensive, unbiased information about using a Mac, and Mac Pros can share the years of wisdom they have acquired

Ultimately, I was foiled by the security features of the Mac. I found that SSH attempted to log me in as the account owner of the Mac itself, rather than letting me to supply my own log-in name and associated password. In effect, I couldn't log on as anyone except the owner of the Mac account, at least by default. Because I didn't have an account on that Mac and my friend with the Mac didn't have an account on my Linux box, I couldn't log in.

For individual Mac users or small businesses, it's usually not a problem deploying new Macs with a standard image -- as a Mac support specialist, you might just load each machine manually. But imagine if you need to deploy hundreds or thousands of Macs, PCs, or XServes. You'd need a small army of techs or a way to do the job automatically. That's where DeployStudio comes in handy. This freeware tool can be used to create deployment files using Netboot, external USB or FireWire drives, or any AFP, SMB, or NFS sharepoint on the network.

After updating to Mac OS X 10.5.7, a user may not be able to log in to a managed client workstation. On startup, or after entering the user name and password, the user may be prompted for an administrator name and password, but nothing can be entered. This issue can occur on PowerPC-based Macs if the file /etc/authorization is not updated correctly when installing the Mac OS X 10.5.7 Update.

This extract from a chapter of our book Troubleshooting Mac® OS X describes several ways to free-up space on your Mac OS X startup disk, also known as your Mac OS X boot volume.

As a Mac sysadmin, I've had the need to manipulate the dock on hundreds of systems at a time. I used to cobble together terrible shell scripts to do the job, but now thanks to plistlib and python, plist manipulation is really easy. I am releasing this utility free under the Apache 2.0 license. Hopefully some other sysadmins will find it useful. dockutil is a command line utility for managing Mac OS X dock items. It can add, replace, list, move, find, and delete dock items. It supports Applications, Folders, Stacks, and URLs. It can act on a specific dock plist or every dock plist in a folder of home directories. It is compatible with Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard.

Kinemac is a 3D Real Time Animation & Presentation Software for Mac OS X (Universal Binary for Mac-PowerPC and Mac-Intel). It allows you to create your own professional 3D Animations with the simplicity of a 2D presentation tool. See the animations in our Gallery. Kinemac plays the animations in real time at full screen and export them to QuickTime movie files or to a series of single still images. For this reason it's the ideal application to create Advertising for TV, trailers for movies, video-clips, instant scrolling messaging to put "on air" in real time, video content for CD, DVD, web sites... Part of the $39 MacHeist bundle

With its use of the latest Mac OS X technologies, breakthrough ease-of-use and innovation, all Mac users will find CheckUp very useful and even fun. It's the dashboard of your Mac! CheckUp is designed to check your disks and memory but also to monitor the usage of CPU, Memory, Disk Drives and Network Adapters in a very visual way. By adding rules that will be triggered when certain conditions are met for a specified resource on the computer, you can receive visual notifications. For example, CheckUp can alert you when a hard drive seems to have hardware failures, even when the application is not opened (thanks to an innovative background process).

We all want our Macs to be labour-saving rather than labour-causing devices. Yet, even if you've been using a Mac for a long time, the thought, "There has to be a better of way of doing this," will probably come to mind on a daily basis.

Changing file permissions on the Mac is something you need to know how to do if you want to create your own non-home directory only shares on the Mac. Leopard implements folder sharing similarly to the way SharePoints does. I find myself needing to change permissions regularly because certain programs like to change file permissions on their own. The Terminal is generally better for changing permissions because it is much faster and also because you have more control. Sometimes you may need to do this is the file permissions get messed up in Leopard's File Sharing under System Preferences.

Visage allows you to easily and safely customize the appearance of your Mac.  The preference pane's simple interface contains several tabs, each of which will help you customize a different part of your Mac. You can run screen savers as your desktop background, customize your login panel, personalize system alerts, and more! Visage keeps track of Apple's default settings for every customization, so you can easily switch back to the original settings at any time.

Twin is the most flexible online backup solution for Mac OS X, compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe. It even supports offline backups to external drives. Twin is a true Mac product that preserves Finder info, resource forks, ACLs, Privileges and comes with an elegant user interface and a powerful assistant. It also provides numerous high-end features like AES-256 encryption, efficient bz2 compression, powerful exclusion rules and scheduler, support for splitting large files during network transfers, network-error recovery, individual digital signature for backed up files, multi-cores machines optimization and much more!

According to the X-Force 2008 Trend & Risk Report (PDF) released early this year, Mac OS X Server and Mac OS X top the list of operating systems with the most disclosed vulnerabilities for 2008. Each accounts for 14.3 percent, and has been in the top five in each of the last three years. Rounding out the top five were: Linux Kernel at 10.9 percent, Sun Solaris at 7.3 percent, and Microsoft Windows XP at 5.5 percent. The purpose of this data is to compare the total number of disclosed vulnerabilities with each individual operating system. Vulnerability data is submitted to the Mitre Corp. and then appears in the CVE (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) List.

Apple Inc.'s Mac OS X market share has passed the 8% mark for the first time, a research company reported today. In September, Apple's operating system ran on 8.2% of the computers that accessed the 40,000 sites monitored by Net Applications for clients, the company's data showed. The Mac's share of the operating system market was up over August's by nearly four-tenths of a percentage point, the biggest one-month gain since May. Apple tends to post significant increases in September, according to Net Applications. Last year, for example, Mac OS X climbed by 0.45 points that month

Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) 3 is the latest release of Apple's desktop management software, enabling administrators to distribute software, manage assets, and remotely administer Mac OS X systems via a network. ARD 3 takes advantage of innovative technologies in Mac OS X Tiger such as Automator. Automator is built on the concept of actions - discrete tasks such as opening a file, cropping an image, or sending a message. With Automator users can string together a series of actions into a single Automator workflow document. Much like a script, a workflow document can be executed, triggering each action and passing any data generated by the action to the next action in the workflow. Using the Automator actions installed with ARD and custom actions you create, you can develop workflows to automate repetitive system administration tasks. For example, workflows can distribute software, create detailed software and hardware reports, and remotely configure systems using ARD.

RCDefaultApp is a free utility that CreativeTechs has started adding to our recommended Mac OS X installs. It adds a special preference pane that allows you to quickly change the default application for many common situations: * Open all your .pdf files in Acrobat instead of Preview. * Pick a different default mail client or web browser. * Control what opens when digital cameras or webcams are plugged in. * Close security holes with how certain weblinks are handled. Of course you can change these settings other ways. But RCDefaultApp makes it much easier by putting the most requested controls into one location - a new "Default Apps" option at the bottom of your Mac OS X System Preferences.

BoinxTV turns your Mac into a TV studio for creating Live to Disk, Live to Internet and Live to Stage video. Record stunning studio shows, podcasts, sports events, concerts, interviews, sermons, seminars and more using your Mac and multiple cameras. Part of the $39 MacHeist bundle

LittleSnapper is a screen and web-snap application for Mac OS X Leopard. It is currently in development, scheduled to ship Q4 2008 Part of the $39 MacHeist bundle

Timer is a complete and professional stopwatch, alarm clock, countdown and clock utility for Mac OS X. Apimac Timer is freeware and gives you the known ease of use of other Apimac Applications.