Technology

Various things to run in Terminal on a new Mac (Updated)

Get rid of the annoying network stores: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true stop telling me shit I already know: defaults write com.apple.LaunchServices LSQuarantine -bool NO Put Screenshots in their own Directory on the Desktop mkdir ~/Desktop/Screenshots defaults write com.apple.screencapture location ~/Desktop/Screenshots

  • Set a Login Message: sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow LoginwindowText "Room17: Unauthorized Access Prohibited" * Disable saving to iCloud defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool FALSE * Disable Dashboard `defaults write com.

Turner’s Presentation at re:Invent 2016

My VP, Michael Koetter, gave a presentation in the Media Track at re:Invent on the AWS-based Content Supply Chain we’re building. You can check it out here: Plus a Link to SlideShare.net where you can see one of my diagrams: http://www.slideshare.net/AmazonWebServices/aws-reinvent-2016-turners-cloud-native-media-supply-chain-for-tnt-tbs-adult-swim-cartoon-network-cnn-mae302

t2.nano

Is apparently not large enough to run wordpress and mysql. Thus, the issues with this site being down. Plus I generally neglect to post anything here.

AWS API Keys in OSX Keychain

AWS API Keys are powerful things that you don’t want to leave lying around. Amazon’s suggestion is to keep them in ~/.aws/config. I’m not a fan of that. OSX has KeyChain, which is a secure repository for credentials and what most OSX Apps use for caching your login to various websites. This might not be the ideal solution, but it’s better than an unencrypted file in your home directory.

I’ve built a set of three scripts that will use OSX Keychain to store your AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, and retrieve them into environment variables when needed to use the AWS API or any script that honors those environment variables.


AWS New Account Config

We’re getting ready to deploy our first production workload in AWS, and our AWS account team recommended we enable a bunch of auditing on our accounts in each region. That is a lot of clicking for 9 regions across three accounts. This script will configure AWS CloudTrail and AWS Config Service in all regions, configure the logging bucket, and establish a reasonable password policy. Amazon is about to release 3 (or four) more regions in Ohio, England, Korea and India.

GitHub

I’ve created an account on github. You can find my work (and mock me for it) here: https://github.com/jchrisfarris/via XKCD

Chef on a Raspberry Pi

So OpsCode (or now GetChef) doesn’t have an omnibus installer for the ARM/Raspberry Pi, but it’s pretty easy to get it setup. Start with the base default Raspbian (stretch) and get it where you can ssh. Run the following on the Pi: sudo apt-get install ruby bundler sudo gem install chef —verbose Then on your workstation this to bootstrap: knife bootstrap -N NODENAME -x pi -P raspberry –sudo IP_of_rPi You need to set the nodename explicitly as the hostname under raspbian is “raspberrypi” and you probably want something else.

Quick Hack to allow any folder to be a TimeMachine Destination

Apple doesn’t let you use a shared folder as a time machine destination in regular OSX (you can buy server and get that functionality), only a full volume or Time Capsule. But you can use this command line trick: This assumes your Folder exported is called TimeMachine AFP mount your TimeMachine share via Command-K on the Mac you want to back up. Try this. It will probably fail with an error about locking: sudo tmutil setdestination /Volumes/TimeMachine On the server you want to back up to, run defaults write /private/var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/sharepoints/TimeMachine.

Recovering deleted files on an iPad

So I come home yesterday to a very, very dejected child. Apparently she somehow deleted all the slides for a school project due when she gets back from vacation. First off – iOS doesn’t have .Trash. Second, she hadn’t synced to iTunes in several months. Third, iCloud backup wasn’t turned on. Not expecting too much, I took her iPad and scoured the Internet to see what I could find that would act as an undelete tool for iOS.