Steven Eppler’s Blog

After a little searching, I found out you can add printers to OS X from the command line using this syntax:

lpadmin -p Printer_Name -L "Printer Location" -E -v lpd://x.x.x.x -P /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/en.lproj/Printer_Driver.gz


If you don’t specify the -P option, it will not show up in your Print or Printer Setup dialogs. If you want to include the generic PPD, it is located here:

/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/Versions \ /A/Frameworks/PrintCore.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Generic.ppd

That path is all one line, with no spaces.

written by eppler

My Leopard SSH agent was not working after upgrading a Macbook Pro. I was using a few other applications in the past to manage my SSH keys – in fact, I didn’t even know this was a feature until the new install on a Mac Pro worked without me installing the ‘keychain’ app from fink, or a number of other solutions that I had tried in the past.

To fix this, I had to edit the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file. In that file, there is an entry for SSH_AUTH_SOCK which needs to be removed. I just removed the the section that looked like:

<key>SSH_AUTH_SOCK</key>
<string>/tmp/503/SSHKeychain.sock</string>

The text may differ slightly on your computer.

written by eppler

When connecting to AFP shares in the new Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), you may get a -5002 error when the server only supports clear text passwords. To resolve, either disable clear text passwords on the server side, or change the following plist:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient.plist

You need to change the afp_cleartext_allow value to “Yes” “true” or “1″ (depending on the current values you see, either “false” or a “0″).

Here’s an excerpt from my file:


...
<key>afp_cleartext_allow</key>
<true />
<key>afp_cleartext_warn</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>afp_default_name</key>
<string></string>
...


written by eppler

Mozy is an online backup service – right now I’m using it to backup roughly 1.6GB of data. You can backup 2GB for free, or pay around $5 per month for unlimited backup, which I am thinking about upgrading to.  Recently they released a Mac client which makes this a better option for me.  They also offer a commercial version of the service which called MozyPro.

read more | digg story

written by eppler

Sometimes, Adobe InDesign will crash when trying to print on a user account with a networked home folder under Mac OS X. Here is the fix that I use:

ditto -rsrc /System/Library/Printers /Library/Printers

I send that command to all computers with the problem via ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) and it seems to resolve all of the issues.

If that doesn’t work, you need to copy or create a Printers folder in the current users Library folder. Drop into Terminal and type the following:

mkdir ~/Library/Printers

Those two methods have resolved most of our InDesign printing issues.

written by eppler

Here at the school district I was running into a problem where if several Mac OS X wireless clients logged into the network at once, everything slowed down to a crawl. After researching the problem, it looked like the user’s Library and Microsoft User Data folders were causing the problem. I tried turning on OS X’s home folder syncronization, but that didn’t work very well, and filled up our older computers fast. The solution I found was to locally cache the user’s Library and Microsoft User Data folder. To do this, create a symbolic link from the user’s networked ‘Library’ folder and point it to a local source. I chose /tmp/UserCache/username/Library. Here is the login script I created to automate the process:

#! /bin/bash

# Create local user caches of important directories
# Written by Steven Eppler 04/04/2006

export PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin

# Set user variable
user="$1"

# This grabs the user's home directory server
input=`dscl localhost read Search/Users/$user NFSHomeDirectory`
nethomedir=${input:18}

# Or you can hardcode it...
# nethomedir="/Network/Servers/ServerName/Volume/$user"

# Check for blank nethomedir - otherwise you will delete
# the root /Library folder!
if [ """$nethomedir""" != "" ]; then

echo $user
echo $nethomedir

# Create local caching directories
mkdir /tmp/UserCache
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user/Microsoft\ User\ Data
mkdir /tmp/UserCache/$user/Library

# Give everyone rights to them...
chmod -R ugo=rwx /tmp/UserCache

# Create Documents and Desktop folder (sometimes they don't exist)
mkdir $nethomedir/Documents
mkdir $nethomedir/Desktop

# Delete old folders or links
rm -rf $nethomedir/Library
rm -rf $nethomedir/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data

# Create new links
ln -s /tmp/UserCache/$user/Library $nethomedir/Library
ln -s /tmp/UserCache/$user/Microsoft\ User\ Data $nethomedir/Documents/Microsoft\ User\ Data

fi

written by eppler

Here is a video of my first R/C flights. On my first landing I almost hit the cameraman, but all was good – only bent the landing gear a tiny bit which was easily bent back. The video turned out pretty good, and all was created/rendered using iLife ‘06 on Mac OS X 10.4.3 (running on an AMD CPU…hmm…)

You can view the video here.

written by eppler

If iTunes 6 is getting the -208 error, this article at Apple may help you get it fixed.

Remember when typing commands in Terminal – everything is pretty much cAsE sEnSiTiVe.

Apple – Discussions – Solution to the iTunes -208 Error Problem

This link is now broken (apparently the discussion thread got closed).

Now you can just download the iTunes 6 installer from Apple’s site. iTunes 6.0.1 fixed this issue.

written by eppler

For a few weeks now, I have been unable to access digg.com through my work’s internet connection. I have been unable to determine where the problem lies, so I decided to access it via an SSH tunnel. Here is the command I used:

sudo ssh -l *_username_* -L:*_localport_*:*_remotehost_*:*_remoteport_* *_tunnelhost_*

With all the blanks filled in, here is my final command:

sudo ssh -l seppler -L:80:digg.com:80 epplersoft.com

Then, I modifyed my /etc/hosts file to and added the following line:

127.0.0.1 digg.com

Now, I can access digg.com from work and home via my SSH tunnel.

…And that’s how I got my digg back.

written by eppler