John Welch

With the Apple World Wide Developers Conference, (WWDC)getting closer, and with it, the much anticipated preview of Mac OS X 10.5, aka “Leopard”, the “What we want to see” calls have started up. While most are pretty sensible, some are not what I would term…realistic. However, there is value in putting wish lists out there […]

It’s rare that non-technical events bleed over into the world of bits, protocols, and group policy, but it does happen, and it did happen early in the morning on June 12. Michael Bartosh, author of “Essential Mac OS X Mac OS X 10.3 Server Administration“, and probably the expert in Open Directory, Kerberos, and Active […]

In my last column, I talked about how you can use Apple’s client management tools to help lock down portable/removable media access on a Mac, and how you were going to need a Mac to run the administrator tools to do this. I also mentioned that there were some tools that allowed you to manage […]

Lately, I’ve been seeing a spate of articles and products designed to deal with the problem of removable media and drives. Now, this isn’t a new problem. There have been removable media for decades, and the security involved with those devices has always been tricky. It’s also not just a strict security issue. Things like […]

With the Intel transition, there have been two issues that have cropped up quite a bit — getting 64-bit chips from Intel and what about Altivec. Both of these are of no small importance to some key Apple customers, namely the High-Performance Computing, or HPC folks, ala the cluster in Virginia, the COLSA cluster, and […]

On April 11, Apple released a major update to its primary client administration tool, Apple Remote Desktop. With this latest release — Version 3 — Apple added quite a few features and fixed some long-standing quirks that were around in Apple Remote Desktop 2. For me, the biggest fix was reporting. In Apple Remote Desktop […]

In this week’s column, there’s so much going on that I’m actually worried about taking up most of the space on Datamation’s site. On April 3, the only way to dual-boot an Intel Mac with Windows XP required slipstreaming the Windows install CD. It was a rather involved process. What you got didn’t have a […]

With the release of the 11.2.3 update, the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit — aka the MacBU — has filled some rather important gaps in how well Entourage, the PIM/Email component of Office 2004, plays with the rest of Mac OS X. By adding support for Mac OS X’s Spotlight search and Sync Services, the MacBU […]

So today’s column is about a couple of products that have caught my eye, mostly because they make my working life easier. The first is free with every copy of Mac OS X — namely Apple’s Migration Assistant. Now, like a lot of sysadmins, I had a series of scripts and procedures that I used […]

A new set of Mac malware threats have emerged in the Mac world, albeit without causing more than some annoyances and tedium on the part of the victims. I’m not going to get into the details of the various implementations of these attacks, as that takes up a fair bit of space, and there already […]