Sc@-tt3r-ed Thoughts

A couple of days ago, I was dealing with the issue of trying to have home directories residing on Mac servers where the users would connect to these home directories which are auto created from their Mac workstations, but also, need these same home directories to be available for mapping via login script to the Windows clients.

The problem that I was faced with, which also matches my philosophy about security, was that everywhere else where I had created shares, I had them setup as hidden shares. Something makes me uneasy knowing that users would be able to just browse all shares (Even though they can’t really access them) if the shares are not hidden.

So, in all my Windows environments, where user data is on Windows shares, the path looks something like this:

D:\User\Students\%USERNAME% with a share point physically pointing to D:\User, and named user$, so the path to the user’s home directory from a UNC perspective would look like this:

\\servername\user$\students\%USERNAME%

Can you guess where the problem is on a Mac, trying to create the same type of share?

\\servername\user$\students\%USERNAME%

From my research, it doesn’t seem like it’s even possible to create a hidden share from Mac OS X Server, at least not natively. I have tried everything, from changing the name of the share to have a “$” sign in it, to changing the share name in the SMB protocol options. Non worked, or returned the expected result.

The solution ended up being a hack, it’s not permanent, as it will revert back to non hidden state if any changes are made to that share point, but, realistically speaking, once a share is created, it’s permanently there, or at least long term.

To make a share hidden on a Mac, so that Windows can access it, create the Mac share , and enable the SMB protocol, and specify the name of the share. To be consistent with the above example, we’ll name the sharepoint: “user”

Once the share is created, and all the ACLs are set, open up Terminal, and su – to root

then: cd /var/samba/shares

The share we just created above will show up in that directory, just rename that to user$:

mv user user$

Now, try to access the share like you would from Windows: \\servername\user$\students\%USERNAME%

You will notice that you are now able to do so without any problems.

Of course, this article is only explaining how to create a share, and not how to properly configure Samba. There is additional details that you need to be aware of when configuring Samba, mostly related to user authentication, especially, if the Macs are not authenticating to a common directory.  This article can give a bit of an insight on how that works: http://www.samba.org/samba/docs/using_samba/appf.html

I got my hands on a copy of Mac Office 2008, and was so excited to check out the new entourage, since I’ve always had gripes about the lack of functionality of Entourage. Well, turns out that all Microsoft did with Entourage is add a few eye candy features, and shipped it back out. I figured, in 4 years, they would’ve had enough time to invest in sprucing up the functionality to become at least comparable to the PC version. I was wrong!

I am just recently a Mac person, and never really had any bias towards Mac users, but now that I have my own Mac, I will refer to “US MAC USERS”! , we, feel left out.

Here’s my opinion about it though, ever since Leopard came out with the spiffed up version of OS X mail, I’ve been using that with no complaints. ok, maybe a couple, like the lack of a nice archiving system like the PC version of outlook has, and which Entourage STILL doesn’t have! I have not tested full functionality of Office 2008, because I’m still dealing with the initial shock of disappointment!!

At this point, I’m thinking of reverting back to OS X Mail, and using the PC version running Office 2007, on my Parallels VM. cloodgy? maybe, though with the Parallels tools installs, the locations of my files don’t even matter.

Before I finish my rant on Office, I have one more gripe! Pricing!

Hello!? $400??? for the standard version of Office 2008 that actually supports connection to Microsoft Exchange. Hmm… I work for a school district, and when they create a version of office that says on it “Teacher and Student edition” … I would expect all teachers and students jumping on that version, when, in reality, in my case, 100% of the teachers will actually need Exchange functionality! So now, $150 for the retail price of the Teacher and Student edition won’t be enough anymore, and the $399 edition will be required. Granted, educational pricing will probably still be lower than that, I think that the featureset that got offered in this version does not deserve this big hype, and certainly not this high price!

Oh, and I don’t believe I’m the only one that had this issue with Office 2008 for Mac… reading reviews about it, I see these complains all over… Microsoft! get on the ball with Mac users!

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I am a relatively new Mac user, and I am still learning the ropes. One of the things that I used to be bale to do very easily on the PC was to create an ISO (CD Image file) from a CD. On the Mac, I attempted to do it using DiskUtility, which is a native tool that comes with OS X, but it does not really do the job. So, after a little bit of research, I found a cool way to do it, which is fairly easy. For this to work, you probably have to be a little comfortable using your “Terminal” application. I will try to put the steps in as much detail as possible, so that you can follow along:

Disclaimer: Please note that the tool used in this article (dd) can be dangerous, and, if used incorrectly, can end up wiping your whole hard drive, so, consider yourself warned!!

- Open “Terminal” : Applications / Utilities / Terminal

- With your CD mounted. (You should be able to see the CD on your desktop, type:
df -h

The important line is /dev/disk1s1s3 . This is the device reference to your CDROM drive.

This number may vary, and in order to be sure that your CD device reference is the correct one, you can run the following command, and that should give you at lease the first part of the device without the reference to the volume:

drutil status

This /dev/disk1 is the CD Drive.

- Unmount your CD:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/disk1
Disk /dev/disk1 unmounted.

- Now create the ISO

dd if=/dev/disk1s1s3 of=mynewcd.iso bs=2048

- When the process finishes, you should be able to mount that image using this command:

hdid mynewcd.iso

Or you can mount it by double clicking on the iso file, and it should show up on your desktop.

Gotchas:

- The main problem that I had with doing this process was to refer to the CD device, instead of the volume that I need to rip. (i.e: /dev/disk1, as opposed to /dev/disk1s1s3). If you use dd and get the final file, it’ll look fine, but when you try to mount it, you will get an error. So make sure you refer to the correct volume.

- Make sure that you are writing the ISO file somewhere within the filesystem that you have WRITE access. The safest place would probably be your home directory, so your dd line would be best that way:

dd if=/dev/disk1s1s3 of=~/Desktoop/mynewcd.iso bs=2048

This will actually write the file straight on your desktop, and you won’t have to go looking for it after the process is done.

This ISO can then be burned at a later time.