Free Utilities For Mac Admins

With the end of the year growing close, the nights growing long, and a foot of snow paralyzing a completely unprepared Seattle, our thoughts here at Make Mac Work turn to all the gifts we've received this year to make our jobs easier.

So we've collected some of our favorite free tools for Macintosh administration. We feel enormously lucky to have received these gifts from their developers, and we're sharing them here in the spirit of giving.

Some of these utilities we've already reviewed, some we're reviewing in the upcoming months, some of them we use every day, while some we only tinker with. But every single one of these applications is highly recommended, and completely free.

AirRadar:

There are many wireless scanners for Macintosh, but none as customizable or pleasant to use as AirRadar, Koingo Software's beautifully-designed and profoundly Mac-like little application.

Flame:

More a proof-of-concept that a full-fledged application, Flame is nonetheless invaluable for tracking down unsanctioned Bonjour sharing on your network. Simple, functional, and free.

FSEventer:

Fern Lightning's FSEventer doesn't just log file system changes, it charts them graphically in real time. Wonderful for understanding the systems you're supposed to keep running, and the horrible things that software does to them.

Lingon:

Peter Borg's handy front-end for Leopard's complex launchd doesn't make building system daemons easier, but it does make it faster. We've reviewed Lingon before, and we've only used (and liked) it more since then.

Password Expiration Checker:

If you've got Macs bound to Active Directory, this little AppleScript can be set as a login item, warning users that their AD password is set to expire. It may only do one thing, but Peter Bukowinski's Password Expiration Checker does one thing that's badly needed.

QuotaMonitorMenu:

Great for users new to Portable Home Directory environments, Adam Gerson's QuotaMonitorMenu displays how much space their account has left on the server. Another single-feature utility that should have come with the operating system.

Suspicious Package:

By bringing the convenience of Leopard's QuickLook to the arduous task of vetting software installers, Suspicious Package from Mothers' Ruin Software manages to be both deeply geeky and extremely elegant.

Time Machine Perspective:

Pierce T. Wetter III hacked the open source disk space monitor GrandPerspective, tuning it to only find files Time Machine had backed up once. Time Machine Perspective helps prune backups of unwanted cruft, reclaiming valuable disk space.

Wireshark:

Despite it's colorful GUI, Wireshark is anything but easy or friendly. Instead, this enormously popular Unix tool is the most powerful weapon in your network troubleshooting arsenal. Learning it could be the best gift you get yourself this year.

Special Thanks: Our friends Damien Barrett, Eddie Kelley, Jasson Lewellen, Aaron Robinson, Shayne Sandison, and Craig Swanson all helped compile this excellent holiday offering. Thanks to everyone, and we'll see you all in the new year...

Mirror Disks After Install

Disk mirroring, where data is written to two disks simultaneously, is a great low cost method to protect against single-disk failure and improve read-intensive performance. Apple's Disk Utility provides an easy way to set two disks up as a RAID mirror at installation, but once the operating system has been installed OS X can't mirror an existing drive without reformatting and reinstalling.

What began as a missed opportunity in Tiger became a buggy implementation in Leopard, and in the past year the procedure for mirroring an existing volume has changed no less than three times. This is an essential feature for storage management, and it inexplicably still only works from the command line. While not the most convenient, this method works with any Tiger or Leopard machine.

This process has the potential to destroy all the data on your machine, so make sure you have a current backup of the drive you're going to mirror and confirm the backup is both restorable and bootable. Next, if you're mirroring your existing startup disk, you'll need to boot off an installation DVD or external drive for the first part of the operation. When you're ready to proceed, type the following into the Terminal:

diskutil list

This will produce a listing of the attached disks, along with their types, names, sizes, and identifiers, like so:

/dev/disk1
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple_partition_scheme *465.8 GB disk1
1: Apple_partition_map 31.5 KB disk1s1
2: Apple_HFS Server Disk 465.6 GB disk1s2

Use the name of the volume you wish to mirror to find it's identifier. If your machine only has one internal hard drive, for instance, the identifier of your boot volume will most likely be disk1s2, the second slice (after the partition scheme and map) of disk 1. Once you've determined which disk you're working with, type the following, replacing IDENTIFIER appropriately:

sudo diskutil enableRAID mirror IDENTIFIER

If all goes well, the disk will unmount, reappearing in the Finder a moment later along with "The disk has been converted into a RAID" reported in the Terminal. At this point you can insert the additional disk you wish to use in the mirrored RAID array (assuming it's not installed already), then reboot the machine off the original drive.

Now when when you run diskutil list from the Terminal you should see two new listings, one for the new virtual RAID array (the one without slice information) and the other for the additional physical disk you installed.

/dev/disk2
#: type name size identifier
0: Apple_HFS Server Disk *465.6 GB disk2
/dev/disk3
#: type name size identifier
0: GUID_partition_scheme *465.6 GB disk3
1: EFI 200.0 MB disk3s1
2: Apple_HFS New Disk 465.4 GB disk3s2

Now with the necessary identifier information, you can assign the physical disk to the mirrored RAID array, replacing RAIDARRAY with the RAID volume (in our example disk2) and NEWDISK with the hard drive being added (here disk3):

sudo diskutil addToRAID member RAIDARRAY NEWDISK &

How long the RAID mirror takes to build depends on how much data is on the original volume, but the ampersand at the end of the command tells it to run in the background. When the process is completed you'll have two fully mirrored and redundant disks, built from your existing installation without ever having to erase the original volume.

iPhone Can’t Sync Information

While a lot of iPhones sold to corporate customers are connected to the company's Exchange server, even more float around officially unsupported. At least until something goes wrong. When your VP of Marketing signs a two-year contract on a new toy, your IT department has just gotten into the iPhone business. Which is why it's so frustrating when you see a message like this sitting in your trouble ticket queue:

iTunes cannot sync information with the iPhone "3G" because
syncing has been disabled on this computer.

The dialog even offers you the opportunity to enable syncing again, but the option doesn't actually result in anything. Once this error appears, you can't synchronize any of the data in the iTunes "Info" tab (including contacts, calendars, bookmarks, and mail accounts), though music, picture, and video syncs work normally. Home users might not notice for months, but if an iPhone is meant for business this issue renders it basically useless.

The problem is corrupt SyncServices data, the system that keeps track of information between Macintosh systems and applications. The solution is to delete the the files in ~/Library/SyncServices and ~/Library/Application Support/SyncServices, log the user out and back in, then reset the sync preferences in iTunes. This forces OS X to rebuild the SyncServices database, resolving the issue.

Entourage Won’t Update Calendars

Most Windows users have learned the hard way not to update more than they have to. After all, you never know what the newest fix might break. But when Microsoft issued the Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.3 Update, including "fixes for vulnerabilities that an attacker can use to overwrite the contents of a computer's memory", that sure sounded to Mac users like an update they shouldn't wait on.

And they were right. Sort of. The update fixed a long-standing, cross-platform, critical bug that allowed malicious Excel files to execute code on a victim's machine.

Unfortunately, it also prevented Office 2008 users with both POP and Exchange email accounts from updating, or responding to, shared meeting invitations. This may not be a common configuration among stand-alone Office for Mac users, but it's the most common setup for Macintosh users in corporate settings.

The good news is, the problem was fixed just two weeks later. The bad news is that because the update isn't considered "critical", many Office for Mac users still can't participate in the scheduling of meetings, appointments, and holiday parties. If you haven't run the Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.4 Update, it's worth doing so immediately.

Uninstall Adobe Creative Suite

If your job is to administer Macintosh computers, odds are that much of your time is spent working with Adobe's Creative Suite. And while many have been tempted to uninstall Adobe products out of frustration, removing Creative Suite entirely can be an important (and difficult) step to effective troubleshooting or a clean upgrade.

Uninstalling Adobe CS2:

The only way to completely remove Creative Suite 2 from a system is do so manually, using the list of CS2 files posted at Adobe's own support site. Unless you specifically need CS2 for legacy work, it's best to remove it completely before installing CS3 or CS4, as having multiple versions can corrupt preference files and make the applications behave erratically.

Uninstalling Adobe CS3:

Loading CS3, on the other hand, isn't always as easy as following a checklist. The installer can become convinced that some or all of the suite is already present, even when there isn't any usable software available. For this very reason, Adobe has a script to uninstall the Photoshop CS3 beta, the non-bundled versions of Acrobat 8, or even just a previous CS3 install that somehow went wrong.

CS3Clean, once double-clicked, runs in the Terminal to remove every application, file, preference, and driver that might be preventing a fresh installation. The script offers two official "levels" of cleaning, the first removing everything *but* Acrobat 8, the second removing all CS3-associated files, plus a mysterious third option which isn't listed (or explained) but is often recommended by Adobe's phone support representatives, and a secret fourth which removes *all* Adobe and Macromedia software.

The script also uninstalls CS3 in about 10% of the time the programs actually take to install initially. That means that rather than installing CS3 individually on the machines that require it, you can often save time by including Creative Suite in company-wide disk images, then removing it on the workstations where it isn't needed.

Uninstalling Adobe CS4:

With the launch of CS4 this week, Adobe released the Creative Suite Cleanup application, a graphical tool to remove all traces of Creative Suite 3 or 4. Use the pull-down menu to select your version of Creative Suite, then highlight the components you want uninstalled at hit the "Cleanup" button. If you're prompted to try uninstalling the product instead, click the "Cleanup" button again to remove all your Creative Suite components by brute force.

With these tools you can eliminate any recent version of Creative Suite, allowing you to install the newest version (or just reinstall your existing software) trouble-free.

Recommended Reading: If you're considering a full uninstall procedure to merely address a licensing issue, check out how to reserialize Creative Suite instead at the CreativeTechs QuickTips blog.