A blog about archives, storage and everything

Tag: scripts

  • Add header here

    Or remove it, up to you,

    Had some fun creating a longer script to add a text header to some shell scripts, then because I wrote the wrong thing to all my shell scripts I had some more fun tweaking my script to find and remove this header. I’ve added it to my GitHub repo with a couple of other scripts based on the find command, one of my favourite unix tools since it is so handy.

    The script that should be a Unix one-liner: add (or remove) a header

    Some of the other example scripts based on find might be of interest to some, such as the

    File Name Check

    Especially important with certain filesystems (certain encrypted filesystems) with file name “length limits”. So why not check for these files and zip them up and put them aside for safe keeping. In practise, the only files which push this limit are downloaded (purchased) from stock photos sites and write the file name with every keyword. Nice, but why can’t we have standard metadata handling these days? (I can dream!)

    Archiware P5

    The last two scripts I made with Archiware P5 in mind, as I manage many servers for clients with P5 Archive and I really do love this software and the team. More Archiware P5 inspired scripts are in other repos here or on my main P5 code site

    Find A Trailing Space

    In this case, besides it just being nice to clean up folder names with invisible trailing spaces before the archive job it was also necessary when using the P5 Companion (desktop) app which will not archive a top-level folder with a space at the end of the name.

    Make (Only) One Thumbnail

    This script makes only one image thumbnail per RDC folder, as they normally have a lot of R3D files which are part of the same shot. Also, I don’t want a lot of duplicates and only one is enough.

    And while yes technically P5 Archive can make thumbnails and proxy videos when it is archiving (and I do use this feature) making proxies of RED files is an intensive process for older computers which means taking a long time, so pre-processing these R3D files ahead of time on faster computers can make the final archive job quicker. As part of some pre-processing before archiving to LTO (or wherever) is making sure some formats like R3D (aka RED) files have a thumbnail which will then end up in the P5 Archive created Archive index.

  • SimpleMDM tricks and tips – part 1

    Custom Attributes

    Custom Attributes in SimpleMDM are a way to assign values in a few different cases. I will show one use case, scripting, and one example: checking the firewall.

    Note: for more fun use cases see Steve Quirke’s blog post, or the talk “Making SimpleMDM complicated” by Lucas Hall at MacDevOps:YVR in 2021 or even the official documentation.

    The goal: Checking the firewall

    I wanted to see the status of the macOS firewall in the device view dashboard. That’s so simple, right? Well, I wanted to see it at a glance for every device, and not have to go into each device entry to see if the firewall was enabled.

    Write a script:

    #!/bin/bash

# Check firewall status
firewall=$(defaults read /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf globalstate)

if [ "$firewall" = "1" ]; then
    echo "Firewall is enabled"
elif [ "$firewall" = "0" ]; then
    # Set firewall status
    #defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.alf globalstate -int 0
    echo "Firewall is NOT enabled"
else
    echo "Unable to determine firewall status"
fi

    Note: This is my script. This seems to work. If you have other working examples let me know.

    Add it to SimpleMDM scripts

    Add your script to the scripts section. Check the “Enable attribute support” check box.

    Add a custom attribute

    Set up a custom attribute that your script will populate with its variable later. I set up one for the firewall.

    Create a job

    Your script will need to run (once, or scheduled) to populate the value into the variable and into the custom attribute. Choose what script runs where on what Macs. And choose the custom attribute.

    And choose the custom attribute.

    Note: The cancel job if not started is helpful if your devices are not responding. And is a premonition to issues you may have with this feature and might give some flashbacks to the ancient way of using scripts in ARD (Apple Remote Desktop) to try to make changes, back in the days before MDM or good configuration management tools ie. munki puppet chef salt etc

    Dashboard Devices

    Add your custom attribute to the viewable columns in the Devices dashboard and your life will be full of joy. Seeing at a glance your scripts output variable as a custom attribute.

    And now I just have to recreate everything in MunkiReport as a custom attribute and then I’ll be good.

    Script debugging.

    Running scripts is all well and good until your devices don’t check in and don’t run the scripts for whatever reason. Rebooting the Mac helps. Refreshing the inventory in SimpleMDM helps (maybe) and well, you’ll see it’s like the old ARD scripts run ad hoc and you’ll wish for better tools like fully functional DDM (declarative device management) which is like configuration management of the days of old. Incorporate MunkiReport and Fleet’s osquery tools and save me the trouble of doing piecemeal.

    Enjoy the script output in the custom attributes for now and send me your awesome ideas for what to script next.