Happy Sys Admin Day!

http://www.sysadminday.com/
I know I'm a day early, but I won't be around the computer tomorrow (I will be too busy celebrating). So, here's to the good sysadmins, and the lamers like me.

iPhone Mac Address OUI's

Because of security concerns, I'm thinking about filtering out iPhone wi-fi access from our corporate "trusted" wi-fi network. One thought would be to know what the MAC addresses for iPhones wi-fi start with, and block those. I found this post.

http://www.everythingiphone.com/forum/wifi/iphone-mac-address-oui-5819.html

Accessing Serial Console Using a Mac Book Pro

Mac Book Pro's are awesome, but they lack a serial port. Recently, our Network Admin left for greener pastures (or a job that gave him an office) and most of our Unix/Linux admins prefer Macs for their workstations. I found this blog post to address our problem of being able to connect to the serial access port on our network gear.

http://www.ciscoblog.com/archives/2006/05/macbook_pro_usb.html

Corrupted MS Entourage 2004

In a rush to leave the office on Friday, I closed my Mac Book Pro and didn't bother shutting down my apps (including Microsoft Entourage 2004). Much to my dismay this Monday morning, my Entourage would start to have strange errors and wouldn't allow me to open anything in the client or close message windows. Eventually, I would force Entourage to quit, and get the "do you want to submit this error" window. Clicking on "Details" I would see

Exception: EXC_BAD_ACCESS
Codes: KERN_PROTECTION_FAILURE

Apparently, I corrupted the local database for my Entourage 2004 client. I found this post to a newsgroup via Google with the answer. The abbreviated fix is

1. Start the Database Utility. To do this, hold down the OPTION key on the keyboard, and then start Entourage. The Database Utility window opens. In the Database Utility window, you have the option to select the database that you want to maintain.

2. Run the "Verify database integrity." If problems are found, you can select the option to rebuild the database.

After I rebuilt the database, Entourage started up and proceeded to download my mail again from our Exchange server.

Lame But Useful Bash Tricks (Part 1)

Incrementing Letters and Numbers for Variable Lists

[Note: Applicable for Bash version 3.00]

Using curly brackets "{" and "}", you can set a range with a variable list. Inside the curly brackets, the range just needs to be separated by two periods, "..".

Ex.
$ SERVERLIST="`echo server-{1..5}`"
$ echo $SERVERLIST
server-1 server-2 server-3 server-4 server-5

$ SERVERLIST="`echo server-{a..d}`"
$ echo $SERVERLIST
server-a server-b server-c server-d

This could also be useful for quick "for" loops with a list that has incremental numbers off the same root name.

Ex.
for i in server-{1..5}
do
echo $i
done

server-1
server-2
server-3
server-4
server-5