061: Phony Tech Support

Recorded live on July 29, 2014

- one of Joe's clients fell for a popup window claiming virus infection and imploring her to call phony tech support, who proceeded to run harmless utilities (ping test, CPU History, netstat, top) and claiming they were evidence of malware; paid $300 for two years of support from "Mac"; Joe removed LogMeIn, TeamViewer, and ran a full scan using Sophos Antivirus and removed 8 instances of malware

- Sam's wife received a call from phony tech support; thankfully she proceeded to interrogate the guy about his badge number, company, and credentials until he hung up

- Social Engineering techniques on the rise, demonstrated in this scene from Hackers

- Network World reports: FTC takes out “tech support” scammers; $5.1 million in fines, retribution

- Jerry reminds us to manually remove updates downloaded by Software Update service when no longer needed!

- Joe recovered data from client ZIP disk, wrote AppleScript to convert old Word documents

- xkcd: Automation

- Joe discovered issue with Time Machine failing to complete a backup, with no error messages displayed, due to nesting of folders too deeply: "destination path too long"; not sure how long is too long, but in this case is was over 50 levels deep

How to schedule launchd to restart SMB Service in Mavericks Server

Dave Provine of Premier Mac was kind enough to write in with a great tip, following our discussion of SMB issues with Mavericks Server in Episode 60:

No need to restart that mini; you can just restart the SMB daemon, and since SMB is stateless, it normally won’t affect connected users.

To restart the smbd daemon in OS X Server 10.7 10.8 10.9 add this plist to launchd

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Label</key>
<string>com.psimac.restartsmb</string>
<key>ProgramArguments</key>
<array>
<string>/bin/bash</string>
<string>-c</string>
<string>sleep 60;touch "/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server.plist"</string>
</array>
<key>RunAtLoad</key>
<false/>
<key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
<dict>
<key>Hour</key>
<integer>2</integer>
<key>Minute</key>
<integer>0</integer>
</dict>
</dict>
</plist>

Dave continues:

All you have to do is actually 'touch' the /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.smb.server.plist file and that's enough to restart it.

Thanks so much, Dave!

060: Server, Services, and Such

Recorded on July 8, 2014, aired on July 22, 2014

Sponsored by Smile. Check out Smilesoftware.com for a great screencast from David Sparks about PDFPen for Mac, and to learn why you should use and recommend Smile's awesome software to your clients.

Topics

- MacBook Air torqued

- creative client interpretations of rates and service offerings

- Managed Services discussion; revisiting Easing into Managed Services

- Jerry recommends AJA System Test with the following settings: "MBytes/sec", File I/O API: Unix, "Round frame sizes to 4 KB", "Enable network volumes", Test: Disk Read/Write, Video Frame Size: 1920x1080 10-bit RGB, File Size: 1GB, "Disable file system cache"

- Jerry's legal firm successfully replaced Mac mini Server with Synology

- "working off the server" vs. copying files locally for editing and then copying back to server

- scheduled server restart to work around SMB service interruption? Sam suggests scheduling a launchd job to stop and then start SMB using serveradmin command

- Jerry recommends TP-LINK TL-WR710N 150Mbps Wireless N Mini Pocket Router with USB port for storage for streaming movies to iPad when traveling

048: Stream of Conciousness

Recorded live on April 29, 2014

• Thanks to our sponsor, Drobo. Check out the new Drobo Gen 3 with USB 3.0 – move your disk packs from a Gen 2 (four bay FireWire 800) model into the new Gen 3 for an easy upgrade path and 300-500% improvement in speed!  Visit www.drobostore.com and use coupon code CCP50 for $50 off your Drobo 5D or Drobo 5N.

TOPICS:

• Joe discusses his own personal with his iPhone 5 battery drain and the article for troubleshooting by a former Apple Genius - The Ultimate Guide to Solving iOS Battery Drain — Overthought
• Sam has used iFunBox to remove unwanted files from his clients IOS devices.PhoneView from eCamm is recommended and Jerry has used PhoneClean from iMobie.
• Creating email signatures and client frustration. 
  Chungwa Soft's - Graffiti Email Signature Plugin for Apple Mail
  Jerry used Joe Workman's Blog post from a few years ago to create his signature - Joe's Blog
•  Reference to HBO's new series Silicon Valley and a great t-shirt "I Know HTML" - t-shirt
• Joe makes progress troubleshooting a clients email issues
  How to send an email via telnet - blog post by Drew Moris
• Mavericks Server Caching Service - Great overview from Krypted
• A discussion about turning Software Updates on or off
• PowerMac G4 to Mac mini
• Team Viewer For Mac and PC - Team Viewer
• Free Option join.me from LogMeIn
• What's your fastest SpeedTest?
  SpeedOf.Me HTML5 speed test recommended by Kevin Ginger; no Flash or Java required
• uninstall Flash Player in Safari for better full screen experience with multi-screen in Mavericks; YouTube's HTML5 player performs better than Flash will less CPU impact; in full screen mode using the Flash Player in Safari on Mavericks
• fit-Headless recommended by Michael Reinhart to solve "black screen" issues in screen sharing connections

043: Synology DS1513+ vs. Mac mini Server: Return of the Jerry

Recorded live March 25, 2014

We are pleased to be joined this week by Ryan Grimes of HoosierMac Consulting.  Ryan has been a longtime user of Synology products and has been writing a series of blog posts comparing Synology network attached storage devices to the Mac mini Server.

Thanks to our exclusive sponsor this week, Smile Software.  Smile makes great products for Mac and iOS, including our favorite time-saver, TextExpander.

Topics:

- Ryan’s comparison of Mac mini w/Thunderbolt RAID storage vs. Synology 1513+: Part 1 & Part 2

- How to set up CrashPlan Cloud Backup headless on a Synology NAS

- CloudStation

- Plex

- complications from Apple changing default connection method for Mac servers to SMB when using Bonjour

- MineCraft server

- DHCP, DNS, VPN services

- Surveillance Station

- how to find the "Performa 600" among Synology’s huge product lineup

- live demo of DSM 5.0

- cleaning up after non-certified fly-by-nights (“Anger Work”)

- Brett Terpstra's blog post on automating dynamic date math in TextExpander

037: Anecdotal Anecdotes

Recorded live February 11, 2014

Topics:

- Jerry walks us through how to resolve a failure to start Mail server and Calendar server on Mac OS X Server after renewing a certificate, and tells us what Dovecot means

- Sam explains how to resolve failure to login to iCloud by removing the NetworkInterfaces.plist

Simplenote

Notational Velocity

SubEthaEdit

ScreenSteps; see also: Clarify

ScreenFlow

OmniGraffle

OmniDiskSweeper

GrandPerspective

Krypted.com

TunnelBear

MonkeyBox