077: Trust No One, Yoseminite Sam

Recorded on November 19, 2014

Topics

- Jerry bails out Joe onsite, and diagnoses an issue where a specific website wouldn't load or respond to pings from a client location, but loaded fine from elsewhere; turned out to be a block on the client's static IP due to three failed login attempts

- we discuss clients trying to set things up and fix things themselves

Yoseminite Sam: a no-nonsense guy

- do you give clients easy access to their servers, e.g. Screen Sharing?

- Sam lands a client on bowtie alone: "I'm a no-nonsense guy, and you look like a no-nonsense guy too."

- what's your dress code for consulting?

- Joe details troubleshooting serious permissions issues in Yosemite after a prior "consultant" tried to set up shared calendars

- how do you bill for extensive cleanup work like the saga Joe describes?

- Joe notices a pattern to Security Questions answered by a prior consultant

067: Watch Me Do

Recorded live on September 9, 2014

This week, we're thrilled to be sponsored by Watchman Monitoring.  Visit WatchmanMonitoring.com/cmdctrlpwr to find out how Watchman Monitoring can keep an eye on your client machines and notify you of over 100 issues.  When you sign up (and we know you will), be sure to tweet @cmdctrlpwr #CCPsentme to let us know and support the show!

Topics:

- Which Watch?

- iPhone 6 vs. iPhone 6 Plus? compare sizes to iPhone 5

- back pocket vs. front pocket?

- Sam's story of a client unplugging the backup hard drive from the server because they thought it was slowing the system down – should have had Watchman Monitoring installed, which can let you know if a drive is unmounted

- Joe moves his Drobo disk pack from old Drobo Gen 2 into new Drobo Gen 3 and realizes huge speed increase: 123.7 MB/s write & 171.9 MB/s read vs. 27 MB/s write & 24.6 MB/s read; Sam is already using his new Drobo Gen 3 as primary storage on his home server

- Software Update prompts to upgrade the Mac OS on a Server, which kills the Server: we consider this a bug!

- something goes wrong, end user flails, copies and pastes from forums, then finally calls you, the professional

- Bender from Forget Computers automatically backs up server settings

062: Mac Repairs - The Agony and The Ecstasy

Recorded on July 31, 2014; aired on August 5, 2014

Followup from Dave Provine: How to Restart SMB automatically on Mavericks Server

Liquid Spills - Mircro Replay - 

Tools We Use - Tools that we can’t live Without
8" Straight & Curved Hemostat http://amzn.to/1qXedhv
Magnetic Projet Mat - https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/Magnetic-Project-Mat/IF145-167
iFixit 54 Bit Driver Kit https://www.ifixit.com/Store/Tools/54-Bit-Driver-Kit/IF145-022
Wiha - Wiha 26099 - Screwdriver Set, Slotted, 8Pc 1-4mm Bonus Pack http://amzn.to/1qXcOax
iMac Screen Removal - FastCap HOD-DOUBLE Handle On Demand - http://amzn.to/V2fdSp

http://www.PowerBookMed.com
http://www.iFixit.com

Data Recovery - Driver Savers Partner Program

What repairs you regularly do. 
What repairs you won’t do and why.
Apple Store repair experiences
Depot Experiences
Out of warranty satisfaction repairs
Weirdest Repairs

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