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Last updated Apr 16, 2024
ALT is a one-stop-shop for all technology needs. Our team of technicians and consultants have the expertise spanning today’s best-in-class technologies, which will allow your organization to lower cost, increase agility, improve efficiency, and succeed in today’s competitive markets.
When you enable the VNC connection on a Mac, it will not let you login directly to the current user, but rather it will present you with a login screen after you've authenticated with VNC. This is convenient when you want to login to another account remotely, but not so much if you are trying to assist the current user (this is especially annoying for IT technicians, accessing the computer remotely and not knowing the user password)
There are various ways to restart and shut down your mac. The obvious one is through the Apple menu (there's very little magic about that), but the one that is more useful is using a command line. Because MacOS is a derivative of Unix, it has many tools hidden from an average user. To restart the system using a command line, open a terminal and run the following:
There are many tools, including free ones that allow for video conversion, however, many of them use GUIs and don't allow for automation of tasks. FFmpeg is a command line based tools which allows to do very neat video manipulations.
We would like to share this small script, which our IT specialists have used for one of our video conversion projects. It parses a directory, finds all flv (Flash video) files and converts them to mp4. This script can be added to a cronjob to run on a scheduled basis. Converted videos can be moved elsewhere upon completion.
As mentioned, we've used ffmpeg to accomplish this task, running under Ubuntu 14.04. FFmpeg doesn't come with Ubuntu 14.04 and a package repository needs to be added manually first.
One of our IT Support clients asked us why some emails are coming in with extra HTML content. After some searching, we've discovered that is was due to the MailScanner antispam system: it was parsing emails improperly and adding extra junk characters. We have decided to solve this by skipping the email from that domain from being scanned altogether.
One way to do so is to change the Scan Messages directive in MailScanner.conf from:
Scan Messages = yes
to
Scan Messages = %rules-dir%/scan.messages.rules
Then, in your rules directory, create a file called scan.messages.rules. In that file, be sure to add the line for scanning all by default:
You have a server, but want to setup VNC to access the GUI? We use this tutorial for our systems and wanted to share. (ALT is an IT consulting company, offering technical support for Mac, PC and Linux systems). We try to keep things updated, but tutorials have a tendency of exiring, so some steps may be different for newer versions. We've used Ubuntu 16.04 to install, but it should work with others as well.
Install the components
apt-get -y install ubuntu-desktop tightvncserver xfce4 xfce4-goodies autocutsel
Add the vnc user and give it a password:
adduser vncpasswd vnc
You can add vnc as sudo, so you could run apps as root. Edit the sudoers file:
echo "vnc ALL=(ALL) ALL" >> /etc/sudoers
We regularly post scripts and script snippets that we have found useful in our day-to-day IT support tasks. Here's a quick way to help determine if the week is odd or even using a bash script. You can replace the echo "even" and "odd" with whatever functions you are looking to perform, such as weekly backups for example. Although not tested, this script should also work on any version of Apple's Mac.
Copy and paste this into a file:
Q. Hello IT Support, I know there's a feature in BIOS for PCs to be turned on after a power outage. Is there such a function in a Mac?
A. Yes, this is a useful feature to have for remote computer access. If you login with an account that has administrative privileges, you should be able to do that. Go to: