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macOS

Find a Mac’s serial number in Recovery Partition or the macOS installer

I couldn’t find this anywhere, so I thought I’d blog about this. Thanks to the #general channel on the MacAdmins Slack for the help. To find a serial number for a Mac when booted into the Recovery Partition or the macOS installer, to go Utilities and choose Terminal, type in ioreg -rd1 -c IOPlatformExpertDevice | awk -F'”‘ ‘/IOPlatformSerialNumber/{print $4}’ That’s it, it will output the serial number for the computer.

Importing Data to FileMaker 16 via APIs

I’m new to APIs. Have quite a bit of FileMaker experience. I’ve decided to see if I can build a system to track parent-teacher contact. This is a system that once existed for the school in an ASP system that I mocked up and outsourced. It was replaced with Edsby, an LMS system that wasn’t truly designed for this purpose. We were smashing a square peg into a round hole. My proof of concept for this system involves seeing if I can build something that does three things I’ve never done in FileMaker before. OAuth login using Google authentication Sending nightly emails of any records that have changed for those… Read More »Importing Data to FileMaker 16 via APIs

Renewing Let’s Encrypt on a macOS machine running 10.12.6 and Server.app

Last time on Never Had To Fight… Adam installed a certificate using Let’s Encrypt for a macOS server running 10.12.6 and Server.app. It wasn’t exciting, but it worked. Now, three months later, we need to renew. It was actually really easy. Renew the certificates sudo certbot renew Transfer the .pem files to desktop Using the cp command enter these to copy your files. Replace <<FQDN>> with your FQDN. Replace <<USER>> with your username. sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/<<FQDN>>/privkey.pem /Users/<<USER>>/Desktop/privkey.pem sudo cp /etc/letsencrypt/live/<<FQDN>>/fullchain.pem /Users/<<USER>>/Desktop/fullchain.pem Hooray, now these files are on your desktop. Install Certs Open Server.app Go to Certificates. Click on the + Choose Import Certificate Identity… Drag and drop the two .pem… Read More »Renewing Let’s Encrypt on a macOS machine running 10.12.6 and Server.app

Let’s Encrypt on a macOS machine running 10.12.6 and Server.app

Are you doing your web hosting with Server.app? You’re probably not the biggest fan of it, but it works, so… let’s keep on keeping on. Do you want to have a free SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt? Well, I found some really bad guides, so this is much better. *Hat tip to MacAdmins slack for a few key points Open up your Terminal.app (Go to the Go menu, choose Utilities, double-click on Terminal). This isn’t even a step, you should know this. Step One – Install Homebrew /usr/bin/ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)” At this point, you will be prompted to press RETURN to continue. Press the return key. It will… Read More »Let’s Encrypt on a macOS machine running 10.12.6 and Server.app

macOS Sierra Beta

Apple has been seeding developer previews of macOS Sierra (10.12) since the Worldwide Developer Conference in June. I installed developer preview 6 and have been using that and version 7 since their release. Fortunately, everything seems to be running quite well. One of the features of 10.12 is Siri on your Mac. The one thing I use Siri for the most is the clock functions. Timers and alarms. I tried setting a timer on my Mac using Siri, and there’s no functionality for that in 10.12. Perhaps Apple will add this functionality. In the mean time we are seeing SiriKit being made available to iOS developers in iOS 10, so… Read More »macOS Sierra Beta