A 10 minute clip of an interview with Steve Jobs on CNBC, shortly after the announcement on January 9th by Steve Jobs revealing the new Apple iPhone. An interesting interview, that also hits on and covers the current stock option fiasco concerning Apple, Inc. and the supposed coverup/ manipulation of prices to make Apple stock (AAPL) appear higher in value.
Worth the 10 minutes to watch.
Did you watch the Macworld 2007 Keynote? Did you see the iPhone demo? If so, I’m sure you heard the iPhone’s ringtone during the phone call exchange between Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller.So did you like it? Good, now you can download it here. Check out this link.
iPhone Ringtone Remixed Into 90’s RPG Soundtrack: Listen Here – Gizmodo
Well I have finally arrived home. Actually I arrived home yesterday evening, but nonetheless the conference week has ended.
The last day of sessions was more fruitful. With more discussion on management of your systems/ clients via network resources and also management of your system images by means of network pushed package updates, the last day had a good amount of information. The sessions ended around 12 noon, but the show floor was open until 4. With the exception of stopping to eat for lunch, I spent the afternoon on the show floor walking around, looking at and getting information on products AND software. And to my surprise I found many new things that could prove useful.
Some of the things i got information were also discussed in our sessions for client and system management. These tools I hope to be able to research more fully and get implementated at the college where I work. I believe they will improve our efficiency and effectiveness in the areas.
Well I suppose this now ends the postings for this category. Unless something comes up in the near future relating to it.
The new Apple iPhone, click on the image for more information from Apple’s website. I have seen this up close, unfortunately it was behind glass and unreachable, it is a glorious piece of craftsmanship, innovation and design. Kudos Apple! You have pushed the envelope again and we, the Mac faithful, Thank You deeply.
The new Apple TV, click on the image to be taken to Apple’s website for more information.
Watch the Keynote presentation by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc.from Macworld 2007
Well I attended 3 more sessions today. Image creation, imaging deployment and image maintenance. These were considerable more informative than yesterday’s sessions but still not incredibly so.
The image creation session was basicly procedurely how to properly create an image from a master. They listed some of the options that are out there for doing this, but they mainly focused on using Apple’s Disk Utility software which comes installed on every Mac and the asr command line tool. The command line tool is the preferred tool because it has more option if you are comfortable with the command line and it is scriptable so you can easily customize and automate many parts of the process.
The imaging deployment session was hard to follow along with because of the mass amount of information they tried to cram into the session and one of the two presenters raced through the presentation. He also had WAY too much content on the slides that he basically read verbatim. One thing that I had pursued previously that they mentioned was using a boot DVD or NetBoot device and then restoring via a disk image being shared by HTTP. We have had some trouble with transferring data on our network with multicast and data transfer rates. So perhaps using the HTTP protocol will fix that issue. I am also going to look into doing more scripting as a way to automate more parts of the process. One of the presenters also showed a configuration script for setting up Entourage with Exchange on the first login of a user then removing the login script. They also showed the PSU Blast Image Config utility by the guy who created from PSU. The options that are built-in to the software are pretty amazing. It allows for customization of settings at the setup for each restore process, and parts can also be automated so you don’t have to input all the data all the time if it is not necessary.
The last session, image maintenace, covered a few software utilities that can be used to manage clients and the software on their computers. They covered FileWave, Radmind, and LANrev. All three have very similar feature sets but with some minor tweaks. And quite honestly I am not sure which is the best of the three. I am going to have to do some extensive research and testing to get into each of them to see which will be more suited for our needs. Initially though LANrev looks enticing because it also does licensing of software and monitors the software installed and being used.
The Birds of a Feather session I attended yesterday evening on Enterpise Administration was helpful in listening mostly to others who are dealing with large network implementations and how they handle issues. I at least felt more stretched in trying to understand what they were discussing about much like I was the first 2 days of sessions I attended.
It appears that many use two clients for backup managent for their networks, a program called Legato and also Retrospect. Legato is a command line utility and therefore is scriptable and easily customizable. Retrospect is a server based cross-platform solution. The most popular use was to run Retrospect on a Windows server and use it for both Macs and PCs.
One VERY intriguing thing that was mentioned during the session was about Exchange 2007. If you are anticipating runing Exchange 2007 and you have Macs on your network that use Entourage for email access, then you MUST have a dedicated server for Free/Busy otherwise Entourage will have problems correctly display free/busy information.
I also found that Adobe CS2 has a command line installer for installing the suite quickly over a network. I am certainly going to be looking into this for use on our campus.
I inquired of the group as to what client/asset management solution(s) were being used. The two popular were Casper and LanDesk. Nessus, Radmind, LanRev, Sassafras, and FileWave were others that were mentioned. Radmind supposedly is extremely powerful and useful but has a pretty high learning curve, but once you get passed it is wonderful. Casper is supposedly powerful and easy to use and gives you a lot of control of your clients. The LanRev software is developed by a man who used to work on the NetOctopus project and has now started on his own. Supposedly from what everyone was saying, the NetOctopus project has gone downhill since he left. So his solution might be a very viable one. He has a booth in the Expo for award winning software.
It was also recommended to lean on Sassafras for this type of solution. Apprently the developers have the ability already to do this but they just don’t think they have the market to go forward with it. So if people begin to inquire about it perhaps they will pursue it.
Well I neglected to post last night and I apologize. I was rather enthralled with deciding on whether or not to keep a digital camera I purchased or not. That is another post for later today, most likely. I also returned to my hotel later last night due to an even Birds of Feather session on Enterprise Administration. And odd out of the the 2 other sessions I attended during the day it proved to be more useful.
Anyway on to the day. The first two sessions that covered Image creation and deployment were less than I had anticipated. There was some good information out of them, but all in all, I probably could have taught more than half the class based on the content that was covered. I am not saying the presenters weren’t knowledgable of the content or anything of the sort, rather I am confident enough in my own knowledge on what they were presenting.
They went through the basics of what you need to look at when creating your images. Knowing your audience and how they will use the machine. And what software to include on the image and how much to tweak and set it up. They also covered the idea of managing your image(s). They brought up the point that you really don’t want to have to manage more than one or two images. They suggested that depending on your implementations your situation may be more suited to a modular approach. Starting with a base image, then in your deployment solution setting it to install customized packages for each different deployment instance, ie different labs, faculty or staff, kiosks, etc…
The next session carried on this discussion and went into more detail of package management for your deployments and what utilities to use. They described several including Apple’s PackagaMaker which comes with Xcode. They seemed to show preference to a program called Iceberg because of its greater granularity to customize and control the package, as well as its ease of use.
Another day of Mac enriched goodness. Today was the annually awaited Keynote address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, Inc. Steve began his address by thanking Intel, the Developers and the users for making the Intel transition the most seamless major transition ever in the industry.
Following this Steve showed a new Mac commercial that will begin airing soon, showing PC getting ready to go into surgery prior to his Vista upgrade and a brief conversation between himself and Mac.
Jobs covered data about the music part of Apple’s business and statistics from iTunes music, TV shows, and Movies. iTunes to date has sold over 2.0 Billion songs, and 1.2 Billion of those were in 2006, up from 64 million in 2005. That comes to about 5 million per day or 58 per second. Apple was listed as the 5th largest online seller of music online and have recently passed Amazon into the number 4 spot.
There are currently 350 TV episodes with over 50 million downloads sold. The movies on iTunes have reached the 1.3 billion sold to date. Steve also announced that Paramount has just signed on with Apple to release moves via iTunes. There are currently 100 movies available, and this number will be going to 250 over the next week.
Steve made some brief comparison to the iPod competition from Microsoft in the Zune. The sales data for November showed that the Zune had 2% of the market share, iPod had 62%, and others took up 36%. The interesting bit of information is that November was the launch month for the new media player.
Steve showed two new iPod ads that will be airing soon.
The iTV, that was previously announced in August 2006 at WWDC has received a new name, Apple TV. The Apple TV will put out 720p Hi-Def picture, has a 40GB HDD (which can hold 50 hours of video), uses 802.11 b/g/n wireless technologies for streaming, has Intel chip inside, designed for widescreen TV’s. The new media streaming device will auto-sync with one machine, meaning that you can set rules to have all new content automatically stream to iTV without user interaction upon being added to iTunes. It can also pull from up to 5 other machines at any given time, it will not store the data on the internal HDD from these 5 machines but the content can be streamed and viewed via the Apple TV.
Jobs walked through a demo of the new Apple TV , showing the user interface and moving through the menu’s. He walked through playing the movie trailer for “The Good Shepherd” streamed from Apple’s website. Then played a clip from the movie Zoolander which was currently on the internal drive. He then showed a clip from the TV show, Heroes. Then moved on to play a song selection from John Mayer.
The Apple CEO then demonstrated the sharing function with Phil Schiller’s laptop. In order for the laptop to grant access a number must be inserted on the users laptop that is generated by the Apple TV device as an authentication method.
The price for the new Apple TV will be $299 and orders are starting to be taken today, Tuesday January 9, 2007. The product will ship some time in February.
After this the image on screen changed to the same image that has graced the Apple homepage for the last couple weeks. Jobs says that there are 3 new revolutionary things being announced today. And all three are in one device.
The iPhone, a revolutionary new device. It has a revolutionary new user interface, and features an all screen input interface, with only one button, the home button. There is no stylus all interaction with the device is via a touch sensitive screen, which can also handle multi-touch inputs.
The software that will run on the device is a breakthrough for a device of this type. And according to Jobs, is at least 5 years ahead anything else on the market. The operating system for this devices runs a smaller version of Mac OS X. It features desktop class applications and networking and will sync with your iTunes.
The design of the device boasts a 3.5″ high resolution screen, at 160ppi. It is a really thing form factor at 11.6 mm thin and is the thinnest of any of its competitors. There is a ringer/silent button one side as well as a volume control. A great addition to the phone is a the 2 MegaPixel camera built-in to the device. There is also a headphone jack, a sim car slot, as well as a sleep/wake button. The device also has a built-in speaker, microphone and a dock connector port. The device connects to your computer with a dock just like the recent 5th generation iPod’s.
Another very amazing feature of the iPhone are the three sensors inside the device. There is a proximity sensor that identifies when the device is raised to your head and will turn off the display and touchscreen, to save battery power, as well as to avoid any inadvertent input during use. An ambient light sensor is used to detect the amount of light around the device and will adjust the brightness of the screen accordingly. Probably the coolest of the 3 sensors is that accelerometer sensor which will detect the orientation of the device and change the orientation of the display to match it.
Steve proceeded to demo these features and showed the cool finger scrolling option by merely dragging your finger across the screen the items in the list or the picture move smoothly. All the controls show up on screen and interact by pressing your finger accordingly. CoverFlow is now a part of the interface on the iPhone, a feature not previously put on an iPod. The iPhone is the best iPod every made, said Jobs. This reinvents the phone. He showed the contacts and the ease of dialing in the interface. A new feature that is completely new is Visual Voicemail. It shows the list of voicemail that you have, who they are from as well as the time. It views much like your email inbox.
The phone is a Quad Band GSM/EDGE device and also has WiFi and Bluetooth built-in. As well as your music and movies, the device also performs as your phone, shows your photos, calendar, and SMS functions. Another demo showed us how easy a conference call is to setup by simply merging an current call with an on-hold call. The SMS feature allows you to carry a conversation with someone and keeps all communications in an iChat like window so you can easily read back through messages as if you were reading a chat log. It also uses iChat sounds for sending messages.
The Photo software allows to use “pinch zooming” by pinch your fingers on the screen to zoom into the photo farther. The finger scrolling is also an option here. As previously mentioned in the sensors if you rotate the device from portrait to landscape the picture will automatically flip the photo to display in the correct orientation. Any photo on the phone can also be used as the wallpaper for the main page.
Apple has reinvented the phone. The device as an internet communicator is an interest concept. It will display rich HTML, not a WAP version so both webpages AND email display as rich HTML as it would on your PC. The email program will receive any IMAP or POP3 email account. To browse the internet a version of the Safari web browser is installed. Google maps is also integrated on the machine. You can not only view maps of an area but also the satellite imagery that corresponds with it from the Google service. Widgets are another great feature. The two that Steve demonstrated were weather and stocks, both of which look nearly identical to their widget counterparts on the desktop version of Mac OS X. Since the device has both EDGE and WiFi antenna’s built-in the device will seamlessly switch to WiFi if it detects a WiFi signal instead of using the cellular antenna. This new device is not only integrating with Google for their maps and their searching via Safari, Yahoo is joining in on the fun with this device. A Yahoo Mail IMAP account will be made available to any iPhone user, but the unique part is the IMAP account is a push account, meaning that whenever a new email arrives to your address it will automatically update on your phone even if you don’t ask it to refresh.
The mail program can be viewed either in a basic list view or in split view showing a preview of any selected email. It will also show pic attachment on your screen thanks to the rich HTML abilities of the software. It also features address completion.
The Safari web browser will not show you a WAP version of any website you visit but the actual full website with pics and all. Since in showing the full page it is hard to view the text on the screen the zooming and scrolling features that are used in photos are also available here. An additional feature is the double tap feature. If you double tap on the screen it will zoom in a bit to the specific location.
Jobs went on to do more demonstrations of the Widgets and Google Maps. Then Jobs brought up Google CEO, Eric Schmidt. He lauded Steve and Apple for the development of this product. He said that Apple and Google had accomplished “integration without integrating”. Then Jobs introduced Yahoo co-founder and Chief Yahoo, Jerry Yang. Jobs said that not only can you search Google from Safari but also Yahoo and again mentioned the push IMAP email service from Yahoo. Jerry praised the iPhone and asked Steve to send him one.
Jobs briefly walked through a real life scenario using the iPhone, starting with listening to music, receiving a call, checking the internet while on a call. Browsing his photos while on the phone and sending an email with photo attachment. Then when the call ended the music resumed.
Several screenshots of the iPhone and the other smartphones on the market were shown. Comparing user interface difference in software. Some of the accessories for the new iPhone include stereo headset/ headphones (which has a mic switch, with a push to answer/ hang-up button), a Bluetooth headset that is sleek and simple and will automatically sleep when not in use. The iPhone battery will get approximately 5 hours of talk, video or browsing and 16 hours of audio playback.
The iPhone, is “Your life in your pocket”. How much will it cost? an iPod 4GB nano costs $199, most smartphones with 2 year contract cost about $299. These come to about $499.
The iPhone will cost $499 for the 4 GB model and $599 for the 8 GB model. The product will ship in June to the US and in Europe in Q4. Asia will probably see a ship date of 2008. Cingular is the network that Apple has selected for the device, because they are the best and the most popular cellular provider with over 58 million subscribers. This is a unique partnership according to Steve. The product will be sold through both Apple and Cingular stores.
The Cingular CEO, Stan Sigman came on stage and gave congrats to Steve and Apple. He mentioned that this is an exclusive deal between Apple and Cingular leaving both companies as separate entities, and he stressed that this partnership is not an MVNO service.
Steve went on to talk briefly about the current market trends with device. He showed that in 2006 over 957 phones were sold in the US. Apple’s goal by 2008 is to get 1% of that market which would be 10 million phones sold.
Steve said that today they had announce changes to the Mac, the iPod, the new Apple TV and now the iPhone. This shift in product has brought a new age Jobs said and announced that their name has changed. They are no longer Apple Computer, Inc. and are now just Apple, Inc. This change now reflects the changing product line that Apple has embraced.
Jobs made a heartfelt acknowledgment and applauded the developers and their families for the dedication and their sacrifices to make the products and developments that were announced possible.
The conclusion of the Keynote was a brief concert from John Mayer who came on stage and played two songs for those in attendance.
Steve then said Thank You for coming to everyone and exited.
Well session 2 today had more information in it that sent my head spinning. Basically a lot of it I knew what they were talking about, but I certainly couldn’t understand it all.
The afternoon session continued the directory setup of Mac OS X Server. The part that we probably spent most of the time on was the AD/OD integration. Using both the dsconfigad command line tool and the Directory Access program. An interesting bit of information I was unaware of is that inside Directory Access you can login to a Mac OS X Server and view/ change serve binding settings.
When you bind a machine to directory server it creates an edu.mit.Kerberos file. This file has all the information in it that allows the client to utilize account and other directory information from a server. This file can also be created manually, by creating a simple plist file and then copied over to other machines, it will also allow you to strip out any unneeded information from the file.
One note that was made with setting up AD and having Macs bind to it via the “AD/OD Triangle”, was to setup a special container on the Active Directory to bind your Macs to. This will allow for easier administration of your Macs from AD and also keeps your Macs out of the same container as your Windows machines. If you do this, during the binding process you will need to indicate the new container name in the OU field.
You can do the binding manually via the command line, or even Directory Access. There are also scripts from Bombich.com that will aid in automated binding to AD.
During the session they mentioned that you can view a network users account info in NetInfo Manager. They said that if you ever have any trouble with your network user account that you can log in to the local admin account and view it with NetInfo Manager and if the problem is unable to be corrected, then you can delete the account from within NetInfo and the account will be recreated at the next login and the user will not know the difference because the new account will use the same UUID. The question that this raised for was, does this process remove the local home folder and its files? They did not address this at all and will make me leery to try it until I can verify this.
You can also create a locally cached account so that a network account can be logged on to a laptop even when not connected to the network. The locally cached account cache’s the credentials for the user to login. The only thing about it is that the locally cached account is ONLY for the last login made to the machine. So if by chance another user were to login to the machine a previous user will not have access to it.
There is one password issue with AD binding. That is if a user were to change their password on another machine or via a web portal or such on AD, but this will not change the local password on their Mac and will cause problems. The ONLY way to change it in both places at one time is via the Accounts Preference pane in System Preferences.
So you can bind your Mac to AD and get authentication with your network account, but there is a way to get 100% integration with AD. What needs to happen is to put ALL the Apple Specific Schema’s into AD’s schema list. If this might be of interest to you then I would suggest checking AFP548.com for more information.
They also went through setting up user environment/ management settings to change how individual, groups or ALL users interact with their system. You can complete customize the user experience with these settings.
They briefly discussed FileVault as well. They covered that the FileVault DOES indeed work with AD/OD Binding, so even though the users account is network based their local files will be encrypted and safe. This discussion prompted me to think that a user policy should be established within an organization that if a user wishes to use FileVault then that the Master Password for FileVault should be one of an IT Admin level so that the file can be recoverable if anything were to happen to the person who set the account password.
Firewalls were the next discussion of the session. The firewall setup inside Server Admin apparently is very robust. You can do most of it via the command line but the gui is simple and sexy at the same time, so why fuss with all the typing. You can use defaults, add in other predetermined types of firewall actions, or create your own from scratch, all within the gui interface of Server Admin.
A couple things that came from this Firewall discussion that I am going to suggest for our College network, at least to be put on the table for discussion is to block AppleTalk traffic to our servers freeing them up a bit, as well as setting 1(en0) of the 2 NICs on our servers to outbound traffic only and 1(en1) to inbound only traffic. But before making any changes to the firewall settings create a backup of the settings by using the “tear-off” option in Server Admin by dragging a blank space on the Server Admin window to your desktop or other Finder window which will create a file of all the current settings. This might save you if mistakenly screw something up.
Well that is some of the interesting things from the afternoon session today. I hope there might be something of interest for you.
Tomorrow is the BIG day of the whole conference, the Keynote. I will post up my thoughts and ponderings on this once the address is complete. I will be keeping a written recording of the event as it happens and will upload once the address is over.
Well… the morning session has completed and I have just finished lunch. In about 15 minutes the afternoon session and I am already developing a headache, trying to to take in and understand everything.
I am in the Out of the Box: Advanced Mac OS X Server Techniques class. The morning session consisted of initially good practices for setting up your OS X Server, then moved on to setting up OD and replicas. The practices suggested were to do an initial install, create a backup, configure services, create a backup, create users/groups, create a backup (V.1, v1.5, and v2.0)
One really cool thing that was brought up during all this is that the Mac OS X Server Installation DVD comes with SSH and VNC enabled. So with the system booted to disc for initial setup you can access the system remotely. This is perfect for sysadmins who manage several locations. If the server is shipped to another location, no problem, just have them boot to the DVD and you can then do the installation yourself. The machines uses the MAC address to do authentication.
Another interesting thing that was suggested was to take the 3 drives that ship with most Xserves, and partition the first drive (your boot drive) into 2. One will be home to the server installation and one will be home to an OS X client installation. They suggested installing client so that if anything ever happens to the server you can reboot to the client partition and hopefully take care of the issue.
Now back to the different versions you created during the installation of your server, the 3 backups. The last backup v2.0 was suggested to be read/write so you can then create a diskutil script that will run to amend changes on a regular basis. Smart if I do say so.
Now you might be asking how you create backups, well, their suggestion was just to use diskutil, it is made by Apple and just works. If you need/ prefer a gui then Bombich’s NetRestore software will work just fine. Bombich’s Carbon Copy Coner was never intended to be used for Server, this is according to Bombich.
One really interesting thing that I hadn’t heard at all before was that ifconfig should not be used when trying to check on and make changes to networking configurations. The daemon configd handles that now. If you make any changes with ifconfig it can cause and out-of-sync system and this can cause issues because configd is polling the system for changes and if it finds changes it is going to try an fix them and then you are going to run into problems, at least potentially. They strongly suggested to NOT use ifconfig any longer.
Configd has monitors that it controls that keep track of your system and things that are happening. They are IPMonitor, PreferencesMonitor, KernelEventMonitor, and Apple802.11 Monitor. If there is a change noticed the the monitor will contact the IPConfigurationAgent and that agent then notifies configd, then configd will contact lookupd, which also has agents working for it. The lookupd agent mainly serves to do DNS resolution for Mac OS X.
There was quite a bit of other information on OD setup and setting up OD Replicas, but as far as practically to what I do the above was most useful.
I will post more as I learn it. Its about time to start the afternoon session. so long for now.
Disclaimer::
Any how-to content posted here is taken from the MacWorld Conference and Expo Power Tools session Beyond the Box: Advanced Mac OS X Server Techniques given by Schoun P Regan, Joel Rennich, and Josh Wisenbaker. These 3 are from afp548.com
Well I arrived in San Fran yesterday and after a minor hiccup with my luggage and the hotel not finding my reservation, I made it.
I am currently sitting in the first session of the conference, Beyond the Box: Advanced Mac OS X Server Techniques. Hopefully this doesn’t hurt my head too much, because my server knowledge is minimal and Mac Server is mostly self-taught.
So here we go. As I learn things I will try to post them.
Do in part to a comment posted by Matsu concerning my attendance at the MacWorld 2007 Conference and Expo, I have decided to add a new category to this blog to catalog my time there.
I am writing now since my weekend will probably not involve much computer time since I will be flying from Lexington, KY to San Fran, CA at 6:00 AM on Sunday, and I would like to spend some time with my wife before I leave on said journey.
I will be writing as often as I can and as often as I am able to process all the information I will be taking in. I am the lone attendee going to the conference from the college I am working for and as such it places a heavy burden to be able to take in the information and be able to spit it all back out when I get back.
I am not going to discuss the rumors of what possibly might be announced at the Keynote speech, given by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer. But possibly later today I will post what it is I / my department, hopes to get out of this conference. Then if any of you loyal and wonderful readers perhaps knows a thing or two about it all we can try to help each other out. And if you are going to be attending the conference as well, perhaps we could meet up and discuss more.
San Fran here I come!!!
