Windows 8 hiberfil.sys large file size removal

I only have a 60GB SSD hard drive running windows 8. I am trying to save disk space and noticed this large file:
hiberfil.sys

I guessed it was to do with hibernating, and is roughly 75% the size of my RAM, which is 8GB, So it is taking up 10% of my hard drive. I found this very helpful article describing this file and it's function which is well worth the short read.

Basically, it has the added benifit of helping Windows boot faster. But I will forfiet that advantage as I only switch my PC on once a day.

Here's how to disable it:

powercfg /h off

OS X installing Profiles .mobileconfig files through ARD command line

I've not quite got OS X server running pushing changes to macs yet, so in the mean time I have to change a profile through the web service, download it and install it on the machines I want to update.

I found this article which helped doing it through command line:

/usr/bin/profiles -I -F "/Library/MyOrganization/Company Wi-Fi.mobileconfig"

I first copied the file to "Users/Shared" then ran this script. To improve it, I could make a pkg file which ran a script to install the file. That is the next step

OS X Mavericks - No disk space on startup disk - files that can be deleted

After re-imaging a new Macbook Pro 13", I discovered that it only had a 120GB Hard Drive. The Disk Image I use takes up all of this space, so files have to be deleted. The applications that take the most disk space are:

Soundtrack Pro Loops
DVD Studio Pro Content
Motion Content
LiveType Content
Logic Content

so, after imaging these machines type this in to remove these things:

rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Audio/Apple\ Loops/Apple/Apple\ Loops\ for\ Soundtrack\ Pro/
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/Final\ Cut\ Studio/DVD\ Studio\ Pro/
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/Final\ Cut\ Studio/Motion/         
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/LiveType/
rm -R /Volumes/Macintosh\ HD/Library/Application\ Support/Logic/

Should make about 57.05GB

As the MacBook Pro is for a manager, these applications arent' needed.

Mavericks Black Screen with Cursor (mouse)

Just encountered two Mac Mini's which, when turned on, show a black screen with a cursor which moves when you move the mouse. cmd + alt + esc doesn't do anything.

Tried:

1. reset PRAM
2. SafeBoot (hold down shift)
3. hold down cmd + s and type "/sbin/fsck -yf"

I gave up and reimaged these macs.

Did a bit of research afterwards and found this apple discussions on it. There were two suggested fixes. One involved blindly logging in which isn't an ICT Technician friendly fix. However, Spiro.r suggested:

1. ssh 192.160.0.1 -l username
2. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.loginwindow.plist
3. sudo rm /Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist
4. sudo rm /private/var/db/.AppleUpgrade
5. reboot


As ssh is by default turned off, you could also do this in single user mode (hold down cmd + s).

Apparently it is a problem with updates. It basically wants you to log in and OK an update, but seems to stop the login screen appearing. Not entirely sure anyone knows what's happening, but deleting these preference files and .AppleUpgrade fixes it. I shall try it next time I see it.

Mavericks "The software for the printer was installed incorrectly" error

After reimaging a computer suite with Mavericks and installing a networked printer via "Profile Manager" mobileconfig files, the printer had an exclamation mark next to it in the print dialogue box. When a print was sent to the queue, the print queue would load up and prompt the error:

"The software for the printer was installed incorrectly.
Would you like it to be repaired?"

After clicking "Repair" you are prompted with an Administrator Username and Password dialogue box.

I needed to find a way of "repairing" all these machines via ARD or Profile Manager. Looking in console, I found that the error was due to:
"/Library/Printers/hp/filter/hpPostProcessing.bundle/Contents/MacOS/hpPostProcessing" has insecure permissions (0100775/uid=0/gid=80)"

I found this forum which mentions the fix which is to change owner and permissions.

I ran a few commands to first change the owner, which needs to be Wheel, and the permissions with need to be 755. After doing so, I needed to reboot to see if it had fixed it, only to come up with more errors due to insecure permissions of the containing folders. After continuously doing this it finally fixed it.

I ended up running a command which changed the permissions for the whole /Library/Printers folder recursively:

chmod -R g-w /Library/Printers/
chown -R root:wheel /Library/Printers/

This needs to be run as root, which is an option in ARD, or you can put "sudo" before each line.

Blender render farm for OS X in background

Hi, I want to set up a render farm at our College to run on any machine in the background with minimal installation and setup.

It looks like the built in render farm to blender is only acceptable on smaller scales where all machines are logged in, and have blender open and running. This isn't the right solution for me.

A while back I set up a render farm for Maya using OS X Qmaster. This runs in the background without anyone logged in, receives jobs and executes command line arguments. A network share is mounted on all machines running it. Looks like Qmaster isn't set up correctly on Mavericks, also might be some compatibility issues for it too. Looks like you can set up with command line:

sudo SystemStarter start Qmaster

qmasterprefs -list

Current settings:

 -sharingType servicesAndQuickCluster

 -launchContentAgent off

Bus error: 10

qmasterprefs -cluster on servername "test1"

Bus error: 10

I'm getting "Bus Error: 10" every time I run any commands

I also setup Blender to render over Xgrid, but Apple has pulled this out of the new servers so I'll give this a miss for now.

Farmerjoe render farm, looks alright. Need to install Perl I think.

DrQueue looks interesting, but you do need to compile it first.

Backburner is more promising, as we can also use it for Maya and any autodesk app. Found an article here which almost proves it. So here's my attempt a few years ago to get it working. I tried once more but couldn't get the web monitor working, might be because I've got the server app installed? Or it's mavericks? I shall continue with this.

installing iLife through Apple Remote Desktop Task Server

So, I need to install iLife '09 through ARD Task Server on 17 machines. When install the iLife '09.mpkg file from my machine straight to one machine it works fine. If I give it the option to use the task server it comes up with:
Completed but failed on 1 package ""

In console on that machine I found this line:

17/12/2013 16:03:26.476 com.apple.RemoteDesktop.agent: iLife09.mpkg/Contents/Installers/iPhoto.mpkg/Contents/Installers/iPhotoContent.pkg/Contents/Archive.pax.gz: (Empty error message)

I tried renaming the mpkg file so as not to have the '09 but did not effect it.

I'm now trying it from the command line. The plan is to just send some commands to the machine to mount the server share, and run the installer:

mkdir /Volumes/YourTMPFolder

mount -t afp afp://admin:yourPassword@your.server.here/YourShare /Volumes/YourTMPFolder

installer -package /Volumes//Volumes/YourTMPFolder/iLife09.mpkg -target /
umount /Volumes/YourTMPFolder

Works perfectly!

Deleting 'forced' local home folders created from OS X 10.7 Active Directory Logins

When users log in to the apple macs at the college it creates a local home on the machine to save preferences and files, and mounts their home drive too.

After a year these fill up. After a few searches and researches, looks like the easiest way is to write a script which deletes all folders except certain ones. Looks like you can use the 'find' command. Found a good example here:

find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name 'filename.gif' -iname '*.gif' -delete

Here's the man page for find

So, I don't want to delete the folders:
Guest
Shared
administrator
media

So:

find . -maxdepth 1 -not -name 'Guest' -not -name 'Shared' -not -name 'administrator' -not -name 'media' -name '*' -delete

I tried '*.*' but it only then deletes files with '.' in them, not folders. '*' selects everything including folders

Actually, I found here that the slightly better way to do it was to use the -exec rm instead of -delete. This then tells you which directories were actually deleted:

find /Users/Shared -maxdepth 1 -mindepth 1 -not -name 'administrator' -not -name 'Guest' -not -name 'Shared' -not -name 'media' -exec rm -Rvf {} \;

The -mindepth 1 option makes sure it doesn't delete the parent directory.

A longer term solution would be to delete these folders on logout, so the students and staff could get used to not relying on these folders.

Apple Remote Desktop 3 with OS X 10.7 probs

Seem to be having quite a few problems since moving onto 10.7 with remote desktop 3 and task server 3.4 (xserve OS X 10.4.8)

What I think it boils down to is accidentally upgrading to ARD 3.6. I since downgraded but required a bit of uninstallation which Macs don't do by default.

Found this info on uninstalling ARD:

sudo rm -rf /var/db/RemoteManagement
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteDesktop.plist 

For Apple Remote Desktop 3, run these commands in Terminal as well:

sudo rm -r /Library/Application\ Support/Apple/Remote\ Desktop/
rm -r ~/Library/Application\ Support/Remote\ Desktop/

To Remove Apple Remote Desktop, execute these commands in Terminal:

sudo rm -rf /System/Library/CoreServices/Menu\ Extras/RemoteDesktop.menu
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/PreferencePanes/ARDPref.prefPane
sudo rm -rf /System/Library/StartupItems/RemoteDesktopAgent/
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.ARDAgent.plist
sudo rm /Library/Preferences/com.apple.RemoteManagement.plist

I Then re-installed ARD 3.5.1 and clients 3.5.1

Because I've got so much save in ARD, I made a point to backup the ARD plist files in ~/Library/Preferences

This means I have all my saved scripts.

Getting Mac Model Identifiers using Command Line and ARD

I remember a few years ago ARD used to tell me the Mac Model Indentifier e.g. iMac12 ,2

Apparently not any more. I found this forum where they've found a command line argument which prints it:

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | grep "Model Identifier" | awk '{ print $3; }'

This worked, although the machines needed to be switched on to find it. I wonder why Apple never kept this feature in ARD?

installing Octave on Mac OS X 10.6 and 10.7

So, just read the wiki here. As it's open source, they havent yet made a pkg installer for it. Apparently, the best thing to do is to use a Package Manager to install it for you.

I've just tried Fink but the website isn't working. Looks like they've moved their website to http://fink.thetis.ig42.org/. Apperantly there's no pkg installer for this either! Here's the download for the binary.

I gave up here and found that MacPorts have an installer.

Installed MacPorts alright, but when I tried to run the command:

sudo port install octave-devel +atlas+docs

It came up with the error not knowing what the command "port" was. I had to type in:

export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH

One prerequisite is to have xcode installed.

Having done all this, still came up with an error:

Error: Port octave-devel not found

I think it's because we have a proxy server which looks like complicated to add to MacPorts!

Oh well, might just try Matlab! (student version £55!)


....... a little time later......

So I'm now trying at home on OS X 10.7.5

Installed MacPorts
trying to install octave but comes up with:

Error: Port octave not found

Turns out you have to selfupdate MacPort in order for it to sync something or other. Type:

sudo port -v selfupdate

This then came up with the error:

rsync: failed to connect to rsync.macports.org: Connection refused (61)

rsync error: error in socket IO (code 10) at /SourceCache/rsync/rsync-42/rsync/clientserver.c(105) [receiver=2.6.9]

Command failed: /usr/bin/rsync -rtzv --delete-after rsync://rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs/base.tar /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/tarballs

Exit code: 10

Error: /opt/local/bin/port: port selfupdate failed: Error synchronizing MacPorts sources: command execution failed

Doh! Just did a search and found this. Turns out I have PeerGuardian running. Turned it off and ran selfupdate again which worked fine. So, next I tried installing octave again:

sudo port install octave

--->  Computing dependencies for octave

Error: Dependency 'atlas' not found.

Doh! I read this article which tells how other people are having the same trouble. Looks like one of the sync files on a server must be wrong. selfupdating port at some point will fix it;

sudo port -v selfupdate
sudo port install octave +accelerate +gcc45

What do you know? It worked!!

Screen Recording Project - timelapsed

So, I would like to record a whole working week, or maybe more, of work at my computer, but how?

Well, first off I think I want it to be time-lapsed. I think I would like 1 working day compressed into 1 minute:

1 working day = 8.5 x 60 = 510 minutes = 30600 seconds
1 minute = 60 seconds = 60 x 24fps = 1440 frames
30600 / 1440 = 21.25 seconds between each frame

Well, Quicktime does come with screen recording capabilities, but these are a bit hefty on the old processor/ram/disk space.

What I will probably do is make an Automator workflow which takes a screenshot every 21 seconds. Here it is:

Automator workflow which takes a screenshot every 22 seconds

By default "Take a screenshot" saves a file in a location but calls it something. For the next screenshot it overwrites the first. I had to use variables to change this.

Firstly I got a location variable and this contained the folder to save it to. I then got the time variable. I then made a text variable and dragged both of these other variables in, with a "/" in between. I dragged this variable into  the "Save to:" box. It then saves it to the location folder, with the name of the time it was taken.

I think you also need the "Get Value of Variable" before so it updates the variable "time".

Each screenshot is about 1.7MB:

1.7MB x 1440 = 2448MB per day.

I converted this into a quicktime movie using MPEGStreamClip  and it made a 17MB file! (15fps). Sorted!

To anonymise reducing it by 1/3rd (600 x 400 px) seems to render the text unreadable!


After a while of running this I got slightly annoyed at the screencapture noise. To run it silently I figured changing the preferences for it would work. Nope. Next I found the plist file:
com.apple.screencapture

But firstly it didn't exist, and next I couldn't find full documentation of it! Just the simple stuff like file format and location.

The command line for it is:

screencapture -x filelocation/filename.png

So I modified the automator workflow to use this command line instead of the screencapture object. It took 5 mins to work out how to access the variables in Run Shell Script but here's how I did it:

Screencapture workflow with automator using command line argument and passing variable

To access variables I think the only way is to pass them into the run shell script. I found this helpful page on it

The main points were:

1. Make sure you ignore the inputs unless you really need them.
1. i.e. I only really needed the full path name and filename combined so this was only passed into the "Run Shell Script"
2. To use the passed variable you type:
1. "$@"
1. I don't think you need the speech marks but I needed them in the shell script

Now I'm thinking about it I don't think I need the workflow at all, could just run it using a simple shell script. But I think Automator is a nice way of introducing people to programming.

Set Automatic Proxy Configuration through Command line in OS X 10.7

It took me a while to find it, but to set the Automatic Proxy Configuration url and tick the box through command line I found this helpful post which describes a script on how to do it.

First you need to find which network interface you want to change:

networksetup -listallnetworkservices
Ethernet

Use this in the command:

networksetup -setautoproxyurl Ethernet http://wpad.your.path.here/wpad.dat

By adding a url it automatically switches it on. To check:

networksetup -getautoproxyurl Ethernet

Simples. Don't know why it took me so long to find it. Don't think it's in the man page for networksetup for some reason!

Setting all Apple Macs to use network time servers

So I wanted to change all the Macs here to use our specific network time servers so that their time is never out and so cause login issues. I did it by first finding the command line arguments, then making a shell script, then making a pkg file which the OS X task server sent to all the machines when they are powered on.

Here's the step by step guide:

1. finding the command line arguments:
1. sudo systemsetup -setnetworktimeserver your.time.server.ac.uk
2. sudo systemsetup -setusingnetworktime on
2. making a shell script
1. make a new plain text document using "TextEdit"
2. make the first line:
1. #!/bin/bash
3. paste the two lines from 1.1 and 1.2
4. save as (untick "add .txt file extension) and put .sh at the end
5. make it executable
1. in terminal type:
1. chmod 744 nameOfShellScript.sh
3. make a .pkg file which runs this script
1. I use Iceberg. Here are the screenshots:








2. When done, go to Build > build
3. navigate to the project folder in Finder and inside the "Build" folder you'll find the .pkg file.
4. test it on a computer
5. Send to all machine
1. I use Apple Remote Desktop Task Server for this

1. select the computers in a list
2. click "Install Packages"
3. select the package
4. select "run this task from: The Task Server on your.task.server.ac.uk"
5. sorted
2. sorted
6. sorted

installing Trains and Zeppelin Mod for Minecraft

So, my son would like to play this "Trains and Zeppelin Mod" for minecraft. Talk about complicated! I've got a mac which adds a little more complication. Anyway, here's how to do it:

1. go to terminal and type:
1. cp ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin/minecraft.jar ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin/minecraft_backup1.jar
1. this creates a backup of your .jar file
2. mkdir ~/temp
1. this makes a folder in your home folder called temp
3. cd ~/temp
1. this moves you into this folder
4. jar xf ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin/minecraft.jar
1. this unzips the .jar file into the temp folder
2. download:


1. Modloader -> download file here
2. ModloaderMp -> download file here
3. Minecraft Forge API -> download file here
4. Trains and Zeppelin Mod -> download file here
3. unzip these zip files (double click on them)
4. copy, in the order downloaded, all the contents of these zip files to the ~/temp/ folder on your home drive
1. a dialogue box will appear saying something along the lines of:
1. do you want to overwrite this file
2. tick the "apply to all" box and click "replace"


5. finally, go back to "Terminal" and type:
1. jar uf ~/Library/Application\ Support/minecraft/bin/minecraft.jar ./
1. this zips the temp folder up into the .jar file in the right location

When the game is now loaded, it will tell you down the bottom left that there are 4 mods, and it should all work.

I had a bit of trouble before, but I've found I did things a little different then suggested. Heres some things I did different:

1. I loaded the game up after just installing the Modloader, ModloaderMp and Minecraft Forge API without the Trains mod installed.
1. I then went through the process again, and added the Trains and Zeppelin Mod
2. I didn't delete the META-INF folder in the .jar file
3. I couldn't find the trainconfig.cfg file.
1. turns out it is automatically made when minecraft is started.
2. doesn't look like this file works on Mac OS X 10.6.8?!
3. None of the Keys work!!!!!!

Hope it helps.

One note I'd like to make is:

• Why is this such a long winded process. The way I would like to add Mods is to:
• double click a file which loads and says it's installed!

But, I ask myself, why don't I do this. Well I guess I expect too much.

HP Shortcut Manager

Whilst imaging a machine I noticed a process taking up 100% of one of the cores named HPShortcutManager. After a quick search I found this Apple Discussion on the issue. It appears there's an issue with HP Scanjet Scanners button manager. It isn't very effecient at waiting for someone pressing one of the buttons on the front of the scanner.

Best way to fix is by deleting the HPShortcutManagerstartup.app:
sudo rm -R /Library/Application\ Support/Hewlett-Packard/HP\ Scanjet\ Scanner/HPShortcutManagerStartup.app

Done

Rendering with Maya Terminal command line

So, want to start a render farm, which essentially sends command line commands to computers. You can do this yourself really.

I thought I'd document the command line stuff so that I can come back to it some other time.

So, to open the Maya Terminal, you can open up Terminal and type:
. /Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh

Now you'll have access to Maya terminal commands.

Here's a simple line to render a file:
render /Users/me/test.mb

Simply renders the file with the settings that are set inside that file (in the render settings).

You can use flags with this command to set all kinds of things. Found a good help page here. The ones I'm interested in are:

• -r mr
• uses mental ray for renderer
• -rd /Users/Shared
• uses the specified directory for rendering to
• -s 1
• sets the start frame of sequence to render
• -e 100
• sets the end frame of sequence to render
• -reg 0 250 0 250

• sets the render region to render 
• (left right bottom top)
• it's key to note that co-ordinates 0, 0 are at the bottom left of the image, so 0 250 0 250 renders a 250px square at the bottom left as pictured
• it creates a file of the proper resolution, and fills in the part which was rendered
• to combine, make sure each render 'region' has a different file name, peice it back together in photoshop
• -im mylovelyfile
• saves the render with this name
• -x 250
• renders this amount of pixels width-ways
• -y 250
• renders this amount of pixels height-ways
• -cam persp1
• the name of the camera you want to render from
• -proj /Users/Shared/
• uses this folder to load file
• -n 0
• use all available processors

If you're using mentalray, you can also use:

• -art
• mentalray measures how many cores you have and adjusts to maximise performance
• -v 5
• for render percentage

For a render farm, each node will need access to the .mb file and all the textures. It's also good to have them render to the same folder so you don't have to collect it all. I'd have the files on the server and run this command:

(first make a directory to mount the shared folder onto)

mkdir /Volumes/renderfarm

(then mount it)

mount -t afp afp://admin:password@my.server.dns.name/MySharedFolder /Volumes/renderfarm

I'd also be tempted to load the file up from this mounted directory and make sure the project path corresponds to this, so it can find all the sub-directories for textures and such.

On each computer you simply type the range of files to be rendered, so:

render -r mr -s 1 -e 10 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb

render -r mr -s 11 -e 20 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb
render -r mr -s 21 -e 30 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb

render -r mr -s 31 -e 40 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb

render -r mr -s 41 -e 50 -rd /Volumes/renderfarm/rendered/ -v 5 -art /Volumes/renderfarm/file1.mb

OS X Maya 2012 and Backburner

So, I'm getting up and running with Maya and I want to eventually use as many machines as possible to render from (I have about 100 machines, 4 of which are super-duper!). So where to start. Well, just found the Maya documentation and found the specific Backburner very small section on Page 175.

One interesting bit is about where to say which machine is the "Manager". This is in the folder:
/usr/discreet/backburner/cfg


Looking here you find most of Backburner including a link to the Documentation:
http://download.autodesk.com/us/systemdocs/pdf/backburner2011_user_guide.pdf


note: can't find backburner 2012 documentation!


So, reading backburner 2011 user guide pg.77 to start, stop and restart backburner in terminal type:

sudo /usr/discreet/backburner/backburner stop
sudo /usr/discreet/backburner/backburner startsudo /usr/discreet/backburner/backburner restart

I initially had a problem. Whenever I ran backburner it would come up with:


/usr/discreet/backburner/backburner: line 64: syntax error: unexpected end of file

Couldn't find any mention of it on Google. I had a look at the file and couldn't find anything wrong with it. Seems to just contain a list of 'if' statements. On line 64 it is concerned with 'stop'ping the service:

if [ "$1" == "stop" ]; then

   ${DL_BACKBURNERDIR}/backburner_server stop

   ${DL_BACKBURNERDIR}/backburner_manager stop

fi

I simply swapped these to lines and saved and it didn't come up with the error any more? There must have been an incorrect carriage return.

Anyway, carrying on, you need to stop the manager in order to edit the configuration. Configuration file is:
/usr/discreet/backburner/Network/backburner.xml

Details on what some of it means is in backburner2011 user guide page.81.

It looks quite good anyway, only two things I'm concerned about:

1. the subnet mask to use
1. unfortunately, my machine is on one subnet, and the rest of the macs are on another!
2. what to name the manager
1. currently is set to 'localhost'
2. shall I rename it?

Now for the webserver.

Default username and password are:

backburner

backburner

pg.78 and 79 describe how to manage users.

to check the server and manager are running type the following and you should get some results:

n250-04524:Network leachs$ ps -ef | grep backburner

    0  1573     1   0   0:00.05 ??         0:00.08 /usr/discreet/backburner/backburnerManager

    0  1590     1   0   0:00.00 ??         0:00.00 /bin/sh /usr/discreet/backburner/backburner_server run

    0  1602 1590 0 0:00.02 ?? 0:00.03 /usr/discreet/backburner/backburnerServer -m localhost

Next, you need to make sure that the manager name is in the:
/usr/discreet/backburner/cfg/manager.host

It is currently 'localhost'.

Well, took about 5 mins but finally found where to get to backburner webpage!:

http://localhost/backburner/

Not documented ANYWHERE!!!

Well, it's a good start. I shall set the machine next to me as a server node.

Well, been quite unsuccessful at the moment. Can't seem to get:

1. the web monitor to register the name of the manager
2. any servers to connect to the manager

just found this update for backburner. Found on this page

OS X Maya command line rendering with ssh

So, we have a lot of Apple Macs here, some very, very nice Mac Pro's. I have previously attempted to set up a render farm through X-Grid, which is managed through a Mac OS X Server.

I've just found Autodesk's Backburner is now available for mac, but I think it might not have an Administrator GUI for OS X, just Windows? I'll look into it. Anyway, found this little video on how to get a mac client working with backburner(submitting a job and using it as a render node)

But my original purpose in making this post was to catalogue how I'm going to use the command line to render (until I get backburner up and running).

So, I've installed Maya 2012 on a nice fast machine (not mine) and I want to render a job on this nice machine. So I open up terminal and type:

ssh 123.456.7.89
password....

. /Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh

render /path/to/file.mb

The ". /Applications/Autodesk/maya2012/Maya.app/Contents/bin/MayaENV.sh" line loads up Maya Terminal.

It renders whatever you have set up in the file. i.e. I set up for it to render one frame from perspective camera at 1080p resolution on Production Quality to: /path/to/maya/project/folder/images/.

You can add more information via the 'render' command. Type:

render -h

to get a very long list of arguments for the render command.

OS X automatically changing a password

This is a follow up from the post which describes the problems with 'locking' down a printer. I've finally decided that we are locking down the computer attached to the printer, and changing it's password each day so only people who know the password can print.

So, I've just tested "passwd" command and found it quite useful. It has given me a few ideas.

• When typing "passwd" when you're already logged in
• it assumes you're changing your password
• It asks for your old one, a new one, and retype the new one. Done.
• When typing in from an admin account "passwd stephenl"
• it asks you as if you were the user whose password is being changed as before.
• When doing this through root login (i.e. from Apple Remote Desktops send command)
• it just asks for a new password twice. Easy.

So, I worked out two ways I could do this:

1. I could simply have some scheduled tasks setup in ARD which sends these commands on certain days
2. I could set up a totally self sufficient system when the machine is switched on, it looks at the day, and determines which password to use.

Number 1 is the easiest as I know how to do this.

Number 2 is harder as I'd have to write a script which:

1. loads at startup
2. uses root to change passwords
3. finds out what day it is
4. changes the password accordingly

Now I've written it out in logical order it doesn't sound too difficult.

Just found this post which describes how to simply make a startup script