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When Profile Manager installs a printer, the CUPS queue name doesn’t match what the user sees. You can get a list of those queues by typing lpstat -s. To remove the printer by the name you define in Profile Manager with a script, you’ll need to find out the CUPS name.

Here’s a one-liner to remove a printer that was automatically installed with Profile Manager:


export ptr="PRINTERNAME";lpstat -s | awk "\$4 ~ /$ptr/ {print \$3}" | tr -d : | xargs lpadmin -x


Just replace PRINTERNAME with the correct queue name.

If you modify a printer in Mac OS X Server’s Profile Manager, the changes don’t always get updated in my experience. To get the updates, you need to remove the row in the database that references the old printer.

In Terminal, load psql and select the correct database:

sudo psql -U _devicemgr -d devicemgr_v2m0 -h /Library/Server/ProfileManager/Config/var/PostgreSQL

Find printers with the ‘select’ SQL command:

SELECT * FROM printers;

This will select all printers. You can also use SQL’s ‘WHERE’ clause to filter the results down even more.

To remove the offending entry, use the DELETE command:

DELETE FROM printers where id=[the 'id' column obtained from the previous list]

As soon as I did this, the new printer populated in Profile Manager.

If you’ve ever used Apple’s iPhone Configuration Utility, you’ve probably noticed that it says ‘Unsigned’ when you send the .mobileconfig file to your device. To sign the profile, export or email the config file to yourself, have your certificate files handy, and type the following:

openssl smime \
-sign \
-signer your-cert.pem \
-inkey your-priv-key.pem \
-certfile TheCertChain.pem \
-nodetach \
-outform der \
-in ConfigProfile.mobileconfig \
-out ConfigProfile_signed.mobileconfig


The files you’ll need are:

your-cert.pem – this is the certificate you’ve been issued
your-priv-key.pem – this is your private key
TheCertChain.pem – this is the certificate chain (optional, in some cases)
ConfigProfile.mobileconfig – This is the unsigned copy of your configuration profile

The original instructions are located here.

If you are like me, and annoyed that OS X 10.6’s ping command displays the following text when it cannot reach a host:

Request timeout for icmp_seq 0
Request timeout for icmp_seq 1
Request timeout for icmp_seq 2

Then you’ll be happy for the fix. You can either download the source code to the ping command from Apple and edit it yourself, or you can download my pre-compiled copy.

If you choose to edit it yourself, you’ll want to comment out lines 977 and 978 so they look like this:

// if (!(options & F_QUIET))
// printf("Request timeout for icmp_seq %ld\n", ntransmitted - 2);


Then just type ‘gcc ping.c’ and you’ll end up with a file called a.out, which you can use to replace /sbin/ping, or put in your local ~/bin directory if you’ve got one.

When connecting to AFP shares in the new Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), you may get a -5002 error when the server only supports clear text passwords. To resolve, either disable clear text passwords on the server side, or change the following plist:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.AppleShareClient.plist

You need to change the afp_cleartext_allow value to “Yes” “true” or “1” (depending on the current values you see, either “false” or a “0”).

Here’s an excerpt from my file:


...
<key>afp_cleartext_allow</key>
<true />
<key>afp_cleartext_warn</key>
<integer>0</integer>
<key>afp_default_name</key>
<string></string>
...