Mac OS

Clearing Font Caches

Wrote up a handy script to clear all the font caches for the Mac OS, Adobe, MIcrosoft Office and Apple iWorks.

I am using this in Casper, so I have it running as root and having a reboot happen after. If you are going to run this on your own, you may want to put a root check in there and make sure to reboot after.

#!/bin/bash
## Author: C. Tangora
## Purpose: Remove Font Cache from Adobe, Microsoft, iWork and Mac OS.
## If run outside of Casper, be sure to be root & reboot after.

## Adobe Font Caches are stored in the User's Libraries, and will have "Fnt" in the name and end in ".lst".
echo "Removing Adobe Font Caches (Lists)"
find -x /Users -mindepth 5 -type f -iname *Fnt*.lst -delete
sleep 1

## Next it will remove the font caches from Microsoft Office.
echo "Removing Office Font Caches"
find -x /Users -mindepth 7 -type f -name *Office\ Font\ Cache* -delete
sleep 1

## iWorks is next on the chopping block
echo "Removing iWork Font Caches"
find -x /Users -type f -name com.apple.iwork.fonts -delete
sleep 1

## Next we will restart the Apple Type Server.
# This is the one we want to make sure we reboot (or at least logout) to restart.
echo "Removing OS Font Caches"
atsutil databases -remove
sleep 1

echo "Restarting Apple Type Service Server"
atsutil server -shutdown
atsutil server -ping
sleep 1
echo "Completed Font Clearing."
echo "Please restart ASAP."

exit 0

’till next time

Fastest ways to get a Mac’s serial number from the command line

Getting a Mac’s serial number is often a task that is prelude to other work in a shell script. I was toying around with a script and noticed that it was taking longer than I liked on the client machines, but really fast on my machine. Looking around the web I found a great page that listed the times it took another person to query for the Serial Number, on jaharmi.com. It made me stop and do some time test for myself.

I started timing each component to track down the culprit. Turns out the serial number logic was taking over a second to run to run the first time it was called, but then was dropping dramatically on consecutive calls. I decided to do some time test myself, first to see if Jaharmi’s post was still relevant (it was from 2008) and second to see if I couldn’t tweak it further to gain a few more fractions of a second improvement.

First was what the script had at first, using system_profile. When I tested just using system_profile I found that the first run of the script would take over 1 second on my Mid-2010 MacBook Pro. The next few times I ran it the time dropped from 1.722 seconds down to as low as 0.226 seconds. The trimmed mean for running it five times was 0.227 seconds.

system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | grep "Serial Number" | awk '{ print $4; }'

Next I took the ioreg approach, first off what Jaharmi had posted…

ioreg -l | awk '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ { split($0, line, "\""); printf("%s\n", line[4]); }'

But this took even longer! The trimmed mean time for this was 0.470 seconds. That would definitely not do. However, I still felt that ioreg should return a better time than system_profiler, something in my gut told me that. So I took a closer look at the script and modified it to return a smaller data set before sorting it.

ioreg -c IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 2 | awk '/IOPlatformSerialNumber/ { split($0, line, "\""); printf("%s\n", line[4]); }'

Now we’re cooking. This returned a trimmed mean time of 0.007 seconds. I tried tweaking it a bit more with a different sorting logic to see if this could be dropped even further. But alas, it didn’t really make much of a difference when dealing with thousandth’s of a second. I ended up using this code…

ioreg -c IOPlatformExpertDevice -d 2 | grep SerialNumber | awk -F "\"" '{print $4}'

… as it required less code to get the same speed result. I’m now adding this to my useful unix file for future reference.

’till next time

What version is my Mac OS X installer?

One of the things that I do for Mac imaging is use InstaDMG to make my master image. Part of the InstaDMG imaging process requires the build version of the installer OS to match a specified key in the catalog. I figured out where this was, months ago, but as time has passed I forgot it.

Luckily, I didn’t need to use it for a while. But now I do. We’re having to go to Lion for a few months to get the Mac Book Airs out the door. I can’t put an unsupported OS on a production machine. So, we’ll brave new waters for a few months and try to keep that momentum up for a quick adoption to Mountain Lion.

Anyways! Back to the point of this post!!!!

To find out what version of Lion your installer is (for use with InstaDMG), simply mount the InstallESD.dmg, and open

MacOSXInstallESD/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist.

Now look at the value for ProductBuildVersion. That is your version number.

I’m posting this, so if I ever need it again, I know where to look. Thanks to Allister on AFP548.com’s InstaDMG forum for pointing this one out!

Till next time.

Virtual Box, the easy way with Casper

We’ve been deploying VirtualBox on a one-to-one basis for the past year. Each time someone requested vBox we would get their machine and install it. Casper came along, and after some politics, we decided to give it a shot at building a Virtual Box installer with Windows 7 built-in. While the end result still requires some hands-on to modify some settings (such as computer naming & binding to the AD), it is by far faster and easier to get a Mac to run Windows 7 in Virtual Box now.

The following are some considerations when planning your vBox.

Not all software is legally allowed to be distributed “on image”. Sometimes you’ll have to create a post-install process to do this (such as a GPO or Kace, BigFix, etc).
Binding requires unique name, so you’ll want to bind after it is deployed.
Do not have multiple partitions on the windows drive, you won’t be able to use the dynamic disk size of Virtual Box if your second partition has space left on it.
You’ll want to make sure you setup the storage area to be in a shared space, so it is accessible by more than just the user who created the package.

These are just some of the warnings, however the pay-off is worth it. If you have a paid application for virtualization (Parraellels, VMWare) it is far easier than with vBox (in my opinion), but again you can’t beat the price of Virtual Box. That advantage of Casper is that you can push the user preferences for VirtualBox out as a separate package, available For Exisiting Users, or For User Template. We’re in the testing stages now, but if all goes as planned, we’ll have a simplified Virtual Box deployment in the near future.

I’ll post updates when complete (maybe even the file paths if I get the time).