November 2017 Archives

Does your friend or significant other have a Mac from work that is locked down so that changes can't be made? Any attempt to make a chance in System Preferences asks for the admin password, which you don't have. Maybe they are a teacher at a school with overly-zealous sysadmins? Maybe they work at an insurance company that... just kidding, no insurance company supports Macs.

Someone Who Isn't Me knows someone that has a Mac laptop and can't print to the home printers for exactly this reason. To print at home, they generate a PDF, copy the file to a USB stick, and walk it over to another computer that can print. That is ludicrous.

Now is your chance to fix this.

In macOS High Sierra, anyone can login as "root" with empty password. When asked for the admin username and password enter "root" as the user, then leave the password blank. Two this a second time and you'll unlock admin access.

Now is your chance to install that printer, change the screen saver settings, enable Time Machine, or whatever you have been wanting to do.

Apple will surely fix this soon. You probably only have hours or days to install all the printers and VPNs and other things you've been meaning to fix.

Oh, but don't break any laws or company policies. Certainly don't create an account with admin privs, or give the primary user admin privs. That is probably against policy and could lead to productivity.

More info here: https://twitter.com/lemiorhan/status/935578694541770752

Sorry... not sorry.

Ryn Daniels has written an excellent piece about time management and productivity when you are burned out. The advice is spot on. I also do these things when I'm not feeling my best too.

"It's one thing to talk about productivity when you're already feeling motivated and productive, but how do you get things done when it's hard to even make it through the day?"

https://superyesmore.com/productivity-when-you-just-cant-even-0c73d6a1f086209af420c2ced442a2e8

Taras Lipatov, Principal Engineer at Sailthru, will describe his experience building a hybrid cloud using docker/mesos/consul­ at the Tuesday, November 14, 2017 nycdevops meetup. More info and to RSVP on https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/241852995/. RSVP soon! See you there!

This issue's column in ACMQueue Magazine is titled, "Operational Excellence in April Fools' Pranks". You can read it on the Queue app: http://queue.acm.org/app/

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/devopsdays-nyc-2018-tickets-39330760363

I'm a bit too tired to write a full review of Usenix LISA 2017, so let me just say that the content was excellent and the audience was the most diverse that I've seen at a mainstream sysadmin conference.

The best part about the content? If I could sum it up in one word, it would be "new". Tons of new stuff, new technology, new ideas, and new techniques. (Ironically the one training session I taught was my not-new Time Management class, but the room was packed with new attendees.)

Best meta-issue? Usenix switched to the "Sched App" which was awesome. It made a big difference having an excellent app for the schedule. I always knew where I wanted to be. When a conference has multiple tracks, a good app becomes critical.

Congrats to co-chairs Connie-Lynne Villani (Fastly.com) and Caskey Dickson (Microsoft) for putting together an awesome conference and thanks to all the staff, committee, and volunteers that made it happen!

LISA 18 will take place October 28-November 2, 2018, at the Omni Nashville in Nashville, TN. I've already marked it in my calendar. You should too!