Apple Remote Desktop For Administrators- Tips
ARD 2.1 offers many valuable functions for administrators- much too exhaustive to be listed
here- instead, please read the manual which is accessible from the Help menu.

Below are some general tips for ARD 2.1:

Tips
    Turn the Display colors down to grayscale for WAN viewing, and a notch up for
  •
    normal viewing. Full color detail is very bandwidth intensive…
    For remote installing/updating- always try to do it from a Remote Desktop admin from
  •
    within the building (Installing packages is an ideal way to update)
    Always make sure that a remote admin has the “Allow control of this computer…”
  •
    option is checked.
    To re-clone computers, use ARD to set the Startup Disk to the AutoNetRestore
  •
    network volume on the server.


Handy-Dandy Unix Shell Line Commands
ARD 2.1 allows administrators to execute UNIX commands on
remote machines. This is a very powerful feature which should
ONLY be used if you are sure of what you are doing.

Commands can be used in combinations using a “;”
to separate. Commands are tasks that are queued- the
next command task will not start until a previous task
is completed.

Many commands that work without a path in
Terminal may require the full path (eg /usr/bin) in
ARD. When in doubt, include the path…

To find out more about a command’s options, use the man command (manual) in Terminal.
For example, man say will display the instructions for using the say command.




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Some Useful UNIX Commands and descriptions (run all as User: root):

Command                    Usage / Notes
reboot                    Forces a reboot of the computer. If a user is logged
                       in, it does NOT give them any warning or options...
diskutil repairPermissions /         Repairs permissions on the root hard drive- should be
                       used after any updates or installs (can be added to an
                       update command with a ;)
diskutil enableJournal /           Enables disk journaling on the root hard drive.
                       Should be enabled on 10.2+ systems, this command
                       is convenient for systems that have been updated
                       from a previous version of OS X.
niutil -destroy . /mcx_cache         Deletes the mcx_cache. Useful if cached login
                       information is interfering with logins (Typical errors
                       this can help: User can not log in at this time, login
                       failed, home directory not found, etc…)
osascript -e 'set volume 7'          Sends an AppleScript command to set the sound
                       volume of the computer (0-7). The osascript –
                       ‘applescript command’ can be used to execute any
                       Applescript command.
softwareupdate –i –a             Installs ALL available software updates. Should
                       usually be followed by the reboot command. Also,
                       you should run the repairPermissions command. If
( Suggest using: diskutil
                       updating a large number of computers, this will
repairPermissions / ; softwareupdate     saturate your network connection and many
–i –a; diskutil repairPermissions / ;     workstations will fail to update- download the
reboot )                   packages for the updates and use ARD to install
                       packages instead for large updates.
/System/Library/CoreServices/         (No line breaks) Restarts ARD on the clients. May
                       need to be ran instead via terminal, connecting to the
RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents
                       workstation via ssh.
/Resources/kickstart -restart -agent
/usr/bin/say text to speak          Speaks the text that follows.
/usr/sbin/appletalk -u en0          Enables Appletalk on the first ethernet port




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