Recently i just deploy OCS Inventory NG (Open Computers and Software Inventory Next Generation) to track my IT assets. OCS-NG collects information about the hardware and software of network machines that running the OCS client program (“OCS Inventory Agent”).

In my network environment, i have machine that run on Windows and Mac OS X.

In this tutorial, i just show how to install OCS Inventory agent on Mac OS X machine. You can download the latest OCS Inventory agent installer from OCS Inventory official website. I did try to install the latest version of OCS inventory agent for Mac but it doesn’t work. So, i decided to use the older version of OCS inventory agent which is version 1.1. This version work fine for me in Mac OS X 10.5 and Mac OS X 10.6.

Let’s start with installation of a Mac OS X agent. Download the Mac OS X agent from here and unzip the file. Once the file has been extracted, double-click on Agent_MacOSX_1.1.pkg to start the installation. During the installation, you just follow instruction from installation wizard and click continue to move forward.

Once the installation finished, now you have to configure your Mac OS X machine to communicate with OCS Inventory Server. To communicate with OCS inventory server, you have to point your OCS inventory agent point to the OCS inventory server ip address or domain name.

Here are the steps:-

• launch your terminal
• edit OCS inventory agent configuration files by enter following command

 sudo nano /etc/ocsinventory-agent/ocsinventory-agent.cfg

• Change the default server name ocsinventory-ng to your server ip address or domain name

server=192.168.0.2
logfile=/var/log/ocsng.log
delaytime=30

• After change, just save the file.

Now the final step that you have to do is to force the OCS inventory agent run. To do it, just enter the following command in your terminal.

sudo /Applications/OCSNG.app/Contents/Resources/ocsinventory-agent

Now you can login to your OCS inventory server web GUI. You should be able to see your Mac machine information appear on the web GUI.

If you have any others tips and trick on deploying OCS Inventory agent on Mac OS X, please share with me by leave your comment here. I will really appreciate it.

P/S: Thank you to those who have developed OCS! This is an excellent tool!

I got complaint from my user about their Thunderbird email client spell check function. According to them, the spell check function stop working. I tried to do misspelled two word in this email client to demonstrate the problem. I found that the email client fail to detect the wrong spelling.

To perform troubleshooting on this problem, i try to check on Thunderbird Options setting by using bellow steps .

From the pop-up dialogue shows an empty grey box for “Language” which means that Dictionaries & Language Packs installed on that computer. To solve the spell check issue, just need to manually install Dictionaries & Language Packs.

Below are the steps:-

• Click Add to Thunderbird.
• Wait for the download to finish; even if nothing seems to be happening, chances are a dialog will eventually appear.
• Click Install Now under Install add-ons only from authors whom you trust..
• Now click Restart Now.

Done!!

You can easily transfer Photos from your iOS devices (iPhone/iPad/iPod) to your Mac computer. The easiest way to transfer pictures from your iOS devices to your Mac is through Preview. You’ll need to connect your iOS devices to your Mac computer via USB cable. In this tutorial, i will going to use my iPod Touch to do it.

Below are the few simple steps to do it:-

• Launch Preview
• From the File menu navigate down and select “Import from iPod…”

• Select “Import All” to get all the pictures, otherwise individually select pictures and click ‘Import’

• By default, all the picture will import to  ~/Pictures/ folder. You can change the location by select the your preferable location from the drop down box. In this example, i will select the default location.
• After import, the photos show up on Preview so you can edit, crop or color correct if you’d like.

Besides using Preview, you can also transfer pictures to your Mac with iPhoto or Image Capture. If you have any other alternative to do it, just share with me by leave your comment here

Your DNS cache stores the locations (IP addresses) of pages you have recently viewed. DNS cache help to speeds up the lookups within the same host.  But sometimes if the website page change before your DNS cache is updated, you will failed to access the page. For example, you received a web page with HTML 404 error codes. So you need to flush your DNS cache. Once you clear your DNS cache, your computer will query nameservers for the new DNS information you require.

Clear DNS cache on Windows XP, Vista, Win7

1. Open the Start menu.
2. Go to Run.
   • If you do not see the Run command in Vista, search for “run” in the Search bar.
3. In the Run text box, type: ipconfig /flushdns
4. Press Enter or Return, and your cache will be flushed.

To clear DNS cache in Mac OS X 10.5 and above, use the following command:

1. Go to Applications.
2. Go to Utilities.
3. Open the Terminal application.
4. Type: dscacheutil -flushcache
5. Press Enter or Return, and your cache will be flushed.

Clear DNS cache on Linux (Red Hat / Fedora / CentOS)

Launch your terminal and enter following command to flush DNS:-

$ sudo /etc/init.d/nscd restart

OR

# service nscd restart

If you first time use iMac, you probably will ask a question how to adjust the screeb brightness. iMac does not have brightness controls like normal LCD monitor.

Actually it is very easy to change the brightness of your screen by just hit F14 or F15 on your Apple Keyboard.

Besides that, you also can adjust your iMac’s display from your “System Preferences.” Below are the steps:-

• Open System Preferences.

  

• Click on the “Displays” icon under the hardware section.
• Adjust the brightness by clicking on the slider. Move the slider to the right to brighten the display. Move the slider left to darken the display.

• Click the “Close” button in the top-left corner of the window to close dialogue box.

Do you that you could make your Mac OS X re-run the initial Setup Assistant like the first setup of your Mac Machine? Here is the tips that i going to share with yours.

Before i do that, i need to reinstall my Mac OS X 10.5 first. During the installation, i need to setup the Mac Machine and create a user account. After installation was completed, i log-in to the user account and update the OS and software to most current versions.

Once the update was done. Now i have to reset the Mac machine back to no users and boots to the Setup Assistant again. Setup Assistant will asks for user info and creates a new account. To do that, just follow below steps:-

• Boot into single-user mode (Hold the command+S button during startup)
• Once the command-line prompt appears, type the following command

mount -uw

rm -rf /Library/Preferences/

rm -rf /users/username

rm /var/db/dslocal/nodes/Default/users/username.plist

rm -rf /var/db/.AppleSetupDone

exit

(Note: replace username with whatever account short name you’ve created)

• After that, your Mac OS X will restart and the setup assistant will launch automatically

• Just select the language to proceed to Mac OS X welcome screen animation

• Now you can proceed to register your user information. If you want to let the user register the Mac by themselves, you can just press command+Q and click Shut Down.
• The Setup Assistant will automatically run the next time the Mac is started.

I tried this tutorial on Mac OS X 10.5, it work fine. I think it should same in Mac OS X 10.6. But i not try it yet. Please share your experience with me via leave your comment here.

My manager complain to me said that her MacBook having resolution problem. Her MacBook log-in screen resolution different with the screen log in to the Desktop. The log-in window already change to low resolution with large text and large picture. But when you log in, it changes resolution back to high resolution.

To fix the log-in screen’s resolution, i just login the MacBook as a administrator and change the resolution of the display back to the desired resolution. After that, just reboot your Machine. You will realize that the log-in screen resolution change back to high resolution.

If this does not work, try resetting the computer’s PRAM, and then changing the resolution again. After that, just reboot your Machine. To learn how to reset PRAM, just click HERE to get the tutorial.

If you facing the same problem, please share your comment here.

Resetting PRAM and NVRAM

1. Shut down the computer.
2. Locate the following keys on the keyboard: Command, Option, P, and R. You will need to hold these keys down simultaneously in step 4.
3. Turn on the computer.
4. Press and hold the Command-Option-P-R keys. You must press this key combination before the gray screen appears.
5. Hold the keys down until the computer restarts and you hear the startup sound for the second time.
6. Release the keys.
7. Your computer’s PRAM and the NVRAM are reset to the default values.

Please take note that after resetting NVRAM or PRAM you may need to reconfigure your settings for speaker volume, screen resolution, startup disk selection, time zone information.

After the problem solved by resetting PRAM and NVRAM, i recommend you repair your Disk Permission as a basic maintenance for your Mac.
It is because your Mac Systems files permissions can be modified from their default values for a number of reasons. It is good practice to periodically “Repair Permissions“, which sets the permissions back to their default values. This keeps Mac OS X running smoothly and often both solves and prevents a wide variety of problems.

If you newbie in Mac OS X, you may not be familiar with the commands as it is totally different from Windows. I’m sure the most common question you will ask is how to do print screen on Mac. You will realize that Print Screen button is not available on your Mac Machine.

There are few way to do print screen on Mac OS X, just follow below steps to do it:-

How To Do Print Screen In Mac OS X

If you suspect your Mac machine might have a hardware failure, you can use the bundled Apple Hardware Test that came with your Mac to do a diagnostics.

Apple Hardware Test is a diagnostic tool for detecting issues with your computer’s internal hardware components such as the logic board, memory, modem, video RAM, and Apple’s AirPort card. It does not check externally connected hardware components such as USB drives or Firewire devices; it does not check non-Apple devices such as PCI cards from other vendors.

Apple Hardware Test does not check your computer for issues with the Operating System (OS) or other software related issues such as application or extension conflicts.

These are 2 way to run the Apple Hardware Test

1) To run Apple Hardware Test from the internal hard drive

• Restart your computer while pressing and holding the ‘D’ key on your keyboard during startup.

Note: If Apple Hardware Test was removed by reformatting the drive, or if you cannot open it from your hard drive, you can still use Apple Hardware Test from the ‘iMac OS X Install Disc 1′ install DVD that came with your computer.

2) To run Apple Hardware Test from the Install DVD

• Insert the ‘iMac OS X Install Disc 1′ install DVD into the optical drive of your computer.

• Restart the computer while pressing and holding the ‘D’ key on the keyboard during startup.
• It takes a minute or so for Apple Hardware Test to start up and inspect your hardware configuration. While this is taking place, an icon appears on the screen:
  

• select your language and click the right arrow

• select your language and click the right arrow

• The Apple Hardware Test console appears. You can choose which sort of test or tests to perform:
  • To perform all of the basic tests, click the Test button or press the “T” key or the Return key.
  • To perform a more thorough diagnostic test, select the “Perform extended testing” checkbox under the Test button before you click the Test button.

• After the Hardware test, a fault code will be display on screen if there is a hardware fault. Once you get your fault,call Apple and tell them your fault code to get help from them.

Besides that, Apple Hardware Test also consists of a version of the Apple System Profiler, and allows you view your computer’s memory configuration, video card info, active communication ports, and basic system info such as your serial number, Boot ROM version, and model number.