Technology How To’s

Article that I’ve written over the years to resolve specific technology issues that I’ve run across in my day to day life.

How To: Disable MacDefender and MacProtector

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Technology How To's, virus 0 Comment

How To: Disable MacDefender and MacProtector

MacDefender and MacProtector are the latest in “anti-virus” protections that are actually malicious themselves. These are targeted towards Macs specifically, but are NOT virus. These are trojans, and can be picked up by visiting malicious sites.

To disable:
As an admin user (most are by default)
Open up Terminal and type: sudo killall MacDefender
Substitute MacProtector if that’s the version affecting your computer.

The password will be your login password.

Then type: sudo -u $username> defaults write com.apple.Safari AutoOpenSafeDownloads -bool false

Replace the word username with your login name; or if you don’t know it, look to the left in terminal.

Hit enter, it should not ask for a password for the second time. This will keep the application from downloading again.

Once that has happened, be sure to visit http://adobe.com/flash and update your Flash software to help block these.

The last step is to use Spotlight to search your computer for the bad app. Once you find it, be sure to throw it into the Trash, then Empty the Trash.

Updating /etc/hosts on OS X

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Command Line, OSX, Technology How To's, Unix 0 Comment

Updating /etc/hosts on OS X

Sometimes you need to have a static IP address configured to a specific domain name on OS X. For instance, locally testing a web server is a great reason to do this. Doing so is fairly easy to setup, but does take a bit of command line work.

First, edit /etc/hosts with your favorite text editor.

the default looks something like this:

##
# Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost

Edit the file, add in the IP address under the 255.255.255.255 address, then put in the hostname with spaces over under “localhost.”

Then you have to reload the hosts file.

OS X 10.4 type:

sudo niload -v -m hosts . < /etc/hosts

on OS X 10.5 and 10.6
lookupd -flushcache
dscacheutil -flushcache

Then simply ping the new domain name and check that is resolves to the correct IP address. (assuming the other computer is setup to respond correctly)

How to: From “.phone owner” instead of correct user

Posted by Rick on in Apple, Microsoft, Technology How To's 0 Comment

How to: From “.phone owner” instead of correct user

The problem is that in Entourage, emails are saying that they’re from “.phone owner” instead of the correct (usually yourself.)

This comes about from iPhones synching contacts in a Enterprise environment. The “default” contact on the phone is the user who owns it. So this issue comes up when contacts are synched between the iPhone and Entourage.

Luckily this is easy to fix. In Entourage, go to Address Book. Look for .Phone Owner. Open the contact (double click or right click) then go to “Name & Email”

Change the contact name to the correct name, save and close and you’re all good!

Automatically Insert Signatures into Entourage

Posted by Rick on in Microsoft, Technology How To's 3 Comments

Automatically Insert Signatures into Entourage

By default Entourage does not automatically insert signatures.

Here are directions on how to set it up to do so.

First, make sure that a signature is setup:

1.) Click on “Tools”
2.) Go to “Signatures”
3.) If none are present, click on “New” otherwise double click on “Default”
4.) Create signature
5.) Close and save signature.

To make it auto insert:
1.) Click the menu option “Entourage”
2.) Choose “Account Settings”
3.) Double click on the account (usually the bolded one)
4.) Click on the “Options” tab
5.) Under the heading “MESSAGE OPTIONS” change the option from None to Default