Nick Taylors blog » apple

OSX Security Checklist

nickt — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 16:33:24 +0000

SANS SCORE is a good effort in promoting minimum security standards and best practices. Amongst the various checklists, I came across a good one for OSX, with Eric Conrad being the team lead.

Along with Apples “Mac OS X Security Configuration for Version 10.5 Leopard” [PDF link], it provides a good background into securing your Mac.

I’ve a mirrored version of the SAN document here.

Mac Pro rebuild

nickt — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 17:34:37 +0000

My Mac Pro had suffered from bloat even before I upgraded to Leopard. I performed the simple upgrade, rather than “Archive and Install” or “Erase and Install”. I’ve been in this business enough years to know better! Anyway, after deciding against the expensive option of buying the Apple RAID card and 2 or 4 300GB SAS drives ($600 each!), I simply blatted the boot drive and performed a clean install of Leopard.

Of course, it takes an age to reinstall all your applications and utilities and to get it just the way you want it. I’m mostly back to where I want to be and much happier. Firstly, the system is far more stable and secondly, it’s so much snappier.

Here’s hoping the extra 8GB memory arrives today!

unlocking the iPhone

nickt — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:48:12 +0000

So it’s not too difficult to unlock your iPhone. There’s a 4 step guide here:

http://modmyiphone.com/wiki/index.php/IPhone_unlock_OS_X_Part_1

Some more here:

http://iphone.unlock.no/#Step3-Performing-software-unlockÂ

A couple of extra steps here, if you get “no service” after unlocking:

http://www.djjeffa.com/vb/showthread.php?p=100869

And finally, here’s how to use your own tunes as ringtones (with iTunes 7.4.1)

http://modmyiphone.com/wiki/index.php/IPhone_Modding_for_Windows_102#ADDING_A_CUSTOM_RINGTONE