With a wealth of new features added to the upcoming release of Firefox, Mozilla has decided to skip calling it 3.1 and has gone right to 3.5.  Much of this is due to the increased scope of the project. A thrid beta was released today.  I’ve tried out the beta and it’s a wonderful piece of software.  Pages load quicker as does the program overall.  Things just seem much more responsive.  I can’t wait for Firefox 3.5 to be released!

Tiburon Homes, LLC has managed to avoid viruses such as Conficker and Vundo by using the free ClamAV software on their computers that run Windows XP.  ClamwinAV, the Windows version of the ClamAV, is a free and open source software package that has often rated higher than propriety products such as Symantec and McAfee.  Using a combination of ClamAV and Firefox, Tibuon has been able to keep their IT security high while keeping their costs low.

It’s rare that you would ever want to migrate a Macintosh from one Active Directory domain to another forrest or sub-domain.  In most cases, one forrest or domain should be sufficient for any and all user management needs.  The only time I can think you might ever want to do there is some pressing security need or maybe if your company has acquired another company or division and it needs a new domain.

Apple Enterprise Support wasn’t much help on this and the normal tools you would use, such as Microsoft’s Active Directory Migration tool are of no help with the Macintosh computers and portable home directories on the machine.  The Enterprise engineer I spoke had never heard of anyone doing this and to his knowledge, no at Apple Enterprise Suppot had ever done anything more than an AD-to-OD or OD-to-AD migration.

Here is what I cobbled together to make this work:

AD Migration Process

1.  Have the client log out
2.  If the machine is 10.4 (Tiger), reboot and run applejack first to ensure a clean filesystem.
3.  Run the Microsoft AD Migration Tool using your Domain Admin account and set the user’s password.
4.  Run the script attached to this article to first unbind from old the domain and rebind to the new domain
Run the following through ARD or the Terminal as root
3a.  dscl . list /users ##List the users in order to find the short name
3b.  dscl . -delete /users/migrateduser  ##Deletes the local cached account without deleting the local home directory.  Note:  The lowercase users is not a typo.
3c.  killall loginwindow  ##Refreshes the login Window
3d.  chown -R migrateduser:NEWDOMAIN\users /Users/migrateduser  ##Recursively change the permissions on the local home directory to the user and the new domain group “users”
5. Login using “Other” as migrateduser and click “Create Mobile Account”
6. Verify the Desktop and Dock are as the client had previous to the migration

Leopard Shell Script to Bind to New Domain

Tiger Shell Script to Bind to New Domain

Insert this script inside of the root directory containing all of the files and folders that contain illegal characters.

Run this command:  find -d . -print0 | xargs -0 /Users/$HOME/Desktop/rename_for_windows (or whatever you named your file)

The script:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# This script renames all the files supplied as command-line args
# where necessary so that the filename is acceptable to MS Windows
# Cameron Hayne (macdev@hayne.net), June 2004

use strict;

chomp(@ARGV = <STDIN>) unless @ARGV;

# The Microsoft document at
# http://support.microsoft.com/default…b;EN-US;100108
# says that the following characters are not allowed in filenames
# in each of the specified filesystems:
# FAT:   .  “  /  \  [  ]  |  :  ;  ,  =
# NTFS:  ?  “  /  \  <  >  |  :  *

# We don’t do anything with the dot (.) since it clearly is allowable
# in spite of what that document says.
# And we don’t do anything with the slash (/) since that character
# will not occur in OS X filenames and modifying it would cause
# troubles when a file path (with directories) is specified.
# The changing of the filenames is done via the ‘tr’ statements below.
# Each occurence of a character in the first curly brackets
# is replaced by the character in the second curly brackets.

foreach my $filename (@ARGV)
{
my $orig_filename = $filename;

$filename =~ tr{\\}{-};
$filename =~ tr{*?}{X};
$filename =~ tr{“><[]|:;,’=}{_};

unless ($filename eq $orig_filename)
{
print “About to rename $orig_filename to $filename\n”;
if (-e $filename)
{
print “Oops, there already exists a file named $filename\n”;
print “Skipping the rename – you will have to do it manually\n”;
}
else
{
rename($orig_filename, $filename);
}
}
}

Firefox 3 set a Guiness Book World Record for most downloads in a day.  Approximately, 8,002,530 downloads were registered in a 24 hour period.  Like Apple with the new iPhone 3G, Mozilla couldn’t quite meet demand and there was a temporary outage.  Let me tell you, both products are fabulous and worth all the hype!

Sorry it’s taken us so long, but we wanted to wait for at least one update before releasing an updated MSI installer of Firefox with the Flash and Shockwave plugins.

Firefox 3.0.1 with Flash 9 and Shockwave 11 plug-ins

Pidgin 2.4.3 with Guifications and Pidgin Encryption plug-ins

Enjoy!