chriswelker [dot] net

The Right to Lead

Learning Leadership Through Character and Courage

By John C. Maxwell

This gift book is an excellent idea for anyone who is going into, or may already be in a leadership role. With snippets though out about historically great leaders and what made them a good leader or what made them just a commander. This book is a great idea for morning snippets or if you need a little inspiration though out your day. The way that Maxwell drew from both his own books and other references of historical leaders created a full picture of what a leader who has earned his title should be. Each section has a saying or poem that really emphasizes what the quality consists of, they also have a small story about a leader who exemplifies the section by displaying it thought their actions or by failing to display it.

I would recommend this book to anyone wanting to lead men and women and not just be placed in charge of them

So sometimes I get clients who have an error the reads as follows:

This can be obnoxious since, as an Admin, I know we don’t restrict hyperlinks. We usually discover that the client had previously install Firefox or Chrome and removed the programs after deciding they did not like how they worked. Typically the programs will uninstall cleanly, but not always. If you are worried about a program not cleanly uninstalling, I recommend Revo Uninstaller to remove programs.

This is one of those times, and the best way I have discovered to resolve it is to go into the registry and dig out the mess that the unclean install has left behing.

Frist thing you will need to do is open the registry editor.

Now, select the Find option:

Then search for either “ChromeHTML” or “FireFoxHTML”

When you find one in a key such as “.htm” you will want to change it back to htmlfile. To do that, Right click on (Default).

and choose Modify

Then you will change it to htmlfile.

Then, press F3 to keep searching. You will want to keep searching until all file types are pointing to htmlfile. If you come across a registry key that belongs to Chrome or Firefox, leave it as is.

Once they are all set back to htmlfile, you should be all set and able to open hyperlinks with out issue.

Let me hear from you if you have comments or questions.

So today I want to look at how to do a permissions repair thought Single User Mode.

Heres the code.

fsck /

mount -uw /

/usr/libexec/register_mach_bootstrap_servers /etc/mach_init.d

/sbin/SystemStarter start SecurityServer

diskutil repairPermissions /

To start you want to boot into Single User Mode by holding Command + S after the gong. Once the computer has booted you will start with fsck /. This will check the file system to make sure it was properly unmounted and is ready to be mounted again.

Next you will use mount -uw /. mount is the command used to mount the hard drive, which allows for you to use the hard drive. The option -u basically changes the files system to read-write or to read-only depending on what its currently set at. Option -w mounts the drive as a read/write files system. The combination allows you to have read/write access to the drive you are mounting, which brings us to /. / is the location of the drive that you wish to mount, which in most cases is you main Mac hard drive. / is the root of the drive so you are mounting the whole drive and not just a folder in the drive.

After that you will use /usr/libexec/register_mach_bootstrap_servers /etc/mach_init.d. Here you are starting some services to allow you to run the necessary tools. mach_init.d is responsible for many programs, such as networking, directory services, disk arbitration, and so on.

Next you use /sbin/SystemStarter start SecurityServer. This starts more of the system, more networking items and some other items that would be in StartupItems. It gets the rest of the system before Aqua up and running so that you can run the commands you need.

The final command is the meat of what we are trying to do here. diskutil repairPermissions is how to repair your permissions thought the command line. If you are at the computer and its running or you can SSH into the machine or are running ARD and can send UNIX commands this is all you need.

As usually let me know if you have any questions about this or anything else I can write on. Maybe one of these days I will write a none techie article.

Sometimes when I have to copy data to another machine it won’t let me access some of the files. There are two commands I try to get around this issue.

Of course you could check the man pages for chown or chmod but I will show you how I use them with my limited needs.

I will start with chown. I use this command to change the owner from what the files might think the former owner is, or is some case from who the owner actually was to me, or the new user. Here is how I do it.

Start by opening Terminal which is located in Applications > Utilities > Terminal, then use the following commands.

sudo chown -Rv user /filename/*

Here I use sudo to make sure I am running as the super user for this command, the -R (NOTE: the capital is important) is to make sure its recursive (meaning it will apply to child folders and files) and the -v is for verbose so that it will output what files the command is currently working on. I like verbose so that I know its still going and I can easily tell when its done. user refers to the user I want the ownership to pass to. /filename/* is the location of the file, on my Mac if I need to run the permission change on my music files I would use the short name of my account like:/Users/cwelker/Music/* I use the * out of habit to make sure it is going though the whole folder, which is what -r is doing as well, but it will not matter to have running both.

The other command I want to look at, I really only use when I am working with web design or installing some websites. I really only use this one way, and it opens the files wide open. I use this only when I need to, normally I can use my FTP programs to do the same thing, but either way here it is.

sudo chmod -rv 777 /filename/*

Some parts of this command will look familiar. The main difference is going to be that instead of one user you are modifying the files permissions for groups. The numbers refer to the user groups and what they can do with them. A better explination and a calculator of what the numbers can do can be found here

Comments and questions are always welcome and let me know if I can write something for you.