Category: Apple

OS X – How to Change the MAC Address

Changing the MAC address of your network interface card can be useful for a number of things. Here is how you change it in both Tiger and Leopard:

For Tiger (10.4.x) open up the Terminal application and run the command:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether 00:00:00:00:00:00

where en0 is the network interface you wish to change the MAC address of, and 00:00:00:00:00:00 is the new MAC address you want the interface to use.

For Leopard (10.5.x) open up the Terminal application and run the command:

sudo ifconfig en0 lladdr 00:00:00:00:00:00

10.5 Leopard – Install Complete Sound Effect

The installer application in Leopard has a pleasant sound effect when an installation completes. I thought it would make a good sound effect for cell phones or something else. Here is the sound effect in multiple formats:

To download, right-click over the version of the sound effect you want and select “Save link as…” if using FireFox or “Save target as…” if you are using Internet Explorer.

10.5 Leopard – How to Reset Back to Setup Assistant

This procedure is handy if you are wanting to make a computer appear as it first came out of the box. It is useful if you plan on reselling your computer or are preparing a generic image with some modifications for mass deployment in a large organization.

Here are the Terminal commands to delete a single existing account in single-user mode on Leopard (in the following commands, replace username with whatever account short name you created for your existing account). These commands must all be done in single user mode (hold Command+S during boot).

First the normal things you always do when first entering single user mode:

$ mount -uw /
$ rm -R /Library/Preferences/
$ rm -R /Users/username/

Now you perform the steps that resets the computer and makes the Setup Assistant appear upon first boot:

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

OS X – Read TrueCrypt Images in OS X with OSXCrypt

Up to now, only Windows and Linux users have been able to use the great encryption program Truecrypt. The benefits of TrueCrypt is that it offers VERY secure methods of encryption and the encrypted files it makes can be read on both Windows and Linux computers making it cross-platform and people could share files between the two operating systems. Today OSXCrypt was released which now allows OS X users to create and read TrueCrypt files which will allow cross-platform compatibility with Windows and Linux users. To my knowledge this is the first truly free cross-platform encryption solution available for OS X users and any computer administrator that works in a cross-platform environment knows the value of this. Currently OSXCrypt is a program you run at the terminal so it is not that “mac like” with a pretty graphical user interface. But thanks to the power of open source software, you can bet that in short order someone will develop a nice pretty user interface for it.

Here is a link to the OSXCrypt website where you can read more about it and download the program: Link