At work I’ve been thinking about a particular system administration subject on and off for a few days now. When Mac is first installed all the “Optional Sharing Services” are all shipped defaulted to off, which makes sense and is fine. Generally speaking I’ve been fine with using Apple Remote Desktop to share the workstation, open System Preferences, and turning on whatever sharing bits I need to have on for the client workstations and that’s that. However that’s not really that elegant and I’ve been looking for a way to programmatically do it on the command line. As it is, Apple Remote Desktop can send Unix commands to connected workstations. All my client workstations are assembled in a neat little pile on my Apple Remote Desktop screen, as easy as you please. How can I turn on or off these Sharing services without having to upset the user. Ideally I want to turn these on without even sharing their workstation, to in a way, do it under the covers.

Enter the command systemsetup. G’duh. There’s even a handy-dandy template in Apple Remote Desktop that I’ve overlooked all these years that even has the details of the options laid out. So, in Apple Remote Desktop, select the stations you want to change, click the UNIX button, in there select the right template, change the user to root and send the command. Moments later, and in this case, SSH is up and running on the client workstation as easy as you please. Boom. No futzing with sharing workstations, no mucking about with System Preferences. Just simple, easy, like I knew had to exist. Now I know how.

This is actually the way I prefer to learn these things. This was something I sussed out, so it’s worth more than if I just spotted it in some bit of documentation. It took time and energy and it’s mine. The solution is worth something to me, and so I blog about it so I can celebrate Mac OSX and keep a little log in case I forget in the future. It’ll always be here.

Hooray for Mac OSX!