Anand Pandit's Blog

We might wonder how to disable the USB ports on Mac to prevent data copy to external USB mass storage devices. The USB kext on os x is loaded at the time of start of the system, this can be loaded / unloaded using kextload or kextunload command. To disable USB port on Mac , follow below steps: On Macs running  Mountain Lion, Mavericks  and Yosemite : Unmount any connected USB devices to the system by running below command                  $ diskutil unmount /Volumes/USBDISK. Now unload the USB related kernel extensions in the following order using kextunload command.             sudo kextunload -b com.apple.driver.AppleUSBCardReader             sudo kextunload -b com.apple.driver.AppleUSBODD             sudo kextunload -b com.apple.iokit.IOUSBMassStorageClass        This wil...

System Integrity Protection  or Rootless mode is a security feature of OS X El Capitan operating system  by Apple Inc. It protects certain system processes, file and folders from being modified or tampered with by other processes even when executed by the root user or by a user with root privileges(sudo). Following are the  the key concepts of System Integrity Protection. 1. System Locations Cannot Be Written To  -  System files can be modified only by system processes signed with Apple’s code signing identity. App processes should instead write to locations designated for third-party developers. The following directories can only be written to by the system:  System-Only Locations      ● /bin      ● /sbin      ● /usr      ● /System  In contrast, the following directories are available to any process:  Locations Available to Developers    ...

It very easy to change the font style in outlook for Mac 2016 on OS X. Follow below steps to change the default font. Open "Outlook"  application on Mac. Open Preferences of Outlook       3. Click on Fonts to change the default font settings for the outlook.            4. Select the desired font to set as default font.      5. Close the preferences window.      6. Click on New Email, Now your default font would set to the newly configured font style.

plutil - is a very useful tool to decode and encode the plist files on OSX system. The tool can be used decode the plist file to human readable format in Terminal which would help user to edit the plist files in terminal using vim or nano etc. plutil -convert xml1 [path_to_the_plist_file] The above command will decode the plist file to a readable xml format in command line. plutil -convert binary1 [path_to_the_plist_file] The above command can be used encode back the file to original binary format from command line.

Tab completion in Linux is a very useful feature. On OS X the tab completion can be enabled as well. The tab completion can be enabled on OS X by adding few lines to .inputrc file. Method: Open Terminal.app Go to your home directory such as  /Users/user. Open vim to create .inputrc file in home directory by running following command. vim .inputrc Add following lines to the file set completion-ignore-case on set show-all-if-ambiguous on TAB: menu-complete Save the file using "esc + :wq" in vim. Now open another tab to see the changes to tab completion in bash shell.

To change the user password in Leopard(10.5.x) or SnowLeopard (10.6.x) Hold "Command + S" key on your mac keyboard to boot your mac into single user mode. Execute command "mount -uw /" in shell. Run below command " launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.DirectoryServices.plist" Execute command :  passwd change the password of root.