OS X Installer Relocation vs. InstaDMG

I have been using InstaDMG for a long time to make my Max OS X 10.5 Leopard and 10.6 Snow Leopard images. It always worked without flaw until recently. A technician mentioned to me that /Applications/Mail.app would not launch on my 10.5.8 image. I later also had some issues with the Finder that I just couldn’t figure out. On an email list someone said they saw the same thing on 10.6 with the following error;

You have Mail version 4.0 (1075/1077). It can’t be used on Mac OS X Version 10.6.2 (Build 10C540)

Mac OS X 10.4.11 Tiger vulnerable to libc/strtod(3) buffer overflow too

I read the advisory for the libc/strtod(3) buffer overflow over the weekend and wondered if 10.4.11 wasn’t included simply because nobody tested, and I think I’m right. I logged in to a 10.4.11 machine in Console by entering “>console” in the Name: field of the login window. Then I logged in as my local admin account and typed “printf %1.262159f 1.1” and sure enough I was knocked out of my session back to the login window. It would appear to me that 10.4.11 is vulnerable to this overflow. Now let’s see if Apple goes back and makes a patch for 10.4.11 as well as 10.5.8 and 10.6.2. I would imagine now would be a good time for folks to remove anything older than 10.4.11 from your environment, and depending on Apple’s response you may end up moving all your 10.4.11 to 10.5.8 or 10.6.2 if they don’t issue a patch.

 

OS X cron job to launch LiveUpdate

So I decided I would share. 🙂 This is the cron job I use to keep OS X machines up to date with LiveUpdate and Norton AntiVirus 9.0.1. It’s a fairly simple script. I put this in /sw/etc/cron.daily/ because I use anacron that I installed with Fink. If you don’t want Fink on your system then there is a system cron that is in /etc you can use, but it requires that the machine must be on when the cron job should run. This condition was not acceptable to me. Read on to see the script…

Customizing Symantec LiveUpdate on OS X

If anyone uses Norton AntiVirus on OS X in a big company then you know how annoying it is to configure it for a big company. Well I learned some stuff that I thought I’d share with the world. Tomorrow maybe I’ll share my daily cron job that replaces the Symantec Scheduler for updates on my corporate build.