Feb 29
Digging around in a NetBoot-Install.dmg file created by NetRestore Helper, I found a nice little gem.
In Leopard, and perhaps earlier versions of Mac OS X, we’re able to start a VNC server with the machine serial number as a password. This is particularly interesting for a managed network or lab environment.
As an example, I’m starting a VNC server in my NetBoot-Install image with the following shell script:
# Credit to Mike Bombich for this snippet
VNC="/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/AppleVNCServer.bundle/Contents/MacOS/AppleVNCServer"
if [ -x "$VNC" ]; then
"$VNC" -noRegister -serialNumber &
fi
I’m then able to quickly connect with Cmd+K in the finder:
If you’re scripting this, here’s a quick way to snag the serial number. I do this before I bless a client machine to netboot, so I have the serial number to connect back up once it’s in the NetRestore system.
system_profiler SPHardwareDataType | \ grep -i 'serial number' | \ perl -ple 's/.*:\s+(\w+).*?/$1/'
February 29th, 2008 at 4:24 pm
Thanks.
Not that I don’t like Perl but I find it a little bit too much to get just a piece of info, awk does it very well :
awk ‘{print $3}’
in your case.
ioreg is nice also to get the informations but needs more handling to really get what you need.
Finally, If you have Admin Tools installed, just use /System/Library/ServerSetup/SerialNumber. It will output the first 8 characters of the serial number.
March 10th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
Lolopb,
Great information. Thanks for posting!
March 29th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
And since you’re using awk, get rid of the unneeded grep:
awk ‘/Serial/ { print $3 }’