As the only release engineer at $work, I have been tasked with creating the bootable USB devices of our FreeBSD-based product to send to the Contract Manufacturer. Every time a new release made it to General Availability (GA) status, Sabine would drop off a couple USB sticks and tell me which build to load onto them.

Wanting to empower her, I set out to create a better approach; one that did not involve dropping to the command-line and tapping-out a “dd” command. Meet a new AppleScript, named “WriteImage” written to take the guess-work out of the process.

http://druidbsd.cvs.sf.net/viewvc/druidbsd/WriteImage/

With WriteImage you can now take the USB image file (*.img or *.img.gz) and drop it on the AppleScript droplet. It automates the process of generating the necessary commands to image the file onto hardware USB. Tell the app through a series of clicks or drag/drop actions which image to write, it then prompts you to insert a USB device, and then asks for confirmation (twice) before launching Terminal to do the dirty work.

Let’s see it in action (photo tour):

Cheers!

Having recently updated my 2014 Macbook Air 11″ from Mac OS X 10.10 to 10.10.4, I lost my customizations to Apple’s OpenSSH and no longer was I receiving anything in the Notification Center for SSH logins using my keychain. Looks like it’s time to rehash the steps necessary to reload support for the Notification Center for those going through the same ordeal.

For reference here’s the original blog post where I introduced the customizations required to get Apple Notification Center support for OpenSSH on Mac OS X:

http://devinteske.com/wp/ssh-agent-notifications-osx/

Step-by-step we’ll go through the motions of re-obtaining the latest copy of Apple’s modified OpenSSH, to be patched.

NOTE: Make sure you’ve updated Xcode in Apple Software Update, else you’ll get the error "configure: error: Your OpenSSL headers do not match your library" during compilation steps below.

ASIDE: You can browse Apple’s opensource repository at https://opensource.apple.com/ (obtaining the latest copy of OpenSSH with Apple’s customizations couldn’t be easier). Rather than documenting how to navigate said page, below steps will instead use direct links to the software we’re recompiling (for brevity).

How to patch Apple’s OpenSSH to support native Mac OS X Notification Center (in 13 easy steps):

1. Open Terminal.app
2. curl -LO https://opensource.apple.com/tarballs/OpenSSH/OpenSSH-189.tar.gz
3. tar zxf !$:t
4. cd !$:r:r/openssh
5. curl -L https://github.com/devinteske/apple/commit/296d954851dbba2384797620c1b9a77e562917b8.patch -o patch.txt
6. patch -N < !$
7. ./configure --with-pam --with-audit=bsm
8. make
9. sudo cp -avf /usr/bin/ssh-agent{,.orig}
10. sudo cp ssh-agent /usr/bin/ssh-agent
11. killall ssh-agent
12. ssh some-host
13. Click "Always Allow" to confirm access from new ssh-agent to Keychain

Now every subsequent ssh request will give you a notification in Apple's built-in Notification Center. Cheers!