A lot of companies disable Bonjour on Mac OSX for a variety of reasons, usually because it’s very “chatty” and tends to take up a lot of network bandwidth by itself. It can also cause issues with Printer Sharing, causing print jobs to disappear.

But, some Apple products such as Final Cut, and certain Adobe Suite products demand to have Bonjour enabled.

Luckily Apple Support has a perfect fix for this.

1.) First step is to copy the plist file to make a backup, I like to just add .bak to make things easier in the future:
cp /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist.bak (all on one line)

2.) Open mDNSResponder.plist in your text editor of choice. Doing it from terminal is best.

sudo vi “/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist”

3.) Add “-NoMulticastAdvertisements” to the array in the “ProgramArguments” section.

It starts like this:

ProgramArguments

/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder
-launchd

And needs to look like this:
ProgramArguments

/usr/sbin/mDNSResponder
-launchd
-NoMulticastAdvertisements

4.) After saving the file and closing it, you’ll need to reboot the computer. Keep in mind that if you used EMACS to edit the file, you need to remove the temp file it created, “/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.mDNSResponder.plist~” first or your computer will not reboot.

How To: Change DNS (and make web surfing faster)

The Internet is so big now, and the average person has more bandwidth at home then existed in the entire world in 1980, that the biggest slow down in web surfing has become the initial DNS or Domain Name Service look up. DNS is the service that translates the human readable Domain Name of 1nova.com into the computer readable 173.236.191.132.

All ISP’s provide a DNS service of some sort that is usually automatically setup. By changing the default to faster servers, you can decrease the lookup time, and increase your web browsing speed. The first step to doing this is to download a program that looks for the fastest DNS near you.

namebench does exactly that.

Once you have a new DNS IP, follow the below directions. Note in the directions below that 8.8.8.8 are Google’s DNS servers. The actual numbers you want to use may differ.

Linux

In most modern Linux distributions, DNS settings are configured through Network Manager.
Example: Changing DNS server settings on Ubuntu
In the System menu, click Preferences, then click Network Connections.
Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example:
To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, select the Wired tab, then select your network interface in the list. It is usually called eth0.
To change the settings for a wireless connection, select the Wireless tab, then select the appropriate wireless network.
Click Edit, and in the window that appears, select the IPv4 Settings or IPv6 Settings tab.
If the selected method is Automatic (DHCP), open the dropdown and select Automatic (DHCP) addresses only instead. If the method is set to something else, do not change it.
In the DNS servers field, enter the Google Public DNS IP addresses, separated by a space:
For IPv4: 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4.
For IPv6: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and/or 2001:4860:4860::8844
Click Apply to save the change. If you are prompted for a password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
Test that your setup is working correctly; see Testing your new settings below.
Repeat the procedure for additional network connections you want to change.
If your distribution doesn’t use Network Manager, your DNS settings are specified in /etc/resolv.conf

Mac OS X

DNS settings are specified in the Network window.
Example: Changing DNS server settings on Mac OS 10.5
From the Apple menu, click System Preferences, then click Network.
If the lock icon in the lower left-hand corner of the window is locked, click the icon to make changes, and when prompted to authenticate, enter your password.
Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example:
To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, select Built-In Ethernet, and click Advanced.
To change the settings for a wireless connection, select Airport, and click Advanced.
Select the DNS tab.
Click + to replace any listed addresses with, or add, the Google IP addresses at the top of the list:
For IPv4: 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4.
For IPv6: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and/or 2001:4860:4860::8844
Click Apply and OK.
Test that your setup is working correctly; see Testing your new settings below.
Repeat the procedure for additional network connections you want to change.

Microsoft Windows

DNS settings are specified in the TCP/IP Properties window for the selected network connection.
Example: Changing DNS server settings on Microsoft Windows 7
Go the Control Panel.
Click Network and Internet, then Network and Sharing Center, and click Change adapter settings.
Select the connection for which you want to configure Google Public DNS. For example:
To change the settings for an Ethernet connection, right-click Local Area Connection, and click Properties.
To change the settings for a wireless connection, right-click Wireless Network Connection, and click Properties.
If you are prompted for an administrator password or confirmation, type the password or provide confirmation.
Select the Networking tab. Under This connection uses the following items, select Internet Protocol Version 4 (TCP/IPv4) or Internet Protocol Version 6 (TCP/IPv6) and then click Properties.
Click Advanced and select the DNS tab. If there are any DNS server IP addresses listed there, write them down for future reference, and remove them from this window.
Click OK.
Select Use the following DNS server addresses. If there are any IP addresses listed in the Preferred DNS server or Alternate DNS server, write them down for future reference.
Replace those addresses with the IP addresses of the Google DNS servers:
For IPv4: 8.8.8.8 and/or 8.8.4.4.
For IPv6: 2001:4860:4860::8888 and/or 2001:4860:4860::8844
Restart the connection you selected in step 3.
Test that your setup is working correctly; see Testing your new settings below.
Repeat the procedure for additional network connections you want to change.

How To: Remove Vista AntiVirus 2012

Vista AntiVirus 2012, also known as Windows XP Home Security 2012 is one of the viruses/malware programs running around that masquerades as an anti-virus program.

Unfortunately it’s not. It uses various browser holes to install itself and then pretty much disables the computer until the user puts their credit card number in. Once the program is “bought” it goes idle and pretends to scan for viruses, but as far as I can tell never actually finds anything.

Caution, these directions have you editing the Registry. They do not tell you how to do so, but tell you what keys to delete. Deleting the wrong keys can severely mess up your computer! If you are not comfortable doing this, take your computer to someone who is.

First Step is to go into Task Manager and kill ppn.exe

Then in your registry delete the following keys:
HKEY_USERS\.DEFAULT\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\BrowserEmulation “TLDUpdates” = ’1′
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\.exe\shell\open\command “(Default)” = ‘”%LocalAppData%\kdn.exe” -a “%1″ %*’
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\exefile\shell\open\command “(Default)” = ‘”%LocalAppData%\kdn.exe” -a “%1″ %*’
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.exe\shell\open\command “(Default)” = ‘”%LocalAppData%\kdn.exe” -a “%1″ %*’
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\FIREFOX.EXE\shell\open\command “(Default)” = ‘”%LocalAppData%\kdn.exe” -a “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe”‘
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\FIREFOX.EXE\shell\safemode\command “(Default)” = ‘”%LocalAppData%\kdn.exe” -a “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe” -safe-mode’
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Clients\StartMenuInternet\IEXPLORE.EXE\shell\open\command “(Default)” = ‘”%LocalAppData%\kdn.exe” -a “C:\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe”‘
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center “AntiVirusOverride” = ’1′
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Security Center “FirewallOverride” = ’1′

Lastly delete the following files:
%AllUsersProfile%\Application Data\u3f7pnvfncsjk2e86abfbj5h
%LocalAppData%\kdn.exe
%LocalAppData%\u3f7pnvfncsjk2e86abfbj5h
%Temp%\u3f7pnvfncsjk2e86abfbj5h
%UserProfile%\Templates\u3f7pnvfncsjk2e86abfbj5h

Reboot your computer and everything should be gone.

Again, if you’re not comfortable editing registry files, please take the computer to someone who is.

From the command line:

sudo mdutil -E /
sudo mdutil -i on /

The amount of time this will take depends on how many files are on your hard drive.

How To: Manually update OS X time from Command Line

Sometimes OS X’s time and date gets out of sync with the real world, and using the option “Set date and time automatically:” doesn’t always work.

You can use this command in terminal to update it manually:

ntpdate -u

The server address can be any of the Apple Servers such as time.apple.com or the free Time Servers, pool.ntp.org.

This same command should work for most Unix/Linux Operating systems, as long as ntpdate is installed.