Apple Remote Desktop 2 Hidden Tools

While watching MacEnterprise.org’s excellent ARD 2webcast, Steve Hayman pointed out a couple of very cool command line tools that come with the ARD 2 client software, systemsetup and networksetup. They are located within the ARD client itself in the following directory:

/System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support/

Systemsetup will allow you to control things like energy saver, startup disk, date and time and a large number of other system specific settings. It also has a feature to restart the machine after a freeze much like watchdog in Mac OS X Server. Call systemsetup with a -help flag to see all the options.

Same goes for networksetup. A -help will reveal a bevy of options for setting up your network interfaces including pretty much every option available from the network system preference.

Unless you set a PATH variable to include the above directory location, you’ll have to call the whole path to launch them or cd into the directory.

It is important to note that these command line utilities are only available if you have one of the ARD 2.0 or 2.1 clients installed. Combined with ARD, they offer the ability to roll out changes to huge numbers of machines that previously required a lot of sneaker rubber.

Make sure to check out the webcast if for nothing else to seeMike Bombich, who has done so much to make a Mac administrator’s life a lot better.

Posted by Joe Mullins at December 15, 2004 06:11 PM |TrackBack