How to Uninstall Mac Server on OS X Maverick

I been play with the OS X Server application for a while trying to setup a server environment at home for development use. It is super easy to install the server, however, there isn't a guide of how to uninstall the server.

I was constantly changing the hostname and testing OpenLDAP to setup single sign on environment and eventually some services refused to start. So I decided to re-install the server app and re-configure it from scratch.

After digging google for a while I don't find any place clearly gives you the exact steps to uninstall it - unfortunately.

So I document it here to save your time, here we go:


1. Launch the Server app and connect to your OS X Server and stop all services.

2. Delete the data folder - /Library/Server

3. Delete configuration files:
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.serverd.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.servermgr_accounts.plist
/Library/Preferences/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

4. delete logs from /var/log directory

5. If you don't need the server app any more, delete it from Applications folder. If you want to reconfigure the Server from scratch then you can launch the Server app now to reconfigure a brand new server environment.

Use spotlight to open Apps

In your daily life with a Mac machine, how many times do you open applications from the Application folder or the Launchpad? If your answer is all the time then you need start thinking to utilise the very powerful spotlight - just click the search icon at the top right corner.

The keyboard shortcut to open spotlight search is by press Ctl + Space.

To open an application you have already installed, just simple type the name of the application in the search box, for example iPhoto and then press enter. It's that simple and just take you seconds to launch an app. If it saves you 5 seconds a time, then image how much of your life could be saved in a year :-)

Here are some other shortcuts I use all the time:

1. cmd + left/right arrow key - move cursor to left/right of a text line
2. cmd + up/down arrow key - move cursor to top/bottom of a page
3. cmd + ,  - open application preferences
4. cmd + shift + 4 - take a screenshoot, you do not need any snap applications to do it for you
5. cmd + shift + 3 - take a full screenshot
6. cmd + shift + /  - show help menu, and then you can type the menu name to quickly locate the menu option from the top menu
7. cmd + w to close tabs/windows on any apps (btw, the alt+F4 key in windows system is just no use, the two keys are too far away)
8. cmd + q to quit a application

If you know any handy & useful shortcuts on Mac, please let me know in the comment.

 

Work around to fix the wifi issue on OS X Mavericks (DP versions)

Since Apple released the developer preview of the next OS X system Mavericks I cannot wait to try it on my old Mac Book Pro (2010 version). Although lots of people complaining that they constantly keep dropping wifi connection I had no issues at all until I upgraded the system to the DP 3 - wifi connection keeps dropping on my Mac.

There isn't a solution to fix the wifi issue after searching google for the solutions and I definitely don't want to rollback to Mountain Lion because the new memory compression feature works great on my machine with 8G memory. Usually I don't switch off the Mac but only put it to sleep mode and over time the 8G memory will be 100% used plus over 2.5G swap space used. This never happend again after it upgraded to Mavericks.

After the WIFI dropped I have to reconnect to the wifi point so I can access the network. As there isn't a proper solution to fix the issue and reconnect the wifi network will work the trick, why not automate it?

The easiest way to reconnect the wifi is run the command 

ipconfig set en1 DHCP

We can use the cron job to run this command automatically every minute, however, we only want to run it after the connection dropped. So we need some intelligent to do that

# replace 10.0.0.1 to your router ip address
count=`ping -c 2 10.0.0.1 | grep icmp | grep timeout | wc -l`; if [ $count != 0 ]
then
    ipconfig set en1 DHCP
 # it tells you when the network was reset
    osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to display dialog "Reset Wifi Connection From cron Job."'
fi

You can either put the code into one script and configure the cron to execute it every minute or just compile the code to one single line and past it on the cron job. I chose the second option:

# temperary fix the wifi dropping issue on OSX Mavericks
# replace 10.0.0.1 to your router ip address
* * * * * count=`ping -c 2 10.0.0.1 | grep icmp | grep timeout | wc -l`; if [ $count != 0 ]; then ipconfig set en1 DHCP;osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to display dialog "Reset Wifi Connection From cron Job."' ; fi

the osascript -e 'tell app "Finder" to display dialog "Reset Wifi Connection From cron Job."' will notify you the network was reset with a popup message on the Finder window so you will remember to delete the job from cron once that's fixed by Apple.