Category: Macbooks

17 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 24 views

Macbook: Exploring DNS using DIG (Domain Information Groper)

DIG is an awesome command line utility to explore DNS. Below is a quick guide to get you started. Query Specific Name Server By default, if no name server is specified, dig will use the servers listed in /etc/resolv.conf file. To view the default server use: You can override the name server against which the query will be executed, […]

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17 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 20 views

Macbook: Show which applications have ports open and to what IP address

Below is a dump of examples of doing pretty much the same thing differently. I mostly use netstat and lsof, coupled with some bash scripts. You can argue that this is overkill, but below is a simple bash function that you can paste into terminal and call it whenever you want to see which application/process […]

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02 Nov 2022 Macbooks 👁 4 views

Macbook: MyTraceRoute an alternative ICMP route tracing which works with Zscaler / Zero Trust architecture

If your on a zero trust network adapter like zscaler or netskope, you will see that traceroute doesn’t work as expected. The article below shows how to install mtr (my trace route) using brew: Next we need to change the owner of the MTR package and it’s permissions (otherwise you will need to run it […]

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20 Oct 2022 AWS Cloud 👁 15 views

Macbook/Linux: Secure Copy from your local machine to an EC2 instance

I always forget the syntax of SCP and so this is a short article with a simple example of how to SCP a file from your laptop to your EC2 instance and how to copy it back from EC2 to your laptop: Copying from Laptop to EC2 scp -i identity_file.pem source_file.extention username@public_ipv4_dns:/remote_path scp: Secure copy protocol-i: Identity […]

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10 Oct 2022 Macbooks 👁 58 views

Macbook: Alternative to Ping (using TCP rather than ICMP)

A lot of companies are moving to ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Architecture). This is generally a good thing, it helps cyber posture and it and makes life a lot easier as you no longer need to login to VPN tunnels to manage your cloud environment/s. But one of the few downsides of ZTNA is that […]

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02 Sep 2022 Macbooks 👁 67 views

Macbook: Change the default Mail Client using Terminal/CLI (Command Line Interface)

22 If you want to change the default mail client on your Mac then you can use a quick Python script to quickly change the default mail app. Copy/paste the following command into Terminal. Below I am setting Outlook to be the default mail client, but you can replace com.microsoft.Outlook with whatever application bundle identifier you use. […]

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01 Sep 2022 Macbooks 👁 8 views

Macbook: View the list of DNS nameservers used for resolution

To view the list of nameservers your mac is using, simply open Terminal and paste the following: Alternatively, you can copy the DNS servers to clipboard directly from the command line (using pbcopy):

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01 Sep 2022 Macbooks 👁 5 views

Macbook: How to quickly Flush DNS

I am not going to tell you why you would need to flush your DNS cache (you will know if you need to). So, to flush DNS on a mac simply fire up Terminal and run the following sudo command:

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25 Aug 2022 Macbooks 👁 26 views

Macbook: How to get your Mac to behave like MS Windows to restore minimised windows when using Command + Tab (Alt + Tab)

For those who like to maximise or minimise their windows on a Mac, you will likely be frustrated by the default behaviour of your Macbook (in that it doesn’t restore/focus minimised or maximised screens). Below are a few steps to make your mac screen restores behave like Microsoft Windows: Install Homebrew (if you dont have): […]

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24 Aug 2022 Macbooks 👁 17 views

How to Automatically Turn your bluetooth off and on when you open and close your MacBook

If you’re like me, little things bother you. When I turn on my bluetooth headset and it connects to my Macbook when its closed/sleeping, I get very frustrated. So I wrote a simple script to fix this behaviour. After running the script below, when you close the lid on your Macbook it will automatically turn […]

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