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Disable the Annoying “Try The New Safari!” Messages

Apple has become extremely aggressive when it comes to some of their software. They seem to have forgotten that you own your computer, not them.

safariNOCase in point: often you’ll get popups bothering you to “try the new Safari” and, should you happen to try it and then quit, if you have another browser as your default it’ll ask if you really want to not have Safari as your default. SWEET JESUS Apple, NEEDY much?

You can enter the following into your Terminal to just turn the noise off for yourself, or better yet, use OS X Server’s Profile Manager or deploy them with a profile via Munki and send it out to all of your users – at least until the year 2080 or MacOX version 19.99 comes out.

First the defaults in the Safari preferences to stop it from asking it to set itself when you quit.

Then, the OS X preferences that tell it when it last asked for you to try Safari as well as if you’ve ever tried it.

You should now logout of your account or reboot your computer so that the system doesn’t revert these changes.  It is also possible that during system updates Apple will reset the above to again try to sway you to Safari.

For now, enjoy your computer.

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OS X Server, goodbye DHCP Service

I have now written, let’s see, one, two, three times in the past about Apple’s Server software moving away from standards, retiring features, or just dumbing-down the interface so much it seems they are trying to turn it into an iPhone.

I’ve been wrestling with an issue of my home OS X Server wanting to offer clients its own IP address, even though that address isn’t in the DHCP pool. I went spelunking through all the configurations for it via the command line and the GUI and came up dry.

Then I realized I’ve been here before and it might be time to look elsewhere. I’ve recently converted my home firewall/router from a consumer access point to a much more robust mini PC running OPNsense, which I adore. It’s free, open source, and is loaded with options – including DHCP. So I looked more closely at it. Oh, bliss: multiple DHCP pools and I can finally do DHCP Options. But, it’s got the basic features such that a home user with limited knowledge would use to get going quickly too.

See, this is what Apple has forgotten in their drive to make everything one screen and candy-coated:

  1. OS X Server’s DHCP was once based on similar open source software. But now, it’s so heavily modified that you can really only draw on other Apple users for support instead of a large ecosystem. Apple touted using standard open source packages in the beginning of their Server offerings, but has abandoned it for glitter.
  2. They are leaving out too many features that are useful. In stripping things down to fit their GUI model and lowest common denominator user, they are cutting out features that are needed by a lot of people. Would it hurt to put in an “Advanced” button for the DHCP Options? The answer is “no”, because that’s what OPNsense did and it works.

So, bye OS X DHCP, hello OPNsense.