Enable Mac OS X Leopard Remote Desktop for VNC via SSH

If you have SSH access to your Mac, you can remotely enable Remote Desktop. However, if you want to VNC into the Mac, you'll need to set a VNC password and turn VNC on. The following huge command turns on Remote Desktop, enables VNC, and sets the password to password.

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent -privs -all -setvnclegacy -vnclegacy yes -setvncpw -vncpw password

However, the last part doesn't seem to work, so you can run:

sudo nano /Library/Preferences/com.apple.VNCSettings.txt

and put this as a single line:

6755221DFCC7B786FF1C39567390ADCA

which is the encoding of "password". Now use SSH tunnels, connect, and it should work. You can then change the password via system Preferences to a more secure one.

To turn off Remote Desktop run:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -deactivate -configure -access -off

Exporting a database in human-readable form from mysql

Using mysqldump with the defaults results in huge INSERT statements that can be hard to deal with if you're fiddling with the output by hand; this command dumps a database in a more readable format:

mysqldump -u root -p -h hostname.dns --databases databasetodump --skip-extended-insert --complete-insert > database.sql

Of course, replace the italic words with the ones that apply to you.