I need to be able to control a mac mini without a screen and I think using screensharing would be enough. I've enabled screensharing, setup a manual IP address and I have an ethernet cable. 

The problem is I don't have display to use on the mac mini and I currently borrowed a keyboard and a firewire cable to setup screensharing: 


booted mac mini in target mode (wish there was a way to do it without the keyboard)
booted the macbook holding the alt key and choosing the firewire drive


The problem is the mac mini has a bootcamp partition setup to which it boots by default. I googled a bit and tried the System Preferences &gt; Startup Disk option then the /etc/fstab route but no joy: the mac mini still boots to Windows.

How can I get the macmini to simply boot to it's osx all the time (given that I have to change the settings on a macbook with a firewire cable) ?


Question: Setup ntp client with embedded device
Answer: Try ntpd -bq

That will set the time and quit. It will allow you to sync to broadcast servers as well.

That said there are two important things to note. First I don't know who the NTP servers are on you network. If someone is being a bad little techie they could bork your time/date and invalidate some security protocols. 

Also be aware that a common problem is that your time is "ahead" of the NTP servers. so when you adjust your time, your files and other things exist in the future. This can really confuse things.  Linux doesn't like time travel and it's not afraid to let you know. Normally this is just warnings but can be more serious issues depending on how some scripts are written. I say this because an embedded device usually has some pretty narly scripts on it.