A while back I wrote about advertising Linux services via Avahi/Bonjour. Since then I’ve made a few changes to my setup.

First, I nixed netatalk for direct AFP support. My primary reason for using it was to gain a more Mac-like network filesystem which would make Time Machine happier. Well, Time Machine uses a sparse bundle disk image on it’s target; after learning about that, using AFP seemed a bit unnecessary. Also, Samba CIFS/SMB seemed to perform better. I don’t have solid benchmarks for this, but simple file copies seemed to be consistenly faster with Samba. One of the biggest annoyances about netatalk was all the extra hidden files and folders it created. I run a hybrid network, I have more Mac machines, but also Windows, plus I browse file systems on the command line quite often; and those excess files pushed me over the edge.

Second, I nixed Time Machine. Just when I thought everything was working perfectly, it completely blew up and could no longer access its data store. Not good for a backup solution. I plan to write about my new home backup solution sometime, but it’s basically rsync with a few key points.

Lastly, I streamlined my Linux avahi config using some pointers here, suggested to me by George the commenter on my above linked post.

Previously i had a service config file for each service, but this resulted in my server having multiple entries in the OS X Finder, one host for Samba, one host for AFP (when I had it), and one host for RFB. So, I merged all of those files into one.

multi.service

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards="yes">%h</name>
<service>
<type>_smb._tcp</type>
<port>139</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_rfb._tcp</type>
<port>5901</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_device-info._tcp</type>
<port>0</port>
<txt-record>model=RackMac</txt-record>
</service>
<service>
<type>_http._tcp</type>
<port>80</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_ssh._tcp</type>
<port>22</port>
</service>
<service>
<type>_sftp-ssh._tcp</type>
<port>22</port>
</service>
</service-group>

Now everything that can show up in the OS X finder, shows up on one host entry. Plus thanks to the tip I linked to above, the “_device-info._tcp” section sets an icon for the server in OS X Finder.

Enjoy!

I’ve been spending some time getting my son’s blog setup. In doing so, I discovered that as of Wordpress 2.5, there is built-in [ gallery ] functionality.  Though it isn’t full featured, it’s pretty nice, and perfectly integrated with Wordpress, since, well, it IS Wordpress.

Currently the process to put photos into a gallery is:

1. Choose photos in iPhoto
2. Export chosen files to disk
3. Create new Wordpress post
4. Add media via Wordpress uploader

This isn’t too bad, especially for a geek who’s used to lots of arcane workarounds to accomplish simple goals. But… for my wife or others who don’t want the hassle, this is basically annoying.

So I have this idea to create an iPhoto export plugin which will upload directly into Wordpress!

Roadblocks to completion:

1. Time and Commitment (typical)
2. Objective-C (don’t know it)
3. Cocoa (don’t know it)
4. X-Code (don’t know it)
5. Non-Javascript/Java development on Mac OS X (new to me)

So… this is going to be a slightly ambitions undertaking… but I’m excited about it! I’ll be learning a bunch of new stuff. It’ll take more time than I’d like, but I expect it to be a rewarding process. At some point, I’ll be able to create a “project” home for this bad boy, and make it available to all!

If anyone has pointers on OS X development, I’m all ears.

I had this error popup today on my Mac OS X Lepopard 10.5.4 machine.

This is not cool as, well, I NEED MY VPN TO WORK!

Thankfully google came to my rescue. The solution is to execute the following in Terminal:

sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart

Thanks for the answer, VirtuallyShocking.com.

I just stumbled onto the coolest little app for Mac. Plainview is a web browser based on WebKit (also the guts of the Safari browser). What’s unique is it’s intended to NOT have chrome (the name for all tose fancy navigation bars, address text boxes, menus etc). It’s slim… so slim the chrome is non-existent. This is a full-screen mode web browser, intended to utilize the full screen real estate for presentations! Essentially, instead of having to take screenshots of websites and put them into power point or something, you can just demo the site. It’s awesome… and i’m not even explaining it as well as they did… but I am tired.

I hope that in the near future I can use this for more than playing around.

I’m not really a Microsoft fan, nor do I consider myself a Microsoft hater. I generally like Linux and free Open Source software, and as a network and software engineer type I really like the power and flexibility of Unix-like operating systems. I made the switch to Mac because I wanted to see what all the fuss was about, and if I would benefit from a “Unix like system that just works.” Though there were a few bumps in the road, I’m pretty happy overall. Sometime maybe I’ll post about my Mac experience and thoughts in a broader sense.

This post is about Entourage. When I started this fall, my employer was using Zimbra for our mail and calendar platform. A few weeks ago we migrated to Microsoft Exchange. As a Mac user, I’d gotten very happy with Mail.app and iCal; suddenly I was in an environment where my iCal couldn’t sync to the server like it did previously with Exchange. The only real solution was to either use the web-based client OWA (Outlook Web Access) or to switch to Entourage. I decided to give Entourage a shot.

Entourage is like Microsoft’s Outlook for Mac. It has most of the same features, but a very different interface.

One of the most annoying things I immediately noticed was the layout of the message list pane. By default there’s a three column view, folders (etc), message list, and message preview pane. I’m ok with this in general, but the message list was not very configurable. Sure you could change how messages were sorted, but the messages were ALWAYS displayed using two text rows, even “conversation” headers with only tiny text like an arrow and the work “mail” used two lines, wasting tons of space and limiting the info and number of messages I could see at any one time. I could change that, but I switched to a two column view with message list above the preview pane. This works pretty well as the messages in the list now only use one line and the columns displayed are fully configurable.

This has seriously been my biggest beef so far, though there are others. But I’m really tired… I’ll come back to discuss the other issues. Bottom line though, since I need some of the Exchange functionality, I don’t have a lot of choices, but it’s not too bad once you get past some quirks.

In my last post I outlined how I followed others’ directions to enable netatalk on Linux and Time Machine backups to a shared AFP folder. Originally, I also described how to put all your shares on netatalk. I suppose if only have Mac clients or you REALLY want to use AFP, you can do so. As I worked with files over AFP shares, I started noticing that the performance seemed to be quite bad. No, I didn’t benchmark, but copying large video files to a shared folder over my gigabit network was substantially slower over AFP (netatalk) than over CIFS/SMB (samba). I use my network shares pretty heavily, so this was a concern. Also, netatalk tries very hard to replicate an HFS filesystem complete with resource fork support. This means that your shared directories end up with lots of extra folders named “.AppleDouble”(and a few others) containing Mac specific info. (Note: even on CIFS you’ll get the “.AppleDB” folders unless you disable a setting in Finder. I can deal with .AppleDB better than .AppleDouble AND .AppleDB) So, because of these two issues I decided to try using CIFS and samba again.

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My foray into the Mac OS X world is fraught with daily challenges as I try to learn my way around this new environment.

Firefox has long been my browser of choice on Windows and Linux. So now, I’ve used it on Mac, and while I still like it, I’ve felt the urge to try out “Mac native” apps such as the bundled Safari web browser. For the most part, switching to Safari meant learning new keyboard shortcuts, but one thing that was really killing me is that if I closed Safari or it crashed, I lost all my tabs. I am a pretty heavy user of the auto session save in Firefox.

So, I found ForgetMeNot. This great little GPL’d plugin for Safari does exactly what it says, it saves, then reloads windows and tabs when I relaunch Safari. No frills, no extras, no money (but please feel free to donate). I’m a fan of tools that do their job well. This one does it.

So, I’m a MacOS newbie, just switched over from Windoze / Linux. I figured, it’s cool, things “just work”, and it’s got a Un*x/BSD core. What else is there? Hehe, the interface has definitely been a challenge.

So, the first huge problem that drove me nutz was that in Firefox, I couldn’t tab to checkboxes, some buttons, multi-select boxes, etc. I asked around, but found others with the same problem.

Google to the rescue! I found this summary of how to fix the problem: http://www.tonyspencer.com/2006/05/02/tab-skips-select-form-fields-in-mac-browsers/