I got a real kick out of reading this blog post today.

It’s cool to see good feedback on the company I work for and our flagship product, Clearspace. Of course, since I’m friends with Matt (mentioned in the post), it’s nice to know he’s doing a good job. Gotta keep him on his toes! D00d!

I have to use VPNs at work. Specifically, to access my production webservers (etc), I have to use a Cisco VPN client. Sadly, the VPN concentrator overrides my choice of allowing local LAN access. So, when I am on the VPN, I have my DNS options changed so I can’t use any local servers. This is a serious, serious pain. So painful in fact, that many times instead of fight with it, I simply would run a Windows session in VMware (on my Mac) and connect the VPN there. This has drawbacks too, but it’s better than not having local network access.

So I set out to find a solution and I found a post by loudhush which described using the scutil to modify DNS network settings after connecting to a Cisco VPN. This was great, but I needed something a bit handier.

So, I cranked out the following which goes in my /Users/username/.profile:

# .profile or .bash_profile
function myvpn {
vpnclient connect VPNPROFILENAME user MYVPNUSERNAME
myworkdns
}
function myworkdns {
printf "get State:/Network/Service/com.cisco.VPN/DNS\nd.add ServerAddresses * 192.168.1.252, 192.168.1.198\nd.add SearchDomains * example.com, other.example.com\nset State:/Network/Service/com.cisco.VPN/DNS" | sudo scutil
}


These are bash functions which i run from the command line. (I also find the Client GUI Cisco to be a pain, and prefer command line)

So, obviously, you’ll need to substitute in your Cisco VPN profile name ( found in /etc/opt/cisco-vpnclient/Profiles), your VPN username, your DNS server IP addresses, and your DNS search domains to your legitimate values.

To use, run Terminal, then type myvpn. The VPN client will prompt you for your username and password. You’ll then have to hit CTRL+Z to suspend the VPN client so the script can run the DNS updates; this part uses sudo to run the command as root, so you will probably need to type your Mac password immediately after hitting CTRL+Z. If you didn’t want to bother with the command line VPN client, you could just use your GUI Cisco VPN client, then run myworkdns from Terminal, which will still probably prompt you for your Mac password.

Hope others find this useful. If I find a cleaner way, I’ll post that too.

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 use Ant for my Java projects. It’s a great and powerfule build too. However, there’s always more than can be done to improve the quality of the build process.

I found this nice article that gives some good examples of a complete build process with Ant: dev, test, prod, etc.

As I mentioned recently, I’ve been using pre-release versions of Firefox 3 for a while now. I’ve been happy, but today is great because FF3 was officially released!

They are trying to set the record for most downloads in a day, so go get it!

I knew I-80 was closed due to flooding, but I didn’t know exactly why.

This article makes it vey clear. Check out the photo.

I’m currently packing to move to Portland, Oregon, but I grew up in the Iowa City, Iowa area and have lived in the Des Moines, Iowa area for the last 5 years.

The last week has brought massive flooding to much of the mid-west, Des Moines and Iowa City included. There’s been national news coverage, and locally its the only thing happening. Massive flood work and relief efforts are underway everywhere. There was a similar devastating flood in 1993. This flood is worse, but at least there’s been a lot of warning. A lot of people had days to prepare, evacuate, move belongings to safety, etc.

My family and I are safe and well. My in-laws had a flooded basement due to the exceptionally high water table, but that’s manageable. My parents’ church building is completely under water, but they were able to move everything in the building to a safe location before the flooding hit them. At their home they don’t have internet or phone, but they do have power, and the cell phone is providing basic email for now.

My sister has posted flikr photos of the flood in the Iowa City area, as has her boyfriend Joe in this blog post.
The Iowa City Press-Citizen has coverage of the flood in the Iowa City area (link to front page as the “photos” link isn’t working).

In Des Moines, two friends have posted flood pics: Colin and Mark.
The Des Moines Register has photos and coverage of the flood in the Des Moines area.

Since moving to the Mac, I’ve tried to use Safari almost exclusively. I definitely like it, and it’s got some great tools, but I usually found myself running back to Firefox 2 whenever I had to really do work on a website because I really like some the power Firefox extensions give me. A couple of the things NOT too like about Firefox 2 was the heavy memory usage, the crashing, and the lack of native Mac OS X widgets.

I’ve been playing with Firefox 3 betas off and on, but yesterday I noticed Firefox 3 release candidate 2 is out! This is likely going to be the last pre-release until the official launch, it has fixed a lot of bugs, and it solves some of my nagging issues. Memory usage is better, crashing less frequent, and we now have native widgets! Of course, I use Firefox for work, so to use FF3 I need my extentions which haven’t all been available till now:

• Firebug 1.2 beta
• Firecookie 0.5 beta
  
• LiveHTTP Headers
• Web Developer

Yesterday I mentioned this to my co-worker who expressed concern about being able to test in Firefox 2. We already have this issue with IE6/IE7 and there’s no good solution for that but to have an extra copy of Windows with only IE6 installed. (yes, you can try weird hacks like this, but they don’t always seem to work)

Well, with Firefox (old and new) there’s this snazzy profile manager tool, which lets you choose what profile you want to use.

First, if you want to have multiple copies of Firefox installed, just name them differently. When you download Firefox the app is named “Firefox” I’m planning to use Firefox 3 as my standard now, so I’ve left it named that renamed my old Firefox to “Firefox2″. Shocking, isn’t it.

Now, from Terminal, I can run the following:

$ /Applications/Firefox2.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -ProfileManager

You should see something like this:

By default, you’ll probably only have the “default” profile, but you can create a profile dedicated to testing in FF2 which should prevent it from screwing with my FF3 profile (as I’ve noticed can happen). Another side effect is that this lets you run multiple copies (of the different versions) of Firefox at once. Also, un-check the “Don’t ask at startup” box, and you won’t have to run the secondary browsers from the command-line to ensure you get the profile you intended.

For the record, I’ve tested the same thing on Windows XP. While you can install multiple copies/versions of Firefox and use the different profiles the same way, you cannot run both copies at the same time. At least I couldn’t make it work.

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.

Aaron (one of my co-workers), recently posted a link about OpenID. I’ve given OpenID only cursory glances over the last year, but the Coding Horror link in Aaron’s post had a comment to this Google Video where Simon Willison gives a Google Tech Talk on The Implications of OpenID. The video is nearly a year old, but to date, it’s done more to convince me to get on the OpenID bandwagon than anything else.