Stuff I Do

One of the cool features of FireFox for the linguistics challenged like me is that it will spell check items in a textarea of a web page. If you misspell it, there is little red line that shows under the word and you can right mouse click on it and select the correct spelling of that word. The problems for me is that I get a little too quick on my clicking and from time to time, select the Add To Dictionary option which is directly under the list of other options for the word you misspelled.

To clear the word from the custom dictionary you need to find the persdict.dat and open it in a text editor and removed the wrong entry. On Windows XP you will find it in C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\unique.default And on Mac OS X it is located at /Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/unique.default

My favorite file encryption tool is now (as of early July) available on OSX! I have used TrueCrypt for a few years on the Windows side of things but have always had to launch a virtual or a physical Windows machine to get to my protected files. No more as the OSX tool works very well with those protected files.

Wanted to try out the new browser but it is a Windows only thing! Crap, oh well I guess I will keep using Firefox on my Mac.

I made a boo boo tonight. I was copying some image files from my Windows file server over to my Mac. While looking in finder I thought I was looking at the files on the Mac and deleted a lot of pictures before I realized I was on the network share not the Mac. Doot!

Since this was across the network they will not be in the recycle bin, so after a quick search and trying out different software packages, I found my undelete program. While not as fast nor is the interface as slick as others out, it is completely free so Glary Undelete wins my award for frugal butt saver. Ran the program, recovered my files and breathed a sigh of relief.

Here is a shot of a Mac Mini cracked open to double up the memory in it and if you check out the monitor you will see it is running OSX Server.

OSX server is a pretty slick piece of software and if you had an office full of Macs it would be spectacular to run. It is all the open source software that I have used on Linux for a long time so pretty familiar with it all, but it can be difficult to understand the Apple think on how some of the menus and screens are laid out.

The trick comes when you tie it into your Active Directory network. There are a few different ways to do it and from my testing they work with varying degrees of success and at the end it has the feeling that it is working by some kind of voodoo. The kind of voodoo where you are scared of a patch breaks part of the integration you will be up a creek. I have not tried it with 10.5 yet and really should sit down and give it another shot.

I could never get the Mac profiles to mount to a Windows server. I could do it when it was a straight Mac network using AFP to an OSX server but SMB seems to not work well for this purpose.

My boss had his MacBook Pro connected to the corporate network and was transferring a few gigs of data between one of our servers and his laptop. It was connected via the built in Gigabit ethernet port yet it was taking entirely too long. He was connected into the core switch a Cisco Catalyst 6513 with Gig blades. Transfers between a Windows box and the servers was not showing the same slowness that the Mac was experiencing. We had this same problem with Tiger and now we are running Leopard and seeing the same issue. On the Mac you can correct the problem by going to System Preferences and opening the Network module. Select the Built-In Ethernet connection and click the Advance button. Select the Ethernet tab change the Configure drop-down to Manual set the speed to match your switch capabilities in our case 1000baseT and set the Duplex to Full-Duplex. It appears that by default Mac will set the duplex for Full-Duplex, Flow Control if you have the network set for automatically. Once those settings were set data transfers were flying.

At this point we began to wonder why we were not seeing the same issue with our Dell Windows workstations. On the MacBook Pro it has BootCamp with a Windows Vista partition installed so we booted into Vista on the MacBook Pro and tried the data transfers again. While Vista transfers are no where near as fast as XP or OS X, it was not as slow as OS X when flow control is enabled. So this pretty much points to the way OS X drivers are setup.

Connecting to the Cisco Catalyst 6513 and doing a sho int on interface the MacBook Pro was connected to showed input flow-control is off, output flow-control is off where we have Windows boxes placed and on OS X stations when we have manually set the ethernet settings. A stock install of OS X connect to the same port shows input flow-control is off, output flow-control is on and data transfers are painfully slow, more than doubling the time required to transfer the same 2.69 GB iso file from the same NAS device.

Since we are getting more Mac devices in our environment, and we don’t feel like changing all the settings on each workstation we set out to find a way to make sure this can be altered on the Cisco gear. What we found is that this only effects workstations connected to our core 6513 since our distribution switches are Catalyst 3750 and output flow-control is unsupported on those devices. On the 6513 all that needs to be done is to change the port settings with flowcontrol send off and this will resolve all OS X issues with line speed.

Turning off flow control on the switch should not cause any ill effects on performance if your network uses high level protocol like TCP as it already has a built in mechanism to control data flow rates and this basically duplicates the control gaining you nothing, in theory. When you turn off flow control you will get a momentary disconnect to what ever is connected to that port so not a good idea to do this on all ports during operation hours.

The wife thinks I am a dork and she is probably right.

I have download and am watching the tour of the new Mac OS X 10.5, Leopard. The new Finder with Coverflow looks good and I like how you can use Spotlight to search the network and it all comes back to Finder still using Coverflow. Timemachine is how user backup tool should be and might make me actually get an external drive. Spaces is nothing new, Linux desktops have had virtual desktops for years. I have not used mail and have always been a fuddy duddy when it comes to my mail. Give me Pine and I will read my email from the command line thank you very much. But since most people are not spartan in their email usage I can see where Mail would be cool. I like the idea of it adding items to you iCal and Address Book with easy clicks. iChat Theater is freaking awesome. I can see where this would be especially useful for remote meetings being able to see and hear the presenter and having a easy way to display multiple document formats. Screen sharing could be useful supporting remote users too. I would like to see one over a internet connection to see if there is lag sending or not.

I needed to mount an SMB share on a Windows 2003 server to my OSX Server at boot time and here is what I found how to do it.

Go to Finder and select Applications. Goto the Utilities folder and open the NetInfo Manager.
Select the mounts property. Unlock the app and add the following new properties.

name -> servername:/share
dir -> /Network/ServerName_Share
opts -> url==cifs://username:password@servername/share
vfstype -> url

Now open a Terminal and check /etc/hostconfig. There should be a line in it which reads:

AUTOMOUNT=-YES-

If there isn’t, of if it reads -NO-, add or fix it, and save the file.

Reboot OSX Server and it will now show. Go to Finder and select Network and you will see the name you gave for the ServerName_Share.

If you don’t change the setting on your Windows 2003 server to not encrypt all SMB traffic your Mac won’t connect. This problem is fixed in Samba but not in the version running under the hood on a Mac.

This post has some software needed for noob Mac users like me.

And more.