• iPhone

    ePub and iPad

    As an author, I’m pretty interested in the changing face of the publishing industry. Tim O’Reilly was on the cover of Inc magazine this month and I’ve been following his musings about publishing for some time. But this whole digital publishing thing has to make an author think about what it means for us. But as a geek, I’m stuck in the technical, wondering if I were to self-publish something straight to the iPad, what would it look like? Not the content, but the files. ePub seems to be the main focus of e-book devices and where the industry is going to go. ePub is a format ratified by the…

  • sites

    No More Mingling

    I’m just not that social. Therefore, I have removed Mingle, the social networking aspect of Krypted.com. I may reintroduce something like this in the future, but for now it seems that it’s just a source of frustration… Get MacTech

  • Mac Security,  Network Infrastructure

    Symantec Acquires PGP & GuardianEdge

    Today Symantec announced that it is acquiring PGP. I certainly hope they treat the Mac PGP client better than they’ve treated some of their other Mac clients. This move brings Symantec squarely into the encryption space. They encrypt full disks (including the boot volume of Mac OS X), portables, file servers, jump drives, Blackberry and PDFs. They have a mature centralized key management solution (after all, all encryptions seems to be key based these days) and even recently added application control to their portfolio, to block malware. Perhaps the last is why Symantec went ahead and picked them up. Or perhaps it’s because they just like buying things at Symantec.…

  • VMware

    Checking Free Space in vSphere

    Most of us will be familiar with the df command. But in ESX, you use the vdf command, located in /usr/sbin. Running the vdf command will net you similar output to what you see with df. Simply run the following to see free space on each of your disks: vdf -h You can also list all of your data stores to correlate the vdf output with esxcfg: /usr/sbin/esxcfg-scsidevs -c Or to list LUNs: /usr/sbin/esxcfg-mpath -L BTW, if you’re running out of free space, in my experience, first look to your snapshots and check how much space they’re consuming…

  • Articles and Books

    Status of Books

    Recently I have been getting a lot of questions about what the status of some of the projects that I’m working on is. So I figure I’d just post it here and hopefully proactively deal with that. Many of these stem from the fact that a couple of my books were made available on the Apress Alpha site. The Alpha site is meant to provide access to works as they’re in progress and allow a bit of crowdsourcing for an extra layer of tech review (the books are posted to Alpha before they go to tech review). The Enterprise Mac Administrator’s Guide is complete, shipped a couple of months ago…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    HellRaiser

    A new variant of HellRaiser is now out there. It is being called OSX/HellRTS.D and in order to get infected you would have to run a server daemon, shown below. HellRaiser is a RealBasic-based trojan horse that gives control of a Mac OS X system to an attacker. This can include searching through the file system and then transferring files, viewing the clipboard, sending audio, sending chats, viewing the screen, showing pictures, viewing spotlight indexes, controlling mail and rebooting (see the tabs below). A number of products will detect the OSX/HellRTS.D. trojan horse when using the latest definition updates, including the following (which links to the HellRaiser entry for each vendor):…

  • sites

    Forums on Joomla

    There are tons of plug-ins that you can install with Joomla to get a good, integrated forum. I would recommend that you experiment around with a few on a test site that runs the same version of Joomla as your production site before you go into full production. As a general rule, if it’s a forum, look for something that is included in Joomla rather than a bridge between Joomla and a stand-alone forum package, such as phpBB or something like that. My favorite two forums for Joomla are probably Kunena: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/communication/forum/7256 Or Agora: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/communication/forum/1891 Whatever forum package that you choose, don’t forget you’ll have to match up the template/theme…

  • Xsan

    Dot Hill with Xsan

    The Promise Vtrak is the only officially supported platform that can be used to provide LUNs to an Xsan. Having said that, there are a number of other storage vendors that are supplying LUNs at this point. And while I don’t really want to speak to that it is worth noting that it brings me joy to watch the ever-expanding number of vendors testing their products for and then marketing to the Xsan community. One that I came across recently is Dot Hill, who did a video showcasing their speedy 2U product at NAB.

  • Home Automation,  Mac OS X

    Running SSH on 1st Revision AppleTVs

    Sometimes it can be really useful to have an SSH connection into your AppleTV. If I need to explain why then you probably won’t want to do it. Unless of course, you’re just after getting something like Boxee running, which we’ll look at as well. Before we get into doing anything to your AppleTV, when we’re done I do not know how Apple will feel about your warranty moving forward, so do this stuff at your own risk (but that’s pretty much true for many articles on this site)… So first up, let’s install SSH. To get started, plug in a jump drive you don’t mind reformatting. Then run the…