Box.net is a cloud-based file sharing service that I used extensively in my last book. Similar to dropbox.com, Box.net allowed my publishers and I to automate our workflow with regard to the publishing process, but more importantly, I was actually able to do much of the review and exchange of files from the iPad, which was really nice given that the book was on iOS. I’ve been working with a few companies over the past few weeks on coming up with various strategies for cloud interoperability, and Box.net has come up a few times in this regard. Looks like I’m not the only one!
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Installing phpLDAPadmin
phpLDAPadmin is a tool that can be used to walk LDAP trees and view attributes of objects located within them using a web browser. This isn’t to say that it’s the prettiest tool out there but it works really well and is portable between various flavors of LDAP. Before you can use phpLDAPadmin you will need Apache. In Ubuntu, Apache can be installed using apt-get: apt-get install apache2 Once you have Apache installed, downloading phpLDAPadmin and installing it in Ubuntu Server 10 couldn’t be easier, just apt-get the package: apt-get install phpldapadmin Now you have the pieces, let’s copy phpLDAPadmin into your web root directory: cp -R /usr/share/phpldapadmin /var/www/myphpldapadmin In that…
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Install ntpd in Ubuntu Server 10
I’m sure you’re getting tired of seeing me regurgitate apt-get commands, but here’s another: apt-get install ntp This will install ntpd. Then a quick update to /etc/ntp.conf to configure who you get your updates from (I still like time.apple.com) and you’re now an ntp server. Once changed, restart the daemon: /etc/init.d/ntp restart Then, use ntpq to check your time against the server: ntpq -np Lucky us, ntp is easy, but we’re gonna’ need it for Kerberos now aren’t we…
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EMC + Isilon = ?
EMC is buying Isilon for $2.25 billion. They want the video market, which seems to just be growing and growing. EMC stock dipped a little on the news, which is not surprising because Isilon isn’t worth what EMC is paying for it. What does this mean for the video market? More uncertainty. EMC has been an acquisition marathon runner since 2002, buying up Avamar, Documentum, Epoch, McData, Iomega, Archer, Greenplum, Bus-Tech, Kashya, Dantz, Mozy, Data Domain and even VMware (not to mention a bunch of other companies). So what does this mean for Isilon’s product line moving forward. If you look at how the acquisition of Dantz and Iomega sparked…
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Enable Jumbo Frames in Ubuntu Server 10
Jumbo frames can completely suck. But they can also boost network throughput performance. The MTU in networking terminologies is the Maximum Transmission Unit in bytes that protocol data can send over the wire. MTU is configured per interface and needs (er, prefers) the network infrastructure to match about the same MTU sizes. By default, eth0 (en0 in Mac OS X) is set to 1500. But increasing that to 9000 means that you’re sending less error correction and addressing data and more payload (but as usual the payload can get messy if all parties aren’t knowledgeable that they’re taking it). Before you get started, install ethtool: apt-get install ethtool Then run…
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Configure sshd for Ubuntu Server 10
Installing things in Linux is just silly easy these days. Getting them to work just like you want them is a little more complicated, but not that bad really… By default, Ubuntu Server 10 doesn’t come with ssh enabled. To install it, just run apt-get with elevated privileges and tell it to install ssh (aka – openssh-server): apt-get install openssh-server Once that’s complete every user on your system will be able to authenticate via ssh. Go ahead and test out authentication. Provided that it works, it’s time to restrict who can authenticate via ssh. Do so by editing the /etc/ssh/sshd_config file and adding a line that starts with AllowUsers and…
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afp on Linux via Bonjour
Based on a few messages I got after the article on building netatalk to host afp on Linux, it looks like building netatalk to host your shares just isn’t enough. I guess people still like Bonjour or something… In that case, let’s make this netatalk thingie announce itself to the world (er, your local network)! Avahi is much simpler than netatalk, given that there’s none of this dhx nonsense preventing us from using aptitude (again, this whole thing is for Debian/Ubuntu and you’re gonna’ need to escalate those privileges): aptitude install avahi-daemon Then we’re gonna’ need to teach it about the whole afpd service we built, which is done in…
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Hosting afp on Linux
One of the main reasons people get a server is to share files. Mac OS X Server is one of the more common devices used to share files to Mac OS X clients, using afp, the default file sharing protocol for Mac OS X. But you don’t have to use Mac OS X Server. You can use Linux as well. We’re going to look at using an open source project called netatalk to do so. If you find that after reading this that you’d like to find out more about netatalk then check out the open source project page at http://netatalk.sourceforge.net. The netatalk installer can be installed through most of…
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AFP and Cleartext Passwords
AFP can be persnickety about you doing something as painfully silly as authenticating into a host using a password sent in cleartext (completely unencrypted). But when you’re troubleshooting it can be useful to disable this behavior, if only to test and then re-enable again. To do so: defaults write com.Apple.AppleShareClient afp_cleartext_allow -bool YES And to disable the warning: defaults write com.Apple.AppleShareClient afp_cleartext_warn -bool NO
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Scripting FaceTime
I will go through long stretches without playing with new technology until I either get unbusy or get talked into figuring out how to do something remotely interesting with it. Like linking FaceTime up to a help desk database. It turns out that Apple made it a very straight forward process. Simply use a facetime handler as the prefix to a URL with the phone number of the other person (iPhone 4) or their FaceTime email address (usually with the desktop app). For example, if my email were krypted@krypted.com then you could use the following from terminal: open facetime://krypted@krypted.com Or if my phone number were 310-555-1212 (it is you know;):…