There is a lot of talk about “the cloud” in the IT trade magazines and in general at IT shops around the globe. I’ve used Amazon S3 in production for some web, offsite virtual tape libraries (just a mounted location on S3) and a few other storage uses. I’m not going to say I love it for every use I’ve seen it used for, but it can definitely get the job done when used properly. I’m also not going to say that I love the speeds of S3 compared to local storage, but that’s kindof a given now isn’t it… One of the more niche uses has been to integrate…
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Reducing Inactive AFP Traffic
In Windows, when you have connected to a share, as with a mapped drive letter, that share shows as Active. At some point, if the client cannot communicate with the open session to a SMB/CIFS server the drive will appear to the Windows client as OFFLINE. AFP does something similar, but the result is a constant communication with the AFP server (at least constant as it is perceived from the Finder). While this communication may appear to be constant it is actually verified by the server every 30 seconds, and the AFP client software, if no poll is sent from the server, the client will also attempt to reach out…
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Fun with Google Maps
Open up Google Maps and search for 8 Sampsonia Way, Pittsburgh, PA. This is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on Google Maps. There was an old picture of the 318 offices, which showed me going over the fence one day when I locked my keys in the office that I thought was funny (because it was me mostly), but this is way better – and it got me to thinking about what else people have come across that Google has captured in action. Another that my wife mentioned to me is Liam Gallagher, frontman from Oasis, outside his favorite pub (he denies this is him btw). There are…
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Disable SMB Signing
Mac OS X 10.5 supports SMB signing. But if you have some older operating systems you may need to disable SMB signing when using Windows Server 2003 and up to host your files, typically when the 2003 Server is also a Domain Controller (DC). To determine if SMB signing is required use Netmon (Network Monitor). When using Netmon it is best to use a hub rather than a switch. Once you have set the addresses and performed a capture, you’ll then look for the SMB negotiation string. Options here are values of 3, 7 and 15 meaning SMB signing is disabled, enabled/not required and required respectively. If SMB signing is…
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Moving that iPhoto Library
There are a number of reasons you might choose to change the location of your iPhoto library. Maybe you want to store pictures on a firewire drive, or maybe you want to store them on an iSCSI LUN, which I described how to work with recently. Either way, there are two ways I typically see people go about changing the location that iPhoto uses to store data. The first is to actually create a symbolic link from ~/Pictures/iPhoto Library to the directory you would like to use. The second, which is a better option is to go ahead and edit the location that the iPhoto preferences set as the path…
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Touching Date Changes
No, I’m not getting all teary-eyed about something… Instead I’m thinking about changing the modification date stamp on a file. Let’s take a fairly innocuous and hidden file, such as the the COOKIES file located in the /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc directory. Since I’ve already tried the recipe, I’m going to go ahead and replace the contents of this file with the contents of the mutex script posted a few days ago. This leaves the date the file was created altered as can be seen by doing an ls -al on the file: -rw-r–r– 1 root wheel 4968 Apr 21 22:04 /usr/share/emacs/22.1/etc/COOKIES We’re going to go a step further and use stat on the file to…
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sqlite3 and Address Book.app from the Command Line
The Mac OS X program, Address Book uses sqlite3 to store information. The actual database is located in each users Library/Application Support/AddressBook directory and called AddressBook-v22.abcddb. In order to interfaces with Address Book.app you can use the sqlite3 command followed by the path to the database itself. For example, the following command will simply dump you into a sqlite interactive command line environment: sqlite3 ~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/AddressBook-v22.abcddb Once in the environment you can view databases, manually work with the data, etc. The basic information about a contact is stored in the ZABCDRECORD table. You can view the contents of this table using the following command: select * from ZABCDRECORD If you…
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Automatic Script Updates
Yesterday I posted about Randomizing the Software Update Server for Mac OS X. I posted the script, which I called randomsus.sh at https://krypted.com//Scripts/randomsus.sh. But, what if you wanted to update the Software Update Server list in the script automatically using your own URL (ie – on a timed interval)? In this case, you could simply use the following script, which pulls a new copy of the randomsus.sh script from the site: #!/bin/bash URL=”https://krypted.com//Scripts/randomsus.sh” PATH=”/Scripts/randomsus.sh” /usr/bin/curl $URL > $PATH exit 0 Notice that I made the URL and PATH variables. This is really just to make it easier to use if others choose to do so. It would also be pretty…
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CPAN
Getting through all of the dependencies for certain Perl modules can be hairy. To give you a sense of how complex perl can be, here’s a small fact: CPAN has over nine thousand perl modules listed. Keeping track of module dependencies can be a real pain. Fortunately, there’s a simple solution…CPAN.pm CPAN.pm is a PERL module that automates the whole process of downloading, unpacking, compiling and packaging modules. For example, if I wanted to install a module called Colors::Yellow, I would type: perl -MCPAN -e ‘install Colors::Yellow’ That’s it. The CPAN.pm would automatically figure dependancies, download the appropriate modules, and install them. If you want more information on using the…
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Randomizing the Mac OS X Software Update Server
I’ve had a few instances where there was no way to setup round robin DNS or a load balancer and we were looking to alternate between a bunch of software update servers. In order to do so, I’ve written a quick shell script to do so. Here it is, in pieces, so it makes sense. The following is a quick script to pull a URL from a random list of servers: #!/bin/bash Sus=”http://swupd.krypted.com:8088 http://sus.krypted.com:8088 http://sus1.krypted.com:8088 http://sus2.krypted.com:8088 http://sus3.krypted.com:8088 http://sus4.krypted.com:8088 http://sus5.krypted.com:8088 http://sus6.krypted.com:8088 http://sus7.krypted.com:8088 http://sus8.krypted.com:8088 http://sus9.krypted.com:8088 http://sus10.krypted.com:8088″ sus=($Sus) num_sus=${#sus[*]} echo -n ${sus[$((RANDOM%num_sus))]} exit 0 This script would simply write to the screen one of the software update servers that we’ve loaded up into…