Google’s Android is a very small Linux distribution. Recently I needed to test some applications that were developed by a couple of friends of mine. Rather than run out to T-Mobile I figured I’d just install the new LiveAndroid disk and thought I would write up how to get setup using VMware Fusion and then go about doing some tasks with Android. To get started make sure you’re running the latest Fusion (or Parallels or Q or VirtualBox). Then download two ISO files from http://code.google.com/p/live-android/ liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 and liveandroidv0.2.iso.002. Once you have downloaded the two ISO files we’re going to need to join them. To do so cat liveandroidv0.2.iso.001 liveandroidv0.2.iso.002 >…
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OpenSolaris 2009.06 First Impressions
OpenSolaris 2009.06 is the next generation of the OpenSolaris, the Open Source Solaris that has become the testing ground for new features bound for Sun’s popular Solaris Operating System. The latest version of OpenSolaris sports a number of new features that environments both large and small are sure to find interesting, most of which have to do with more streamlined ways of managing disk, network and other resources – both in virtualization environments and with the operating system itself. First up is package management (using the tool appropriately called Package Manager). It’s now easier to install software managed/compiled by the OpenSolaris community. The packaging environment for OpenSolaris can now access…
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Using the arp Command
You can delete an IP address from the arp table using the arp command along with the -d option followed by an address. For example, to delete IP 10.10.10.1: arp -d 10.10.10.1 If you’re not sure which IP address you’re looking for then you can look at the arp table to check the IP against the MAC address by using the -a option along with arp. For example: arp -a To delete all of the entries in an arp table (they do regenerate after all) you can use the -d option in conjunction with the -a option: arp -d -a If you then want to manually add an entry into…
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Disable and Remove .DS_Store Files
In a number of environments, where SMB, AFP and other file sharing protocols are used with Mac OS X, Windows and Linux clients, there are a number of hidden files that Mac OS X leaves behind. For anyone who has managed an environment like this you’re likely to notice the .DS_Store files and potentially even have tried taking measures to get rid of them. However, try as you might they’re likely to have come back repeatedly. But you don’t have to live with them. You can tell your Windows clients not to show hidden files. From Windows XP, open an explorer.exe window (Windows Explorer, also accessible by browsing any folder…
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Amazon S3 from the Command Line
In a previous article we looked at how to upload Final Cut Server content to s3 using Jungle Disk. We also looked at how to upload ec2 images to s3. But now we’re going to take a deeper dive into using s3 from the command line. There are a number of tools that have been developed by the community to leverage Amazon’s S3 Storage Service. This isn’t as cut and dry as using ec2 due to the fact that the Amazon tools are written in Java, C#, Perl, PHP, Ruby and Python. However, I’m a shell kinda’ guy to a large degree and I was able to find a couple of places where people have written…
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Getting Started with Amazon's EC2 Cloud
Yesterday I did a quick review of the various cloud offerings from Amazon. Previous to that I had done a review of using S3, the Amazon storage service, with Mac OS X, primarily through the lens of using S3 as a destination for Final Cut Server archives. Today I’m going to go ahead and look at using EC2 from Mac OS X. To get started, first download the EC2 tools from Amazon. Next, log into Amazon Web Services. If you don’t yet have a login you will obviously need to create one to proceed. Additionally, if you don’t yet have a private key you’ll need one of those too –…
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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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Using Dates in Shell Scripts
At a terminal prompt, it is really straight forward to grab the date, simply use the date command, with no arguments and you will get something similar to the following, including the day, date, time (with seconds), time zone and year: Tue Apr 15 00:40:07 CDT 2009 In a script this can choose fairly challenging, especially in cases where you just need the date stamp without the time and time zone, etc. Here we’re going to grab the current system date from ESX, OS X or Linux (or whatever OSen really) and then use a variable, currentdate, to put that date, formatted into a pretty standard format, YYYYMMDD: currentdate=`date ”+%c%m%d”…
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Apropos and OS X
The apropos command is used to search for strings in the whatis database. The whatis database is compiled by the makewhatis command, which searches for names and descriptions of all the man pages from a directory you specify as part of the command (optionally, or just defaults to /usr/share/man) and throws them into the database. Apropos then searches these strings and lists a short descriptor. If you’re thinking that I shouldn’t be lazy and I should remember every single command in Mac OS X, well, while I’d love to, but I have to point out that there are a lot of them… Also, I’ve learned that there are some very…
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Maximum Files in Mac OS X
By default, the maximum number of files that Mac OS X can open is set to 12,288 and the maximum number of files a given process can open is 10,240. There are a number of applications that might try to exceed this number, whether ill advised or not. And so if you would like to raise the limit (given that you have enough CPU and RAM to do so) then you can use the sysctl command to do so. To view the sysctl values for maximum files use the following command: sysctl -A | grep kern.maxfiles This will show you the kern.maxfiles and kern.maxfilesperproc variables. There are two ways to…