Sophos has captured video of a fairly legitimate-looking website that’s nothing more than a front that tries to get you to install a Mac OS X trojan horse. Normally, I wouldn’t highlight the OMG! nature of such a thing, but this is truly newsworthy. Trojan writers are finally targeting Mac OS X, probably because the marketshare has been steadily increasing. It should be noted that this is not a virus and that Mac OS X remains fairly innoculated from the scourge of viruses and worms like Conficker that’s about to make a splash on April 1.
Right, so I’m a Mac guy. I have been a Mac guy for a long time, so long that I can actually remember thinking that System 7.1 was a good update to an operating system. Even back then, Apple was giving us an easy-to-use operating system. Yeah, it wasn’t super stable, but it certainly allowed me to very productive through college. I even spent a few years as a Mac technician supporting Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. When Mac OS X came along a few years ago, I was actually quite scared. My technical background was not Unix, even though I had toyed around a bit with MUSIC on my school’s mainframe and actually once installed Apple’s AUX on a Quadra 700. I was resistant in the beginning. I didn’t want to see rendered unusable my years of learning the intricacies of Mac OS 9.x troubleshooting. Like most good Mac techs, I had learned the purpose and function of every single extension and control panel. I could troubleshoot preferences files at lightning speed. I knew *all* the Finder keyboard shortcuts. My poor clients watching me troubleshoot or cleanup a Mac OS 9 machine would literally get dizzy trying to follow what I was doing. I’d developed a rigorous optimization routine for the machines I visited. It was a good job, even if Mac OS 9 wasn’t as stable as it could’ve been (had Copland ever seen the light of day, for instance).
But Mac OS X is an entirely different beast. Despite my early reservations, I’ve come to very much love this operating system. I love its inherent stability, its protected memory, its multitasking capabilities. The interface changes a bit with every major OS release, and it’s getting better in stages. According to rumor, Tiger is set to have less of a brushed metal interface and more of a platinum interface, a bit more like Mac OS 9. Just as Panther’s brushed metal was a better interface than the stripes of Jaguar, I believe Tiger’s platinum will be better than Panther’s brushed metal. With luck, Apple will finally give us the option in the OS to change the interfae between the several themes. Microsoft may have picked a Little Tykes Fisher-Price interface as default for WinXP, but they at least allow users to switch to a different interface without installing 3rd-party software. Continue reading »
[Originally posted February 18, 2005 on my old blog, MrBarrett.com]
For many years, I argued against abandoning support for the AppleTalk protocol on networks because of the problems presented by printing postscript data over IP (instead of AppleTalk). Mostly, I was right; printing postscript data over AppleTalk is easier and more troublefree. However, even Apple doesn’t fully support AppleTalk anymore. The world has moved to IP, and you should move along with it. But moving your network printing from AppleTalk to IP can be a headache.
How many times have you printed a document with postscript data in it and gotten many pages of several lines of gibberish code instead of your document? Yup, me too. It rarely happened when you were printing your postcript documents to your HP printers over AppleTalk. Now it happens quite a lot. The technical reason for this is that most of the print drivers from HP don’t fully support printing postscript data via IP. All of the design programs I know (Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator) default to sending their postscript data in binary format. HP’s printer drivers don’t understand this and will not parse the data correctly, resulting in reams of wasted paper (unless you catch it in time and cancel the job). The good news is that there’s a solution. The bad news is that the setting you’ll need to change is in a different place for each program. Continue reading »
Without a doubt, my iPhone has completely changed how I manage my Mac OS X Servers. It used to be that I had to carry around a laptop if I wanted to be able to access my servers while away from my desk. The power and flexability of the iPhone allows me to monitor and administer my servers from just about anywhere. Here are the iPhone apps I use regularly to do so:
Bjango’s iStat. ($1.99). This is my favorite app. It allows me to see the health and status of my servers at a glance. Yes, I could install Simon, Lithium, Nagios, or a similar type of monitoring software and access their status pages via Safari on the iPhone, but this is much easier.
Server Admin Remote. ($4.99). This is another must-have app. Server Admin Remote allows me to toggle services on my Leopard servers, check services statuses, and most importantly, read my log files.
Zinger-soft iSSH. ($3.99). Quite simply enough, this allows me to SSH to my servers. I’m still searching for the best SSH iPhone app. I’m moderately happy enough with iSSH but am on the lookout for a better replacement. For now, it’s adequate.
Today, we had a catastrophic data failure on our Wiki server, hosted on a Mac OS X Server. We had two backups, a Carbon Copy Clone from over a year ago, and a Retrospect backup from a few weeks ago. Clearly, the CCC backup was pretty much unusable (ancient content), and so we pulled our newest Wiki content from the Retrospect backup, and suddenly hit a wall. I needed to slip the “new” content into a freshly-restored Leopard server. But how?
Unfortunately, Apple’s Leopard Server documentation doesn’t say much about migrating from one Wiki server to another, but it turns out that it’s not such a difficult process. I found this Apple Discussion post that helped me to understand the process for restoring the content into a newly-rebuilt Leopard Server OS. Here are my notes from doing this:
Reinstall Leopard Server OS. Rebuild Users & Groups, rejoin to ODM, if necessary.
Pull Wiki content from Retrospect backup.
Turn off Web services, if you haven’t already done so.
Move the restored content into /Library/Collaboration
Rename index.db to index.bak on each workgroup/wiki. Each index.db will be rebuilt when you restart the Web services.
Turn web services back on. Verify that index.db is rebuilt for each workgroup/wiki
Load your wiki in web browser and voila!, all your content is back.
And that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this was to restore a wiki from backup. Migrating a wiki from one server to another would use this same process.
Note: Retrospect doesn’t honor perimssions during a restore process, which necessitated step number 5 above. Normally, you’d just be able to tar or zip your content and cp or ditto it from one location to another, which would preserve your permissions.
My first foray into Twitter was using Twitterific as a client. I hadn’t ever used the web interface and there weren’t that many other options when I started tweeting last year. As a Twitter client, I suppose it does its job, but I found it far too distracting to use on a regular basis. I actually stopped using Twitter entirely for several months because I found Twitterific so distracting to my focus. I’ve since gone to reading and updating Twitter via their web interface. Yes, I need to experiment with TweetDeck.
For what it’s worth, I have a similar issue with Growl and its interaction with some of my programs. I haven’t turned it off yet, but have tweaked its settings to be less intrusive.
On a related note, this is an excellent post from Chris Hedgate on using Spaces and Quicksilver to help him focus on tasks at hand not be distracted.
Rumors abound that Snow Leopard’s Mail server will use Dovecot instead of Cyrus. This is excellent news.
According to the Dovecot project’s web site, the software is also “among the highest performing IMAP servers,” using self optimizing, transparent indexing of mail folders that support modification by multiple concurrent users. The software also supports IMAP extensions including IDLE push notifications, and provides plugins for handling ACL support and quota limitations. Apple is also expect to tout improvements of its own, including support for server side email rules and vacation messages.
The most significant change is the to the Mac mini, which now sports a Firewire 800 port, five USB ports, and can take up to 4GB of RAM. I’m also really liking the price point on the 24-inch iMac.
The Mac Pro, however, remains expensive when compared to the rest of the Apple line and is really only appropriate for power users, photographers, and video editors.
I’d still like to see a subnotebook or tablet from Apple, but these speed bumps are a decent product refresh, especially in light of how poorly computer sales have been and will be for the next 12-18 months as we all weather this recession/depression.
Apple’s Mighty Mouse is a decent enough mouse, but it’s scroll-wheel nib thing gets gunked up all the time. My users are constantly complaining about the scroll wheel not working…it’ll scroll up but not down and vice versa. The fix is very simple, really:
Hold the Mighty Mouse upside down in your hand and take a piece of copy paper and rub it vigorously against the scroll nib a few times. You’ll probably have to press fairly hard. The gunk that’s blocking the scrolling should dislodge and the paper will collect some of the skin oil and grime that’s on the wheel.
This is nice! GlimmerBlocker is a way for Mac OS X Safari users to block ads without having to rely on a Safari add-on. So when Safari gets updated (which seems to be happening more and more frequently), you won’t need to wait for the add-on to be updated; GlimmerBlocker doesn’t care.
I don’t fanatically hate all web advertising, as some people seem to. What I hate are the obnoxious flashing, rotating, vibrating, sound-playing ads that seem to be taking over the web. They’ve even become a vector for infection on Windows PCs as people are “tricked” into downloading what they think is a free Anti-Virus 08 or 09 software. Not a week goes by when I don’t receive a call from one of my users asking if they really need to download the anti-virus software like they’re being told to by the scam ad. These are the kinds of things I’d love to be able to block for my users.
GlimmerBlocker will let me do this via its use of filters. The community has been posting different filters you can download and use. I’ll likely be writing one specially geared to the educational environment in which I work, and GlimmerBlocker will be making its way into the next round of maintenance installs for my faculty’s MacBooks.
Sophos has captured video of a fairly legitimate-looking website that’s nothing more than a front that tries to get you to install a Mac OS X trojan horse. Normally, I wouldn’t highlight the OMG! nature of such a thing, but this is truly newsworthy. Trojan writers are finally targeting Mac OS X, probably because the marketshare has been steadily increasing. It should be noted that this is not a virus and that Mac OS X remains fairly innoculated from the scourge of viruses and worms like Conficker that’s about to make a splash on April 1.![[Bloglines]](http://appletechnician.com/wp-content/plugins/bookmarkify/bloglines.png)
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OCTOBER 17, 2004:
[Originally posted February 18, 2005 on my old blog, MrBarrett.com]
My first foray into Twitter was using 
In case you haven’t seen the news yet today, Apple has updated their 
This is nice!