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OS X Windows file sharing rules

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 12:02:26 +1100

When activating Windows file sharing on OS X Tiger, by default OS X only configures the firewall to allow ports 139 (TCP) and 137 and 138 (UDP). To successfully connect from a Windows PC it may require that port 445 (TCP) is manually added to the list of firewall port exceptions. To do so:

1. From the Apple menu, choose System Preferences.
2. From the View menu, choose Sharing.
3. Select the Firewall tab.
4. Select New.
5. Choose Other from the port menu.
6. In the TCP Port Numbers field, type 445 and in the description type “Windows sharing”.
7. Click OK.

Cmd - Tab crashing the dock

Mon, 04 Jun 2007 16:18:26 +1000

The issue of Apple (cmd) + tab crashing your dock (see an older discussion on Apple Support) appears to be solveable via the re-installation of the combo updater of 10.4.9 (saving a full reinstallation).

FarCry CMS installation on OS X with ColdFusion 7.01

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 16:19:05 +1000

ColdFusion 7.01 for Mac OS X installed flawlessly on a PowerBook running OS X.4. It integrates with apache (no context root) and by default offers to make the web root /Library/WebServer/Documents. By default it adds index.cfm to the DirectoryIndex line in the httpd.conf file to enable the default document (although this seems to be failing at this stage). With CF 7.01, FarCry now deploys successfully on OS X (without all the long paths and context root issues from the past). Based on the improved FarCry install documentation (which outlines the Apache configuration required) the following line was added to the httpd.conf file to provide for a FarCry installation as the default site (where farcry_site is your farcry site name).

DocumentRoot /Library/WebServer/Documents/farcry_site/www
   ServerName localhost
   Alias /farcry "/Library/WebServer/Documents/farcry_core/admin"
   Alias /CFIDE "/Library/WebServer/Documents/CFIDE"

Traffic and server monitoring tools (for free)

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:20:33 +1000

For those running a small Windows-based network (one SNMP capable router and 1 - 3 servers), the following client-limited versions of commercial applications may be useful:

- PRTG for monitoring network and bandwidth usage using SNMP, packet sniffing or Netflow protocol. The freeware version is limited to a single sensor (try the 'Internet' port on your router).

- GFI Network Monitoring for monitoring raw server statistics (CPU, disk etc for Windows and some Linux distributions) and applications (SQL Server, IIS, Exchange and others). A full list of features is available. The freeware version is limited to 3 servers.

Combining PDFs on Mac OS X

Wed, 28 Sep 2005 16:20:09 +1000

Combine PDFs is a freeware Mac OS X application that combines multiple PDFs into a single file through a simple drag 'n' drop interface (useful for when needing to collate documents with varying formatting arrangements (particularly header graphics) into a single document for distribution).

Free and/or open source software for switchers

Tue, 30 Aug 2005 16:21:16 +1000

For those from Windows, below is a list of useful free and/or open source applications (* denotes pre-installed with OS X 10.4 Tiger)…

- Browsers: Safari*, Firefox, Camino, Shiira

- E-mail: Apple Mail*

- Instant messaging: iChat* (AOL/.mac and Jabber), AdiumX or Fire (both free and open source multi-protocol (MSN, Yahoo!, AOL/iChat/Jabber)). For connectivity to Microsoft’s Live Communication Server use Microsoft Messenger.

- RSS news reader: NetNewsWire Lite (at bottom of page)

- FTP client: Fugu (free and provides SFTP support), whilst Fetch is free for educational institutions.

- Terminal services client: Microsoft Remote Desktop Connection

- Text editor: Bare Bones TextWrangler

- VNC viewer: Chicken of the VNC

- Media players: QuickTime*, iTunes*, VLC (particularly for AVIs), Windows Media Player (although it doesn’t work for some DRM-protected files), and RealPlayer

- Other utilities: StuffIt expander (for expanding .sit archives amongst others)

OS X Server 10.4 iChat Server domain

Sun, 17 Jul 2005 16:22:17 +1000

It appears that under OS X Server 10.4, you must include a FQDN to allow the iChat server to start. If the only host domain listed is yourserver.local, the iChat server will fail to start (throwing a large amount of “org.jabber.jabberd: will restart in 10 seconds” and “too many failures in a row for a job that should be alive all the time” in the console.) By including a FQDN this allows the iChat server to start. Discussions regarding this issue have surfaced on Apple’s support site.

For those who wish to run their iChat server restricted only to internal use, this may require some DNS configuration editing as the iChat AV 3 client does appear to accept the use of username@yourserver.local as the Jabber account.

OS X “lock screen” option

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 21:23:30 +1000

OS 10.3 and 10.4 provide the ability to lock your screen without enabling a screensaver (like the “lock computer” option on Windows 2000/XP/2003).

Open Keychain Access (located at /Applications/Utilities) and choose the following (depending upon your OS):
10.3: View menu -> Show status in Menu Bar
10.4: Keychain menu -> Preferences; then select “Show status in Menu Bar”

For both 10.3. and 10.4 the Keychain menu will now be avialable and the option “lock screen” can be chosen.

Very useful for servers where you do not want to place any further load from the GUI on the system.

Digital camera travel tip

Wed, 22 Jun 2005 16:23:50 +1000

Definitely worthwhile adjusting the internal date on your digital camera to local time when travelling. Helps ensure that time and date stamps in iPhoto (or your preferred album software) makes sense.

WWDC 2005 keynote

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 16:24:17 +1000

The major announcement is that Apple is transitioning to Intel processors. Apple expects to begin shipping Intel-equipped Macs as of June 2006 with the transition complete by 2007. Jobs confirmed that Apple has had OS X running on Intel processors since OS X 10.0 (“a secret double life”) and demonstrated iCal, iPhoto and Dashboard running on Tiger on Intel (all demos were performed on an Intel-based Mac). To facilitate the transition it was announced that:
- XCode would allow for universal binary compilation allowing a single application to run on both architectures;
- Cocoa-based applications would be the easiest to transition (”a few days”), Carbon-based apps in XCode would require more work (”a few weeks”) whilst developers still utilising Metrowerk’s development environment would need to migrate to XCode (the phrase “??” was used to indicate the amount of work required). Mathemeticia successfully migrated their application in a few days last week;
- A technology called Rosetta would allow for dynamic translation of existing PowerPC applications to run on Intel. Jobs demonstrated current versions of Microsoft Office, Photoshop and Quicken running on OS X on Intel;
- Premier and Select Developer connection members could purchase a $999 Intel-based Macintosh (which would need to be returned by the end of 2006) for development work.

Jobs noted significant benefits of moving to the Intel platform, including more processing power per watt in the future and an inability to deliver the 3GHz PowerPC G5 as promised last year.

Other items of note:
- 16 million iPods have now been sold giving Apple over 70% market share in MP3 players (including flash and hard disk based);
- The iTunes Music Store has over 80% market share (which has grown since competition increased);
- Macintosh system growth has been near 50% (year to year) in the last quarter;
- Apple has sold over $500m worth of third party products in Apple Stores since opening;
- The next version of iTunes will include podcast support with the music store having a podcast directory;
- Apple has shipped 2 million copies of Tiger. Tiger now makes up nearly 20% of all Mac OS X users;
- The next release of OS X (Leopard) will be available in late 2006/early 2007.

ColdFusion on OS X Tiger

Mon, 09 May 2005 16:25:13 +1000

Sean Corfield’s instructions for Installing ColdFusion MX on OS X work successfully under OS X Tiger Server. The MySQL database under OS X Tiger Server proved somewhat of a challenge however, so I swapped to a new version from MySQL (and used YourSQL for management via a GUI). The FarCry CMS deployed fine too.

ColdFusion MX 7 on Mac OS X with Tomcat

Wed, 30 Mar 2005 16:27:32 +1000

After issues with reinstalling JRun 4 with my current install of OS X, I decided to instead move to running ColdFusion MX 7 on Tomcat. In many ways, the setup was much easier than my previous setups of CF on JRun 4..

1. Install Tomcat (see the instructions at Apple Developer Connection)

2. Download the ColdFusion Developer Edition and follow the instructions at Macromedia Support “Installing and Deploying ColdFusion MX 7 on Macintosh OS X“.

3. Download MySql to use as your backend database. See mysql.com for the download. There is also helpful install instructions at http://www.entropy.ch/software/macosx/mysql/.

VPN setup: from one NAT network to another

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 16:29:10 +1000

It what must be a relatively common problem (but seemingly not documented), I came across the issue of attempting to VPN from one NATed network to another. As both networks were utilised the 192.168.0.1 - 192.168.0.255 range, attempts to VPN caused a lack of external network access and prevented access to internal resources on the remote network.

The solution was to change the server network (where the VPN was) to utilise the 10.0.0.0/16 range so that gateway addresses and DNS addresses would not overlap.

In setting up the VPN connection on OS X, it also required the DNS server on the VPN connection to be manually set to allow address resolution for external site access.

ColdFusion swsoc.exe service and excess CPU usage

Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:28:09 +1000

Experienced a significant ColdFusion server issue today worth documenting. Access to ColdFusion based pages was being rejected (a JRUN connection closed error) causing lack of access to a range of service (including a site CMS). Checking the task manager (on a Windows 2003 Server) showed swsoc.exe consuming a large amount of CPU time (upwards of 60%). Ending this process (swsoc.exe) or restarting its associated service (ColdFusion ODBC Server) fixed the issue temporarily however within 3 - 4 minutes the JRUN connections were being reported as closed once again.

A number of other users appeared to have experienced similar problems.

Thus the troubleshooting began including:
- checking for any required database repairs
- upgrade of CFMX drivers
- adjustment of login timeouts on datasources
- switching on debugging
- utilised limiting ColdFusion query times to 60 seconds.

Like any problem resoloution process, it is useful to keep a log off each action for change management impacts. eg

12:33pm Changed datasource1, datasource2, datasource3, login timeouts to 120 seconds.

12:37pm Upgraded drivers to v3.3. Moved macromedia_drivers.jar (v3.1) to server desktop
Sourced: http://www.macromedia.com/support/coldfusion/ts/documents/cfmx61_sqlserver_cpu.htm

The problem was eventually isolated to some code that queried upcoming events. The limiting query option allowed this to be debugged as the CFMX server would stop the query when it exceeded 60 seconds. The relatively simple query would not require in excess of 10 seconds hence this code was isolated as the issue. It appears that in attempting to run the code some non-compliant data was causing the CFLOOP command to move into an infinite loop, causing the swsoc.exe process to consume large amounts of CPU resources and prevent further connections to the JRUN.exe service. Commenting out the queries causing the issue resolved it immediately.

Farcry Installation for OS X

Sun, 18 Apr 2004 16:26:01 +1000

This post, FarCry Install Instructions for OS X, provides a good overview of installing FarCry on OS X when running Tomcat rather than JRun. The end result is running FarCry system with a slightly long URLs for accessing the web root (http://localhost/cfusion/myfarcry/www/index.cfm) and FarCry admin (http://localhost/cfusion/farcry_core/admin/).

It does require that Tomcat be integrated with Apache - MacDevCenter provides some excellent instructions and a precompiled mod_jk in its article Integrating Tomcat with Apache Via the mod_jk Module.

How to use MySQL 4.1 with ColdFusion MX

Thu, 15 Apr 2004 16:27:03 +1000

An important technote for those using MySQL version 4 with ColdFusion MX 7: How to use MySQL 4.1 with ColdFusion MX.

Fragments of the day

Tue, 14 Oct 2003 16:30:06 +1000

imagej is a java application that can be used for integration with Cold Fusion MX.

Farcry is a Cold Fusion MX-based, open source CMS developed by Daemon.

CVS Monitor is a perl-based web app for browsing CVS repositories .

The Macromedia Developers conference (MXDU) is on in Sydney in February 2004.

Switching off site caching may help to speed up Dreamweaver when editing large sites.

Be accessible and use th at the top rows of your tables for screen readers.

…or even add a “report inaccessibility” link on every page of your site.

Youngpup.net provides some slide out menus.

CFAussie is a Australian Cold Fusion devleopers list.

Don’t make me think” is a user interface design book.

Use IsDefined to check logins in Cold Fusion.

BrowserCam provides pay for checking of pages across lots of platforms and browsers.

#YesNoFormat(q.var)# is one way to help format data in yes/no format.

PengoWorks maintains qForms - an API for interfacing forms in Javascript. Recommended for use with Cold Fusion.

Landsend.com allows you to build a “you” under “My Model”.

Check that you have a blank Application.cfm (can’t be zero kb - put a comment in it) at your web root so that “above root” references aren’t made when running Cold Fusion MX on your server.