Macessity makes this lovely rackmount shelf for Mac Minis. Looks perfect for integrating Mac Mini Servers into an existing rackmount environment. With a $60 USD price tag, it's a very tempting offer, as rackmount shelves of any kind are usually charged at a premium.
Our organization uses mailman mailing lists to categorize e-mail and deliver to staff. But I've always been driven mad by the fact that mailman removes e-mails' "Sender" field and replaces it with the list address, then moving the actual sender to a "From" field.
This is all fine and good but for the fact that Outlook can't separate the "sender" and the "from" fields; all mail comes from "<listaddress> on behalf of <actualsender>". So using the rules feature in Outlook, it's impossible to automatically sort mail by sender: a truly infuriating combination of technological limitations.
Fortunately, I found a message in the mailman-users mailing list that explains how to fix this behaviour.
Continue reading Mailman Sender Field.
I was having trouble with Apache's authentication service on my Mac OS X 10.3 system. For some reason, I was getting invalid password errors when I knew the user/password I provided was correct. Plus, for every successful login, my Apache error log contained the following message:
Authenticating using checkpw failed, trying legacy method
Some Googling led me to a thread in Mac OS X Hints forum. It seems that the factory default is to use "mod_auth_apple.so" instead of Apache's original "mod_auth.so". mod_auth_apple.so checks against OS X's list of users before using your local .htpasswd file.
Simply modify your httpd.conf file as explained in the link above to correct this. Remember to correct both the AddModule and LoadModule directives or your configuration won't load.
It turns out that Windows machines aren't the only computers ready to turn into vicious zombies at any moment. Security researchers have discovered an OS X exploit in the wild designed to turn hordes of hapless Macs into zombies.
The exploit is installed via a modified version of the iWork '09 installer that has been distributed via bittorrent. The original researcher's post is here, and the comments contain some basic instructions for removing it.
Still, its beginning to look like the era of indifference to security that Mac users have largely enjoyed for many years is over. Viruses, trojans, worms, and other malware are no longer written by bored teenagers or scriptkiddies. Malware is highly sophisticated programming created by organized criminals to exploit end users systems as distributed computing platforms.
My recommendation would be that users download a copy of avast! for Mac. Though I haven't personally tried the Mac version, I've been using the Windows version on our workstations for years, and find it to be a highly stable and well-written piece of software.
Here's a video tour of the White Mountain underground data center in downtown Stockholm, Sweden. Besides the automatic coolness that goes with anything underground, the data center is a repurposed cold-war era nuclear bunker, and the new owner, Bahnhof telecomm, has totally pimped things out with that aesthetic in mind.
This week created some God-awful problems. When I came into work on Tuesday morning, our POP3 e-mail clients were failing to download messages. When I tried to login to the server (an XServe running OS X 10.4) to diagnose the problem, the connection seemed to time out. I rebooted the server, but after a few minutes the problem reasserted itself. It took me forever to log into the system, and when I did, I found that all the processes were normal. There was nothing running out of control to account for the slowdowns.I then noticed that other things on the server like the web and database services were running just fine. It was only when someone tried to log in to something that the slowdown occurred. So I concluded that something was overloading the authentication service. After some digging through log files, I found the problem: hundreds of random computers on the internet trying (and failing) to log into our server via SSH.
Our server was under attack by zombies.
Continue reading Attack of the Zombies.
One of the most extreme computer engineering tests I've seen in a while. Sun Microsystems took one of their "Black Box" portable data centres (basically a whole bunch of server racks in a shipping container) and put it through a simulated 6.7 magnitude earthquake to see how it would fare. The answer? Surprisingly well...
For several months now, my sister has been bugging me to install Windows XP on her Hackintosh. Since I didn't want to have an adventure muddling around in her boot disk's partition table, I decided that the best way to implement this would be to simply add an extra hard disk and install XP on that.
So after managing to scrounge up an old IDE hard disk, I booted off an old Windows XP Pro CD I'd obtained, carefully selected the new hard disk as the install location, and formatted it.
Whereupon Windows Installer promptly formatted ALL drives on the system.
I sat there, mouth open, for a few seconds, wondering if what I thought I had just seen had actually happened. I hastily rebooted the machine and tried to boot into OS X. I was greeted only by a flashing cursor: the universal BIOS message for, "There's no boot record on this disk, dude."
After screaming the F-word as loud as possible, I subsequently realized that my sister doesn't perform backups, resulting in a cluster of smaller but more punctuated F-bombs.
Fortunately, the deletion of a disk's partition table does not mean the end of the world for the files stored within. There are several commercial products designed to scan the disk in question and recover files even if the disk's partition data has been hosed. However, its a long and arduous process.
So I have learned two things. ALWAYS unplug other hard disks before installing Windows, and data recovery programs are expensive.
Ah, the venerable ls command. Unless you have encyclopaedic memory of your system's directory structure, chances are that you use it frequently.
Personally though, I can't stand looking at a directory listing in tabular format, as ls defaults to (at least on Mac OS X). So I always use the long format, ls -l. But then, hidden files aren't displayed, so I have to invoke that option: ls -al. Long lists like that are easier for me to navigate if there's colour involved. But I have to use ls -Gal, forcing my pinky fingers to make an error-prone trip to the shift key. There must be a better way.
Some have suggested overwriting the default mode of ls in the bash shell, but others suggest that this will create a situation where one is unable to invoke other arguments if necessary.
I've chosen a pragmatic approach. I've created a bash alias which allows me to invoke the complicated ls arguments with a more simple command. All I have to do is type the following:
nano ~/.profile
alias list='ls -Gal'Save the changes, and restart your shell (ie: log off and on again). Now, when I type list, I'll get ls with my preferred arguments. This is a relatively simple command line trick I'd recommend to anyone looking to speed up their directory browsing in the Terminal. Just make sure beforehand that your preferred alias name isn't overwriting any existing bash commands!
For several months now, the bulk of our spam has had one thing in common: for some bizarre reason, it all addresses "Thomas". "Thomas, enlarge your member." "Finance your new home, Thomas!" "Thomas, you need heath insurance." Thomas this, Thomas that...While I think some spammer is simply trying to target a common first name, it is ironic that since no one at our organization is named Thomas, the spammer has given me an ideal vector for filtering out all these e-mails. Indeed, a lot of spam was getting through our default SpamAssassin filters due to the broad spectrum of services being offered to this "Thomas" fellow.
Continue reading Thomas Ain't Here, Man - SpamAssassin Rules.
