Although the hardware is detected by default, somehting isn’t supported and causes the broadcasts from avahi and Mac OS to be dropped. You will need XCode to build the sources, or look for pre-compiled ones on the net. More on my hackintosh later.

http://pastebin.ca/966414

My configuration

Just in case you were wondering what configuration i used, and continue to use for that matter Here it is:

• Debian Etch
• Self-compiled netatalk (for Leopard compatibility) here’s a good howto.
• 330GB Volume on Raid5 formatted ext3

So, if you have the first two you’re in business, but even if you don’t use netatalk. All you have to do is mount everything as described in “Mounting”.

Setting up the Harddrive

Now first things first, boot from your cd. To do that just press and hold the c-key immediately after powering on your computer. You should eventually be greeted by a language selection etc. After all of this you will be welcomed by the installer. We don’t need it at all. At the top you will see “Utilities”, where you will find among others Disk Utility, Terminal and Restore from a Time Machine Backup.You will probably want to start off, especially if its a new harddrive by checking out Disk Utility and creating any volumes you want to install your system. After you have them configured your pretty much ready to go.

Network and Jumbo Frames

So now you should connect make sure you are connect to your network. You can open up disk utility to check connectivity. If you need anything special, like setting up specific network settings, these can be done in terminal. I for example like to have jumbo frames, since all my gigabit devices support it. Open up Terminal from the utilities menu, and type.ifconfig en0 mtu 9000and you should be set.

Mounting the Volumes

Let me reitterate that I have not yet tested anything other than netatalk (afp), but this should for any network file sharing protocol. All you have to do is mount your Time Machine volume under /Volumes. The syntax for mounting an afp share ismount -t afp afp://username:password@hostname/ShareName
/Volumes/ShareMountImportant here is to remember that the ShareName is a case-sensitive string. So make sure you type \ before a space, and to check for proper capitalization. Otherwise you get some mount errors, which occur because a volume wasn’t found with that name, since the actual name doesn’t match the one you typed. ShareMount is any string you want, it doesn’t matter what you call it. Same goes for spaces here. If you mount your afp volume just /Volumes (i.e. without ShareMount) you might see multiple TMBackups, as is the case with the images bellow. Still works, just shocking to see 2 of the same thing. Thats basically it, you’re almost done…

Restoring…

Before you close Terminal, make sure the share actually mounted properly, you can simply ls /Volumes and see if your mount is there. If you didn’t mount it at /Volumes/ShareMount your /Volumes folder might be litered with the contents of your afp volume, this shouldn’t cause any problems, just doesn’t look neat at first site. If everything seems to be there, then select “Restore from a Time Machine Backup” from Utilities. Click through the menu and you will come to a screen called “Select a Backup Source”, with your shares appearing properly and being recognized. Don’t ask me why there are two, probably because MacOS in general uses a lot of symlinks… Anyway, important thing is that it works. Select the first volume, and after selecting the you will come to a screen called “Select a Backup”, where you get to chose which backup you wish to use. Afterwards, the system will calculate if there is enough space and will afterwards let you restore. This will now take some time and it went up for me after about 25mins, so don’t hesitate to let it sit there for 2-3 hours. Afterwards, you will just need to reboot, and you’ll be back where you left off.

Hey, I’ve seen this before!

One thing some will notice, is that things like Mail and Itunes, will need to reconfigure themselves, i.e. reimport all your emails. Having said that, I’m still blown away by how well this went over, even if this is “unsupported”. Oh and for those of you wondering how to backup to an unsupported volume in the first place, well its simple. All you have to do is:defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1Hope this helps some people, feel free to leave a comment.

NFS and OS X

Anyway, some of us have had Leopard for a couple of weeks, and i recommend it for anyone who has a fairly new mac, by which i mean that the only consideration should be if you have enough performance to get everything out of leopard. Leopard has a lot of new “features”, one of which I’ll be explaing today.

NFS isn’t something new, and its not even something new for Mac OS. The client to mount NFS is included on almost every *nix, and doesn’t require any additional installation (usually). It also has better performance than Samba (thats what windows uses to share files), and has a fairly extensive list of configuration options. Of course, nfs isn’t perfect for everything, but if your computers run *nix (aka BSD/Unix/Mac/Linux), then NFS might be the easiest file sharing protocol to configure. After all, its basically already there, so you save yourself the install.

I’m going to assume you have NFS configured on the server, this is the computer hosting the files. If not, well its actually pretty simple, and NFS has probably the best howtos out there. You can find it here. Anyway back to the client side, running OS X. So in 10.4, mounting NFS was kind of, well a pain. Mac OS connects to an “insecure” port by default. In other words it doesn’t send a request to the server for a port. This means if you run a firewall, you can’t connect via finder, because Mac OS will attempt to connect to a port that will be blocked, since its not in the firewall rules. Not only that, you have to configure your your shares to be “insecure” otherwise /var/log/messages will get something along the lines of:

russo@marx:~$ cat /var/log/messages | grep nfsd
Nov 8 16:56:15 marx kernel: nfsd: request from insecure port (192.168.0.4:49204)!

Directory Utility

There was a solution in 10.4, and it was fairly complicated and involved setting everything up with NetInfo Manager. This procedure was quite tedious, as you can see in this howto. But we’re not in 10.4 anymore (thank god!) And guess what… NetInfo is gone! And replaced by something, much more user friendly. The new replacement is called, Directory Utility. And can be found in your Utilities folder, imagine that! Fire it up, lets take a look!

So at first site, there probably won’t be much there, especially on a home network. But, this doesn’t matter we’re not configuring Directory Services, we’re here for the NFS mounts. Just click “Show Advanced Settings” and you’ll see “Mounts” appear up top. Click that. Next you should see something like this

Click the lock in the bottom left corner, to allow you to add/edit mounts. Enter the username and password of an Administrator on the computer (Chuck Norris administers mine). Now you should be able to click the + to add a mount. By the way, with Directory Utility you don’t have to reboot to see changes. You just click that apply in the corner. How sweet is that?

The syntax here is a bit different than mount in CLI, however the syntax still contains that which made many new users make a mistake. The syntax is

nfs://<hostname or ip>/<full path to directory>

Remember, /full/path/to/dir is the full path on the server!

Also enter, the directory where you want this share to be mounted. Its probably best to keep everything under either /Volumes or /Network. This way all users can easily access to the shares. You can always add aliases to your home directory, or wherever you want these mounts to actually appear. Now if you, just want to automount “insecure” mounts, than you’re basically done at this point. However we want to add “secure” mounts. This means we need to specify the “Privelaged” flag to the mount. This will cause it to use a port designated by the server. Click the little triangle next to “Advanced Mount Parameters” And you’ll see something like this:

all we have to do is add, “-P”. This makes the mount use a privelaged port. Now click “Verify”. At this point, its good to mention that if Directory Utility only checks if the server that you entered is running nfs and not if the mount is actually functional. Now click “Apply”

Nothing Happend…

Well it did, but you might not be able to see it. At the very least the mount point has been created, and you can check this by opening finder and going to either /Volumes or /Network (EDIT: or wherever you mounted you shaere). To get there you’ll have to type command (apple) + shift + G, and then type in where you want to go. Okay, so now you should see it there, BUT you probably won’t be able to write to even if you didn’t mount it read-only. Why is that, you ask? Well you don’t have permissions, silly! And even if you your user does have permissions to write, even if your user exists on both machines, he probably won’t have the same gid/uid. How can you check? Just use the id command:

lenin:~ russo$ id
uid=501(russo) gid=20(staff)

Just as a side note Mac OS begins with 500, whereas most linux distros begin with 1000. So now you can either change the gid/uid of one of the machines so that they do match, or run “chmod 777″ the directory on the server… that should be it. You should be able to write now!

EDIT: There are also ways to map IPs, hostnames and authenticated users to users on the machine. Maping ips and hostnames is fairly easy, you simply add anonuid=youruid, anongid=yourgid to the options in the /etc/exports file. (Thanks Paolo)

How do i get the share in my Finder Sidebar?

Simple! Just click the folder and drag it while holding apple + option. You can place it under “Places” in this manner. Even if you’re not an admin user.

EDIT: This wasn’t clear enough for some. You cannot create aliases for the actual mounts, however you can create a folder enclosing the mounts and create an alias for that. I.e /Volumes/Hostname and put all the mounts in /Volumes/Hostname. I hope its a little bit easier to understand now…

Anyone worried about RIAA, anyone wanting to block spyware etc. should try out peerguardian. It’s a painless install on Mac and Windows. I just recently installed it on my mac. You’ll be surprised how much unwanted traffic you do get!

Here’s the link their website, PheonixLabs and a link to the mac download on SourceForge.

Blogged with Flock

Blogged with Flock

So i got myself one of these… some ask how can i live with a one button mouse? How can i live without scroll. Well those people haven’t seen Apple’s Mighty Mouse because it has 3 buttons and a 360 scroll! But i didn’t get the wired one i got a bluetooth wireless one. And it’s been making photoshoping much easier! I really recommend this to all even with the slightly higher price tag. Oh and if you have no idea what it is just check it out here.

Blogged with Flock

I still like it very much though. It does look very nice! Its also well built with double layers to prevent any scratching of notebook with the zipers (yes there are 2). Everyone realizes you must have a nice notebook inside and at €30 its not hurting anyones walets. All of this applies to Tucanos in general. It makes me wonder why people settle for cheaper sleeves for their notebooks.

But I guess this is all too much for the 4 color mosaic… This is similar to IE not supporting newer css formats (although safari doesn’t do it perfectly either). But still of all things that are important to day to day life it is definitely email. I’m just shocked that and upset that this hold true and i have to retype reforward my emails. I really hope UTF-8 will become the standard on windows too someday and i think it will as UTF-8 is definitely much more widespread mobile phones etc.

Hmm that probably means if i told my family to check their email with their phones it would work… as opposed to windows…

Blogged with Flock

Simply click on the icon when you want to completely delete your bin’s contents and bingo!!!

Blogged with Flock