Recently I discovered a very well done syncing service, called DropBox.
It allows to sync different machines, also heterogeneous (Mac, PC, iPhone, etc.) in an easy and convenient way. Each local machine has a folder (DropBox folder) which is always in sync with a remote copy stored into the DropBox servers, so that syncing becomes a transparent operation which is automatically performed when the machine is connected to the Internet. It is also possible to fast sync over a LAN. Special facilities are given for picture libraries and for publishing files in a very controlled way.
I’ve used it to sync my 1Password data over different Macs (see the Agile site for instructions)
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I had to upgrade my MySQL installation on Snow Leopard (regular, NOT server edition). I successfully did it following these steps:
1) stop the previous version of the server by the Prefs pane (mine was not working anymore);
2) backup the existing data (es. to desktop):
sudo cp -R /usr/local/mysql-<your_oldversion>/data /Users/<yourid>/Desktop
3) install new version package and Prefs panel downloaded from MySQL site
4) copy old data files to new version folder, remember to not copy the folder “mysql” since the table structures could be changed (happened to me):
sudo cp -R /usr/local/mysql-<your_oldversion>/data/ /usr/local/mysql-<your_newversion>/data
5) adjust permissions:
sudo chown -R _mysql:wheel /usr/local/mysql-<your_newversion>/data/
6) go to Prefs pane and start your new MySQL server, it should start correctly
7) if everything is OK, delete the old version:
sudo rm -R /usr/local/mysql-<your_oldversion>
remember to create the new users you had before
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The iPhone OS 3.0 tethering (either USB or BT) will not work if the PDAnet (a 3-part software for tethering installed from Cydia) has the WiFi router turned on. To get the Apple tethering working set the PDAnet router to OFF.
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To load a new firmware image in the iPhone (e.g. jailbreaking) follows these steps:
1) enter iPhone into DFU mode
2) connect to USB and open iTunes
3) iTunes recognizes the restore mode, press ALT and click the RESTORE button
4) select your image file and restore as usual
Note that the ALT key can be used also with the UPDATE button, in this case iTunes lets you select the file to use for the update
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On Macosx or Linux use the following command to compute the checksum of a given file:
openssl [format] filename
where [format] can be sha1 or md2, md5, mdc2, rmd160, sha.
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Despite the network interface seemed to work well, I discovered a very strange behavior i.e. it was not able to discover AFP shares. Note that SMB shares instead worked fine.
After some googling I found this very well done tutorial on the installation of Kalyway 10.5.4 with a GA P35DS3L motherboard:
http://www.insanelymac.com/lofiversion/index.php/t112708.html
Although I have a P35DS3R motherboard, many part of it can be applied also to my MB. In this tutorial the AFP problem is cited and one of the solutions given is installing a different Ethernet driver from Psystar. So I have downloaded the driver from
http://www.psystar.com/realtek_r1000_driver.html
and installed it. Now the Ethernet is working correctly also for AFP shares (finally my iPhone Remote came up instantly in iTunes!). However I did not observe the cited delay returning from sleep mode, either because is quite short or because I’m not using DHCP.
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My Asus P5B-VM motherboard broke suddenly, so I have bought a new one, a Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3R. This is a very good MB, well compatible with MacOSX. After some tests, I have successfully installed Leopard 10.5.4 (iATKOS v4i) on it, with everything working fine.
Hardware configuration:
MB GA-EP35-DS3R, 2Gb Corsair RAM 800, GeForce 7600GT 256M (Point-of-Interest), 2 WD SATA disk 300Mb each, internal Sony IDE old CD/DVD drive
Bios settings (set them exactly as listed):
SATA RAID/AHCI Mode ENABLED
SATA AHCI Mode ENABLED
SATA Port0-3 Native Mode ENABLED
Onboard SATA/IDE Device DISABLED
Installation instruction:
1) boot from an external USB DVD drive able to read the disk
2) partition scheme for the boot HD: MBR, 1 HFS partition 40Gb for MacOSX, 1 HFS partition 260 Gb for the data archive (CAUTION: do NOT use spaces in the partition names!)
3) install Leopard 10.5.4 with the following setup: disable Darwin BootLoader and enable Darwin X86 for MBR (Non-Efi), enable Kernel 9.2.0 ToH, enable AppleSMBIOS netkas, enable NVinject 256M, enable SATA
4) boot from the HD, you should have a working 10.5.4 system, but with no audio and not able to mount USB disk (due to the different versions of kernel and System.kext)
5) download audio patch ALC889a.zip and install it. Now the audio I/O should work fine.
6) download USB patch usb_fix_1.3.mpkg and apply it. Now the USB disks should mount correctly.
7)With my VGA card, the driver contained in the iATKOS DVD gave me several problems (e.g. iPhoto cannot go fullscreen and similar). I solved all the problems installing a new driver using NVinstaller v.52 from Scottdangel (http://scottdangel.com/blog/?page_id=20)
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Using a laptop 2.5″ disk for a Linux server, I noticed a nearly regular click noise coming from the disk.
After some search on the net, I found that the cause of the clicking is due to the Advanced Power Management option set on this kind of disks which constantly unloads the read/write heads shortly after the disk becomes idle. If the disk is used for a Linux server (especially when ext3 partitions are used), its life can be greatly reduced.
The solution is to disable this Power Management option on the disk by issuing the command (set it in the rc.local):
/sbin/hdparm -B255 /dev/hda
The disk activity can be further reduced mounting the partition with the “noatime” option in /etc/fstab
See http://www.ulverston.myzen.co.uk/mini-itx/pages/tuning.htm
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To repair all the permissions from the console type:
sudo diskutil repairPermissions /
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1) Activate PHP module in Apache config (PHP5 is already into Leopard) by editing the file /etc/apache2/httpd.conf uncommenting the line “LoadModule php5_module libexec/apache2/libphp5.so”
2) Activate Apache by enabling “Web Sharing”
3) Install and start MySQL (see previous post)
4) download and install phpMyAdmin (I put it into my ~/Sites folder)
5) Due a bug in Leopard, the system is looking for the mysql.sock file in the wrong place. It is necessary to create a symlink to it in the right place to have phpMyAdmin working:
sudo mkdir /var/mysql/
sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/mysql.sock
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