Macgasm

Since moving, I’ve had to re-think my entire strategy for getting my Xbox online. I have a decent (but currently broken) 26″ Monitor that can display 1080p. While attempting to hook my Xbox up via my iMac’s ethernet port I ran into an issue. This was specifically related to DNS. I had a couple of out-dated DNS Servers that I wanted to change… but I ran into this ‘lovely’ error message.

Now the Error message states what the issue is currently, so I flipped back to Zones and saw a zone for an IP that was removed already. So I tried to remove the incorrect Zone. To my surprise I saw the Zone re-appear.

Since my initial process for fixing did not pan out, I decided to try and add a name server..

To my utter annoyance the name server ‘magically’ disappeared. I did some googling and came across a thread on the Apple discussion boards that points to editing the actual DNS files. Being the adventurous type I decided to locate the files and look at what could be the issue. The base path for all DNS on an OS X Server is /etc/dns

Within this directory I saw three files, first of which was loggingOptions.conf.apple. As the name explains this is the file used for determining where the logging redirects. So this was not the file I was looking for.
The second file is options.conf.apple. This file is used to determine whether zone-transfers are allowed and which forwarders are used for DNS. This wasn’t the file either. The last file named ‘publicView.conf.apple’ was the file I was looking for.

In this file I found the following zone description:

In order to delete this zone you have to go into terminal, navigate to /etc/dns and type ‘sudo cp publicView.conf.apple publicView.conf.apple.backup’. You will be prompted for your password. This command will create a backup of your current DNS settings, should something go horribly wrong. I cannot stress enough that you SHOULD make a backup before doing anything major via the command line.

Next type in ‘sudo vi publicView.conf.apple’. This may ask for your password again. Once you have loaded the editor, use the arrows keys to navigate to which zone you want to delete. Next hit the ‘d’ key twice to delete each line for the zone that you want to delete. Once you have deleted all of the lines for that zone hit the ‘:’ key and type in ‘w’ and hit enter. Next, type in ‘q’ and hit enter. (all of the commands are without the single quotes).

The final step is to restart DNS and verify that the rogue zone is now gone. If something has gone horribly wrong do not fret you have your backup. To copy the old DNS file to the current one, go to terminal, navigate to /etc/dns.

Type in ‘sudo cp publicView.conf.apple.backup publicView.conf.apple’. This will copy your backup copy to the current working copy. Restart DNS and verify that everything is back to the original setup. If all is, retry to edit and remove the zone.

Once I did this all is now back to normal and I can edit my DNS forwarders. If you’re having a specific issue, or know of one that is affecting a lot of users, let me know at wdixon at macgasm dot net or leave a comment.

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In this episode, we talk about organizing our iPhone and iPod Touch apps.

[03.6 MB] [00:11:10] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner] [Subscribe]

This one hits a little close to home. Back before I got my shiney new Mac Book Pro, I was toiling away on an out of date iBook, used as my second computer, and the thing was a beast. It just kept on kicking, until I got up in the morning and stepped on the end of my power cord. It hurt like hell at first, but I felt the pain deeper than the original bruises. The dongle was squished and upon trying to fix it, I broke the tip off.

What’s a person to do when they have to replace some hardware that’s no longer supported by Apple? EBay of course. After searching for a while I found a reputable seller offering legitimate iBook power cords at a price that was pretty hefty, or so it seemed. I decided to go for it. It worked great for a couple of weeks, then came a loud pop and an iBook that no longer worked. The piece of crap counterfeit clearly had some issues regulating the power. It blew the end of the plug right off the cord, and probably directly into my iBook. I should have known better.

Today, Apple’s made a move to stop third party companies from creating cheaper power plug alternatives, and I welcome the news. Sure, a ten dollar chord might save you some cash now, but when it blows up your iBook, you’ll probably crawl to Apple for some support.

Word to the wise, buy your power cords from Apple and save yourself from having to replace an entire laptop. Luckily in my case my laptop was already entering the end of its life cycle.

A power chord isn’t the same as an HDMI chord. If you want to save a buck save them on buying things like HDMI chords on amazon, but never, under any circumstance buy a replacement power chord from anyone but the original product manufacturer. That goes for any personal computing equipment that you might own.

Article Via Information Week

Image Credit studiocurve

Here’s some food for thought, would you spend your day working on materials that have known carcinogens in them?

I surely wouldn’t. I know it sounds a little ludicrous that I’m agreeing with Apple Inc over this, but when you start painting the situation with a stroke of reality it makes quite a bit of sense.

Sure, fixing one or two computers that have come into contact with a smoking environment might not be all that big of a deal, but that starts to become a little more dangerous when you have prolonged periods of exposure to known toxic elements. The reality is that Apple repair centre’s don’t just fix one computer here and another there. They repairs tons of them, on a daily basis, and if they were to let their employee’s become exposed to these harmful toxic chemicals on that scale, there could be some trouble.

Apple’s protecting itself from future lawsuits by employee’s who claim that they were exposed to unsafe work environments without their knowledge. Frankly, I wish more companies took this approach to protecting their employee’s instead of pressuring them to do work that could be potentially harmful to one’s health.

It’s not about a one time exposure to smoke residue, it’s about repeated exposure to an element that’s is currently on the OSHA’s list of hazardous substances. Ruth’s claim is hilariously ignorant.

SHA also lists calcium carbonate (found in calcium tablets), isopropyl alcohol (used to clean wounds), chlorine (used in swimming pools), hydrogen peroxide (also used to clean wounds), sucrose (a sugar), talc (as in powder), etc… as hazardous substances.

Hey, She’s one hundred percent correct in assuming that these chemicals are used by humans, but what she fails to realize is that we don’t sit around day after day playing in chlorine or hydrogen peroxide. Sure, I’ll apply some hydrogen peroxide to clean a wound, but I certainly wouldn’t stick my hand in it twice a day for twenty minutes.

Lets get some perspective on an issue before we launch a tirade against a company, failure to do so makes you look a lot like a whiner.

Does smoke fumes cause issues with a computer? Outside of the optical drive, I’d have a hard time seeing that as being a problem, but the refusal to work on the machine’s has nothing to do with the hardware failures and everything to do with putting their employees in harms way. I say good on Apple.

Photo Credit: myguerrilla

First thing’s first, backup twice. Then check them thrice.

There’s a number of options for syncing your home folders on the Mac, none of them are straight forward, and each offer up a different subset of challenges, but if you can wrap your head around the complexity, they can certainly help you get your computers synchronized. I’ve struggled over the years with getting my files sync’d, and I’m holding out hope that a company like Dropbox will soon let us run an application over our LANs so that we can get a lot of this stuff done at a much quicker pace.

Syncing your files has a host of benefits, of which getting your documents to be up to date on every machine in your house is probably the most lucrative. There’s other reasons, such as syncing movies and music and getting applications synced, but for me, getting my files when I want them, where I want them, is my main objective.

I’ve put together two options to help you guys get this done. Before you get started… beware. There’s a good chance you’ll be at this for a while, and a couple of headaches are likely in store. It’s not an easy process, but if you can stick through to the end you’ll be happy you gave it a shot.

Using ChronoSync to sync your documents folder.

I say we’ll be syncing our documents folder because it’s probably the most straight forward approach to synchronizing, but the reality is that you can really sync anything you want, so long as you have the time to work the kinks out. ChronoSync is known for its ease of use, but it also has some limitations that make this far from the ideal approach. I’ve yet to find one resource to do all my syncing in a way that’s

simple and effective, but ChonoSync is one of the the least painless ways to getting your files synced.

Off the top, you should know that your ChronoSync license will work on one computer only, and that you’ll likely also need the Chrono Agent for each of the machines you’re wishing to sync to. In my setup I have one computer acting like a server, and the rest syncing with it, so I have ChronoSync running on my Mac Pro, and Chrono Agent on my MacBook Pro. Everything I’ve read about ChronoSync tends to illustrate a PC to PC synchronization, and entering a third computer to the mix doesn’t seem like a plausible option (Correct me if I’m wrong), unless you purchase multiple licenses of ChronoSync. So lets get to it then, shall we?

Make sure your user accounts Match

The first thing I noticed with ChronoSync is that it’s pretty stubborn. I was trying to sync my user account folders and I couldn’t figure out how to match them up, if they weren’t titled the exact same. Essentially on my Mac Pro my user account shortname is jschnell, and the shortname on my Laptop was jjschnell. I’m not sure what I was smoking so I had to recreate a new user account and migrate my files to it. It’s a bit of a pain in the butt, but it’s possible, so if you’re in the same boat read the next section, but if your accounts are all labelled the same, skip ahead to ‘Setting up the connection’

Migrating user’s to a new shortname

There’s no simple way to do this, so you’ll have to go through the process of setting up a new user with the proper short name, then migrating your files. It sounds all well and easy, but it’s not as straight forward as you might expect. I had problems with file permissions for the new account.

From an Admin account, once the new user account is created, copy all the files from one folder to another in ‘Users/’ locations, you can get there by going to the Finder, then clicking on your computer under devices, then the appropriate hard drive, then users. Now copy all the folders from the old account name to the new account name. You’ll probably have to ‘authenticate’ so make sure you enter a admin login and password when prompted.

Now, ideally this would be all set up now, but there’s likely a possibility that you’ll have to give the new user permission to the old users files, as well as assign your administrator account access to the files so that ChronoSync can access the files and sync them. Here’s how you do that.

1. Once the files are moved to the new account highlight a folder
2. Right click that folder and click get info
3. At the very bottom of that window you should see a little lock. Click it
4. Enter your user name/password (admin account)
5. Now click the plus button, select the new user account and your admin account (hold the command key and click both.
6. Push the select button, and they should now be added to the list.
7. Now we need to change their privileges from Read only to Read & Write. Click the Select Button
8. Click the Read Only label and then select Read & Write
9. Now Click the like gear at the bottom and select apply to enclosed items

You should now have access to the proper accounts in ChronoSync, and the user should now have access to the appropriate files. We’re now ready to set up Chrono Sync.

Setting up Syncs Using ChronoSync

This is where we finally start to get our syncing on, and can put away all the preparations. Like I mentioned earlier, syncing isn’t very easy yet, so there’s quite a few steps to getting something up and running effectively, chronosync is no different. So, here we go.

After installing ChronoSync on your main computer, and ChronoSync agent on your secondary computer, it’s time to get to setting up ChronoSync to actually do the synchronization.

Setup Tab

Click on the set up tab, and take notice of the layout. It’s referenced a lot through the application. You’ll need to remember which computer you have in the “Left” column, and which computer is in the “Right” column. I prefer having my secondary computer in the Left, and the Main Computer to the right, so from here on out, I’ll be referring to each by it’s location.

1. Click the drop down list next to Connect To:
2. Select add/edit/remove connection
3. Click the Connection tabs
4. Click te Plus Icon
5. Now add a profile name, select the appropriate ChonoAgent computer, then fell out the secure connection info
6. Now you can select your remote computer in the ‘Connect To:’ drop down on the left, and then click the choose button
7. Select the appropriate folder you want to back up. Note: You’ll want to select the folder just above the actual folder you want to back up. We’ll be able to exclude some folders in a later step.
8. So, I selected the Users folder
9. Click the select button

At this point you should see some statistics populate the left column. It’s going to let you know how much storage space is needed for the back up, so you might want to double check that you have the ability to store that much data on your machine. You now want to do the same thing for the right column, keeping in mind that this will be the local machine you’re working on.

Once you have these two targets (columns) set up with your two computers, you’ll want to decide what type of syncing you want to do between the computers. Right in the middle of the UI for the Left Target, and the Right Target, there’s a drop down menu with a bunch of backup scenarios. I’m selecting Synchronize Bidirectional. We want a real, true sync here, so this is going to insure that data from both machines are being moved across the network, instead of data from one machine only. I checked synchronize deletion, because I don’t want to have my files piling up. If you’re a little more paranoid you’ll want to leave this unchecked.

Just to be safe we’re going to save our setup at this point. So click that archaic disk icon, name your file, and hit okay.

To save on time, we’re going to jump to the Analyze tab, skipping over the options, and rules tabs, but I’d recommend looking into them, and seeing if any of the settings there apply to your setup.

Analyze Tab

This is where we’re going to determine what files are being synced, and which folders might be exempt from our process. Again we’re met with a left and right column, and these are referencing the computers and where we placed them in the setup tab. If you forget, you’ll want to double check.

By right clicking on a file or folder, you’ll have a menu that lets you exclude an item from syncing. This is really handy if you’re only syncing a particular folder for a number of users. For instance, I only want my Desktop and Documents folders syncing. I don’t need Applications, and Library folders, as well as music, and movies being synced between my two machines. So I’ve excluded them to speed up my syncing.

Once you’ve set these up you’ll want to save the setup again, and head on over to scheduling the sync.

Scheduling is really straight forward, you pick the day, the hours, and the minutes you want the sync to occur. Keep in mind that the syncing doesn’t act like dropbox, and it doesn’t occur immediately on a file being saved. It’s one of the downfalls of all these syncing methods I’ve tried out. So for me, I have the syncing happening every hour of the day. It’ll stop me from having to manually sync before I use my laptop to get some work done.

Click OK, and you’re done.

You’ll want to save your file again, make sure you backup all the folders and files that you’ll be syncing before you run your first sync, and make use of the Trial Sync in ChronoSync to ensure that your synchronization will go off without a hitch.

Thoughts on ChronoSync

I’m pretty impressed with the application so far, and it’s certainly worth considering it as a syncing option, but there are a number of things that really stood out for me as being a bit of a problem.

It can get pricey. One serial key works on one computer. That’s it. You also have to purchase a ChronoAgent key for all the computer’s you’ll want to have syncing with your main ChronoSync computer. These two things alone make it a bit of a hard pill to swallow; however, it’s probably the most full featured syncing application I’ve come across. So if you’re serious about getting your computers all working on the same page, the price won’t be as difficult to swallow.

When you factor in the abilities to also act as a backup system, the price starts to become a little more palatable. One way syncs, bootable syncs, and bidirectional syncs make this program a full featured backup option. With a little voodoo magic around the operating system, you’ll be able to get away with having one copy of ChronoSync to backup all the computers on your network. Outside of the price considerations, there’s only one other thing that really had me annoyed.

It might just be that I haven’t figured out the proper option to customize my folder syncs, but I found it a little counter intuitive to stop users from being able to sync folders that are not named the same. As I mentioned at the top of this huge post, I had to go to great lengths to make sure that my user account folders were named exactly the same. I couldn’t put the files from the folder jschnell into my folder named jjschnell on a different machine. I can’t see the logic in that. I should have some ability to sync folders that don’t align alphanumerically. I get that some users might make the mistake of syncing folders they don’t want synced, but ‘powerusers’ should have the tools to do this.

On the whole, ChronoSync is worth it if you have a couple of computers to sync across a network, but if you have an entire house filled with Macs, it could get a little pricey. I’d recommend checking out the demo before you run out and purchase the application, just to make sure it’s actually as full featured as you need it to be.

I was going to write about ways to use Rsync for syncing your home folder, but given the length of this article I decided that I’ll save it for a post next week.

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In this episode, we talk about buying music on the go.

[02.2 MB] [00:06:30] [Hosted by: Josh Schnell & Grant Brunner] [Subscribe]

It’s thanksgiving in the US and people are starting to give away some discounted applications, either to celebrate the pilgrims, or make a quick dime–I’m not sure which yet. But, as a consumer I don’t really care, as long as I’m getting a discount on something useful. I’ll buy it, no matter what side of the fence the motives fall down on.

Agile Web Solutions, the makers of 1Password, have decided that this holiday season would be a good time to giveaway 1Password Pro for the iPhone. It’s sitting pretty at Free-Nighty-Nine, and I’m taking advantage of their hospitality as we speak. Happy Thanksgiving to us.

Also, if you’re wanting to keep your eye on discounted iPhone applications over the thanksgiving long weekend I’d recommend you read Patrick Jordan’s guest post. He highlights a bunch of applications that monitor the appstore and notify you of price changes. It works pretty well, for instance, I just found out that BeeJive IM just got a discount as well.

1Password 3 Also Released

In other 1Password news, Agile Web Solutions has released 1Password 3 today.  It marks the end of the beta testing period.  There’s an early bird discount in effect until Dec 1st.  If you have 1 Password  2 you can get the upgrade for $19.95.

Happy Holidays indeed.

This was originally going to be a screencast, but I have decided to hold off on that part. It may still become a screencast in the future, but for now this is my review.

BusyCal is a powerful iCal replacement application. Created by BusyMac, the same people that brought you BusySync. BusyCal allows you to easily synchronize your iCal calendar with your Google Calendar and even share your calendars through LAN. Now you may be thinking that this is something you can do in iCal already. But this isn’t just a simply replacement. This application is made for the power users that want more than the basic functions that iCal offers.

At first look, BusyCal looks a lot like iCal. This actually helps a lot when trying to get used to the application. Many of the same features are present as well. If you have used iCal in the past, then using BusyCal will be a breeze to you. But it does so much more. You can add the weather forecast to your calendar, which I immediately did. I was also able to immediately see everything that I had in iCal over in my new BusyCal window. I went ahead and made BusyCal my default calendar and test that they two calendars actually worked together. Of course it was seamless. That to me really is the first selling point, if you are using BusyCal and accidentally open iCal and don’t realize it, your event you added will be in BusyCal. That actually happend to me a few times.The other thing that I really liked about the application was the ability to add graphics to your events. This comes in very handy for a nice quick visual of what is coming up. If you are having a skype conference call, you can put the skype logo with the event. There are tons of ways to make this useful and cute. I can see a lot of people spending a ton of time putting images with events. Something else that I saw myself using quite a bit was the Stickies feature. Being able to just throw up a quick sticky on a date for some extra info about things was fantastic. There were some features that I didn’t use and those were Journal and Banner. I really didn’t find much use, mostly because I didn’t know what I should use them for or what the difference really was.

Overall I would give BusyCal a 4 out of 5. It is super powerful but can be a little confusing if you don’t spend a lot of time in it. Thankfully there is a great guide on their site on how to use BusyCal. BusyCal is also a little on the pricey side. It is $40 USD, however like every thing I review, there is a trial period so you can try before you buy. I think if you give it a try and you are a power user, you will get a ton of use out of this calendar. It has been my primary calendar for months.