Static Routes on Snow Leopard

Snow Leopard seems to be a mixed bag of core changes to underlying infrastructure. Adding static routes appears to be one of those changes. See the end of this post if you just want to see the new syntax.

Welcome to another sporadic and completely random tech update. This will be a short one as I just have a little bit of info to share that I couldn't quickly find on the interwebs with the google. Turns out there are some slight changes to the terminal command to add a static route.

I am currently running OS X Snow Leopard (10.6) on my work MacBook. The update was not pretty and I essentially had to completely wipe my OS X partition and start over. Along with that comes a few incompatibilities, most notably for me, MS Live Mesh doesn't work any more, which is how I had intended to get my data back onto my MacBook after I had to clean install, oops!

But here's a slightly obscure change that probably affects very few people:
The basic command to add a static route has changed slightly. I use a static route to connect to a split tunnel VPN (bad practice I know, but it's a long story).

The old command I used to use:
sudo route add -net 192.168.x.0 192.168.y.z
Appeard to work as it used to, but no traffic would actually route through the VPN tunnel. I searched around and saw no references other than a blog comment from today (Sep 2) saying the command in that how-to wouldn't work for them.

So it seemed to me that somehow the way static routes were added changed a little bit. I broke down and read the man page for route (man route) to see if I could figure anything out. Granted I never read it before so I have no idea if there was a difference, but I noticed the following optional parameters that could be used in the route command like static (indicate a static route) and interface (which tells it the interface is directly connected already). I was then able to successfully create a static route using the following command:

sudo route add -net 192.168.x.0 192.168.y.z -static -interface

The Technorati Apple Kerfuffle: I'm taking my toys and leaving!

It's the "tastes great/less filling" argument of the internet raging between recovering Apple fans and the Kool-Aid imbibing remaining faithful. Only this time it's taking place between parties that have voices heard by many thousands. Thousands of people that include me. Since I have this here little blog that nobody actually reads, I get to be the little guy and complain about the "new media elite".

Not that I want to be a little guy, so for the record, according to Google AdSense, I've made 3 cents since I've started this endeavor. Anyone using this against me in 5 years in some stupid comment flame war, please note that I don't choose to be either famous or unknown, I simply am (how Zen-like).

Now on to the back story. For those of you who somehow missed it or are uninterested and came here looking for a recipe for bourbon chicken, here's a brief rundown of the things about which I'm going to bitch and moan.

CEO of Mahalo.com (some may say internet blowhard) Jason Calacanis wrote a little missive to his mailing list and on his blog about his frustrations with some of the business practices in which Apple is engaged. Previous to that other notable internet-types like Mike Arrington publicly and proudly threw their iPhones into the virtual bonfire and said Apple had abused them for the last time.

Now, I don't want to repost the contents of these posts on this blog, nor do I want to inadvertently put words in others mouths, so I encourage you to, you know, go catch up on this stuff if you haven't already. Anyway, to summarize my understanding of these stances is that Apple is too restrictive, their practices kill innovation, Apple isn't the cool little beatnik writing 'zines and slam poetry it used to be, now it is THE MAN! As they go forward, they're going to be more and more closed and oppressive and one day will own your brain. Oh yeah and AT&T is teh suck.

To be fair, I'll now exaggerate and over simplify the other side's counter arguments. These arguments tend to range between "STFU you M$ Whore" to some well thought out point by point rebuttals. Many of the rebukes tend to go somewhat in the direction of Apple's control makes life easier for the consumer.

Since you didn't ask, here's my opinion on the matter anyway. I think both sides make a valid point. Apple's secret sauce is really its tight control over all aspects of the experience. The reason I love stuff like OS X and the iPhone is because the hardware and software design work together to form a solid experience. You simply can't get that from more diverse platforms, Microsoft has to support far too much hardware. Linux of course can range from really elegant stuff that works to frustrating technical problems and UIs that make MySpace pages look like zen gardens, it's all up to the user and the community so it's a complete mixed bag.

On the other hand, yeah Apple has made more than its share of bungles in the App Store, the latest of which as caught the ire of the government. It'd be great to have Blu-Ray and any number of other innovations that other hardware enjoys. I've jailbroken my iPhone before and managed not to bring down AT&T's network.

Of course, I restored my phone back to factory settings some time after jailbreaking because I preferred my phone to actually be stable. That's really the thing, I mean what's the point of these arguments about openness anyway? Should Apple just open up the doors until they're just another Linux distro? That would totally defeat the purpose of having a player like Apple, sometimes it's nice to have a little bit of a guided experience. It's sort of like the difference between a dune buggy and a monorail. Both will get you somewhere, but the experience is vastly different and appeals to different people.

Ok my dear reader (and I do mean that singularly I think there's only one of you). I promised to rail against the elite bloggers and "new media" bourgeois dammit! It's actually kind of nice to hear the classic Apple based flame war move on from Microsoft v. Mac and into the practices of Apple exclusively, but that's about the only new thing.

I've seen this exact same activity countless times on every subject imaginable. Anyone who has spent any significant time in a forum (or if you're old like me, BBSes and Usenet) has seen this whole thing play out. What I'm talking about is that disgruntled poster who threatens to leave but never actually does because they're attention whores waiting for someone to beg them to stay. Nobody ever begs them to stay. Here's a sample of the average discourse.

Poster 1: You guys are so ignorant and closed-minded about (movie/comic/starship captains/software/anything). I clearly am not appreciated here, so I'm going to stop posting.

Poster 2: Ok

Poster 1: I mean it, this is just a waste of my time, I remember when this forum used to be great and everyone really believed in (x).

Poster 2: I thought you were leaving

Poster 1: I am

Poster 2: Ok

Poster 1: I mean it, I'm really leaving.

Poster 3: sorry you don't like it here, good luck wherever it is you're going.

Poster 1: I just wish you guys would learn to treat everyone with respect

Poster 4: Can I have your stuff?

Poster 1: Hey guys, did you hear that (dubious news source) posted an article about (x) That's (fantastic/retarded).

That's kinda what this whole thing seems to be like to me. People just screaming at the top of their lungs.

Look at me! I'm going against the status quo! I think different. You can't fence me in!

- sent from my iPhone.

It's not that I think people shouldn't move on if they think a particular product isn't right for them. Different people have different needs, that's cool and all. But first of all, does it really need to be a federal case? And more specifically to this topic, if you're really against closed systems, my question to you is what flavor of Linux are you running?

And... Can I have your stuff?

Ubuntu - Initial impressions from a grumpy Linux skeptic

You'd think being a fan of free stuff I'd be all about open source and Linux. Well... not really. I've toyed with Linux over the last 10 or so years in various capacities. Generally, each of these flirtations is short lived and more of a passing curiosity or a desire to at least have some working knowledge of alternate systems.

Obviously, from a usability and compatibility standpoint, any operating system will evolve over the course of a decade. The same holds true for Linux, and specific builds of Linux such as Mepis and Ubuntu pop into mind when it comes to ease of use. In my mind, Linux's biggest problem is also what makes it great: the rich diversity of features and customizability of the system.

The fact is there's groups of people going in many different directions at once. Since there's no central company like Apple or Microsoft to direct the vision of armies of developers, things tend to scatter in many different directions. There are endless options of distros, applications, features, and even a fairly big schism in the actual main GUI of the OS (KDE and Gnome being the two big camps). In the desktop world, where end users, AKA consumers, live, this diversity is a detriment to wide adoption as it causes massive levels of consumer confusion.

Indeed, the Linux community itself is even divided over whether or not it cares about average end users. Some groups like the ones behind Ubuntu care deeply about making an easy to use version that anyone can use, while others believe that Linux should remain a mostly hobbyist/IT platform reserved for people who are true believers.

I personally tend to want the ease of use camp to win. While I love technology in general, I'm sort of over the hobbyist thing. I stopped building my own computers years ago, and I want my OS experience to be simple. After a prolonged absence, I've come back into the Mac user flock because I like the integrated hardware and software design, it just feels to me like a sold, flowing unit.

I think the hardware and software combo really is what makes the Mac a Mac. I've played with running OS X on my decrepit Dell E1505 laptop. While I got most of the pieces running, the experience just lacked something.

That Dell has seen a lot of different operating systems, and is the basis for my impressions of the latest build of Ubuntu. When I began this little adventure, I was running Windows 7 on the machine. 7 was working pretty well until recently where it just suddenly started thrashing wildly and generally misbehaving. Rather than go through the trouble of actually trying to figure out what's wrong, or consider the possibility that I got myself stuck in a botnet, I decided maybe it was yet again time to change operating systems.

I've pretty much been through the range of systems, and was kind of bored. I already had Windows 7, so didn't see much of a point there. I use XP at work all the time, and it's not really interesting. Vista? Yeah right. I didn't want to go through the OS X headache when I had real Macs at my disposal. That left Linux.

I knew I wanted to actually use this machine for general purpose browsing, so I didn't want anything over complicated. I like Mepis, so that was an option, but I wanted to be a little different. I briefly ran a couple of incarnations of Ubuntu on the machine, and version 9 (Jaunty Jackalope) had been available for a while, and was starting to gain even more buzz as the most likely winner of the desktop distro wars.

Based on my previous experience with Ubuntu, I knew there were some hiccups getting a fully working version on my particular machine. I went ahead and Googled all of the info I figured I'd need ahead of time (particularly the howto for getting wireless up and running). Interestingly enough, there were no specifics of that wireless card and version 9.04 of Ubuntu.

With the relevant information bookmarked on another machine, I downloaded and burned the boot CD (yes a CD, it still fits on a CD!). I booted from the CD on the trusty old Dell and went straight to the install mode from the boot menu. Testing on the live CD first is for wimps! The installer for Ubuntu has always been a pretty simple affair and fairly straight forward if you take the default options. I told it to feel free to destroy my hard drive and let it do its thing.

20 minutes or so later I was booted into the trademark ugly, ugly brown and orange desktop. Step 1 after any new OS install is to get networking up and running so you can consult with the wise sage, Google for next steps. Just as I figured I would need to get the Windows driver for the wireless card onto the machine, a window popped saying that I need a wireless driver that isn't open source, if I wanted to enable it, click here.

Wait, what? There's no way that would actually work. I remember you have to do all this stuff to blacklist the built-in driver and download and setup stuff like NDIS wrapper, light the black candles and sacrifice a rubber chicken. Well why not, let's just click it. A minute later, the little wifi light on the machine lit up. I still didn't believe it. I hit the menu bar icon for the wireless, and there right in front of me was a list of available networks, including my own.

I watched in amazement as it connected to the network and put me back in touch with my dear friend, Google. I wondered to myself how long it would actually stay connected to the wifi network as older versions of Ubuntu often disconnected me several times an hour. The network has only dropped me once in about a week of usage.

As for the rest of the system? Everything worked. Sound, track pad, video resolution, everything was good to go. I even found myself absentmindedly using two finger scrolling to page through a website (as I'm used to doing on Macbooks), only to realize that I was using two finger scrolling without having to do anything to turn it on or make it work!

I am just blown away with how well hardware recognition and configuration works in this version of Ubuntu. I think this alone is a huge leap in the potential adoption of Linux by more typical users. The appeal in Ubuntu also comes in its pre-packaged software offerings. Out of the box it comes with key things like Open Office, FireFox and Pidgin, and has a nice graphical front-end for downloading even more packages.

While the initial offerings are limited, additional stuff due to a number of reasons such as licensing and possible legality do prevent Ubuntu from having all of the features like DVD playback of a closed source system. A number of third party repositories by default are disabled as well which further limits software options for the uninitiated.

The good news is there are a ton of blog articles and how-to's to help a newcomer get up and running. It may be a little off putting for some as a lot of the steps involve modifying text files and running commands in the terminal window. Through the magic of copy and paste, the steps are easy to follow and will get a new system to pretty much be feature equal to any other system in short order.

Another tutorial covered how to get more eye pleasing themes in place. Going a little more advanced, I was able to turn on the Emerald theme manager and make some tweaks to the general appearance so I have at least some of the eye candy that I enjoy in the other systems such as transparency and window minimize effects.

After spending that first evening setting everything up, I actually found myself at a loss over what to do. For some reason I wanted to go do "Linux stuff" instead of just actually using the machine to surf the web. It was basically too functional, it already did everything it was supposed to without me having to mess with it as I was accustomed.

The OS had faded to the background of my computing experience, which really is what it's supposed to do. I don't think I'm quite ready to join the neckbeard crowd and cast away the evils of closed software, but I'm actually content using a Linux distro. I imagine modified versions of Ubuntu designed for specific manufacturers' hardware (like netbooks) could be even more seamless. Adoption of Linux has been mixed at best because of consumer choices. I certainly understand that, but then again I'd love to have the option to pay 100 bucks less for a new piece of hardware.

I do think that it should be an option since there still is a bit of a culture shock and learning curve going to Linux. I wouldn't really recommend it to someone like my mother-in-law or anything, but it may be a way to go if you have at least a middling level of computer experience, and for some reason don't want a Mac that is ;-)

I'm terrified of Twitter Trending Topics

I am watching with great interest, the activity on Twitter surrounding the current events in Iran. Based on the fact that there are seemingly hundreds of messages per minute with the tag #iranelection flying across the interwebs as I type this.

To be sure, it's both a fascinating thing to watch events unfold in real time (along with some serious cluelessness) and a horrifying thought to witness there are people experiencing some really horrible things at the same time as we watch.

Of course that really isn't my point, since there are hundreds of other blogs to analyze the actual events and how social media is changing the face of news or whatever. Use Google, go find 'em you're in the wrong place ;-)

No, rather as I watch this seemingly endless stream of raw data, I noticed one thing in common with most of them. There are links to other things. Shortened links. Shortened links that when viewed in the raw display no indication of where they might lead.

And?

Well since most people just follow the trending topic, they are getting random links from completely untrusted sources. Remember how you're not supposed to click on random untrusted links in e-mail? This is the same sort of thing, only I suspect people don't quite think about it since it's not e-mail, it must be safe, right? RIGHT?

So if I'm a bad guy, I just put a link to my site featuring the latest drive-by JavaScript attack on it into a Tweet with the most popular tag in trending topics. I will instantly have thousands of eyeballs looking at that URL and maybe clicking on it. No real work involved, no real need to even go through the trouble of injecting my naughty jscript into a legit site.

That was enough to keep me from clicking on anything I saw when I was following along with today's events. Sure, I use a cool (and free, remember where you are, after all) little Firefox Plugin called PowerTwitter that will go check the shortened link and translate that to the tile of the page. That's somewhat helpful, but really, how hard is it to simply put a legitmate looking title on your malware site?

Unfortuately, I don't really have anything resembeling a useful reccommendation besides use an aftermarket Twitter client or plugin that enumerates shortened links along with a little bit of healthy paranoia (try to go the the site independant of the Twittered link). So if anyone else out there actually stumbles upon my humble little musings and has suggestions or tips, I'd love to hear them.

How To: Connect a DroboPro to a VMWare ESX host via iSCSI

Originally I was going to publish an article talking about my trials and tribulations (and really rudimentary performance info) around testing a DroboPro in my work VMWare infrastructure. Well, I found myself burning a bunch of time figuring out how to just get VMWare to see the Drobo. I figured the steps were worthy of mention as there's a couple of things on the VMWare side I missed that caused issues. I opened a ticket to Drobo, but have yet heard back from them on the matter yet, so I don't know if they have it documented or not. I also didn't see anything Drobo specific on the interwebs, so I thought maybe there's others out there who would be able to benefit from my misery.

Also an apology, being as this relates to a Drobo Pro and VMWare ESX, this clearly has no business on a blog about free stuff. However, for a small business, this could potentially allow for the use of big boy technology at a fraction of the cost of enterpise class gear. (My DroboPro as configured is about 10% the cost of a similarly sized EMC unit).

Now onto the details. This article assumes you have an ESX server licensed to use iSCSI, an available NIC port, and of course a DroboPro with some drives in it.

After a little bit of reasearch and experimenting, I have successfully gotten an ESX host to talk to the DroboPro. Below are the basic steps required.

1. Attach the Pro to a Windows or Mac desktop via USB or Firewire. Install the Drobo Dashboard per the included documentation
2. Configure the volumes on the unit to not exceed 2TB (the limit for VMWare) using the wizard.
3. Once attached and configured, go into the advanced settings in the drobo dashboard to configure a static IP address for iSCSI
4. Reboot the unit and test ethernet connectivity
5. Connect the unit to a dedicated NIC port on the ESX host either direct cable or via a switch (reccommend jumbo frames and flow control if using a switch)
6. On the ESX host, create a new network segment for the DroboPro. Under the networking tab, click add networking, select VMKernel, click next. Select the appropriate NIC, and follow the rest of the steps to add an IP address on the same segment as the Drobo. Save the changes
7. (This is the step that got me, as it's not obvious.) Click the newly created network and select properties. Click Add and add Service Console. Assign the Service Console a unique IP in the same subnet as the drobo and VMkernel settings. Edit the original VMkernel network to allow VMotion. Save the changes.
8. If you are running a version of ESX prior to 3.5 you will need to add a firewall exception under security for outbound traffic for the iSCSI client. This is done for you in 3.5 and newer.
9. Under configuration for the ESX host, select Storage adapters. Click on the iSCSI adapter then click properties in the detail window below.
10. In the general tab of the pop up window, click configure and then check enable to turn on iSCSI. The name is not important.
11. Under the dynamic discovery tab, click Add and enter the IP information for the drobo unit. Click OK and close the wizard. A dialogue will come up asking to rescan all storage, click no.
12. Right click the iSCSI adapter in the adapter list and click rescan. Wait patiently this could take several minutes
13. If all went well you should now see the number of targets change to 1. This indicates the host is successfully talking to the Drobo.
14. In the hardware section of the configuration pane, select storage. Click Add storage. The available volumes on the Drobo should appear in the window. Select one of the LUNS and follow the wizard to configure as desired.
    

A call to Mac users: stop with the malware huberis already!

Ok, first of all I am currently a Mac user and have been off and on for years. I say this as a friend, not some sort of anti-mac PC geek: Stop being so damned smug. I am talking about the stance on the lack of malware. This stance is pretty much echoed by everyone on the pro-Mac side of the fence from users all the way to Apple itself (just watch a random I'm a Mac, I'm a PC ad).

I was listening to the latest installment of Macbreak Weekly, and a couple of panelists were extolling the virtue of the malware free paradise that is OS X. Well here's the deal folks. This sort of thing is absolutely a dangerous attitude. How many Mac users use any sort of anti-virus at all? Pretty few. To that point, there actually ARE very few AV programs to begin with. Edit, there is the open source (and keeping to my roots, free)ClamXav.

Sure, the Mac OS is actually reasonably secure out of the box (we'll ignore the fact that the firewall is OFF by default) but some of the other protections work very well and are what Windows Vista wanted to be *cough* UAC *cough*

What we have here is the calm before the storm or so to speak. These days, malware, botnets viruses (virii?) are all about dollars and sense. Gone are the days of the pimply faced kid writing a little code to erase hard drives. The bad guys are writing stuff to make money by stealing personal data, sending spam, DDOS blackmail, you name it. Since this is a business, it's simply much more profitable to target the PC world.

Therefore, many Mac users sit around sneering at the PC world because the Mac folk live some sort of mythical land of rainbows and unicorn tears that no virus dare enter. I'm pretty sure the people in Pompeii kinda thought the same thing about volcanoes too.

That will always be the case, a target rich environment will always get the attention, but think about the Mac side of things for a while. There's a 10% or so slice of the market that's almost completely unprotected. Once somebody really takes advantage of this situation (and I do mean when, not if) it will be an unmitigated crisis.

Think I'm being a little bit alarmist? You might have missed this, but there's a currently exploitable (as in drive by scripting) vulnerability in the Java implementation of OS X. Despite 10.5.7 being put out mere days ago, this vulnerability has not been patched even though it's been known for at least six months. For more, visit this site which even features a proof of concept that will execute arbitrary (but harmless) code on your very own magic, walled unicorn powered Garden of Eden.

So my Mac friends, enjoy your beautifuly designed hardware, (mostly) reliable OS and fantastic UI. But please, please, stop thinking it's a freakin' suit of armor and go install some sort of anti-malware. Tin foil hat optional.

Off Topic, an ironic rant about Twitter advice from bloggers

I know, I know, I've been promising actual content to all (3) of my readers for weeks now. I've got some stuff in the works, a meta post with various updates and musings. I'm currently waiting my DroboPro (alas, not free) shipment to write a real article about trying to get it to play with VMWare ESX and some non-scientific performance stats. But that's not why I'm here now!

No, I am here because I've become irritated about blog posts from the "technorati" expounding on their detailed criteria to get you, the common plebeian, followed by them. I say.. enough already. Seriously. The universal rule should be, do you have interesting things to say? If so, people who find them interesting will follow you.

So far, my favorite bit of advise from these neo-sages is to make sure you are active so you're @ replying a lot. Yeah, ok. I've looked at the tweets from some of these people. Half of what they say is replies to other people I'm not following. So you get this disjointed mess of random half conversations.

Before Twitter, society used to have a term for that: Crazy dude at the bus station.

Some mini updates and random thoughts

Ok, it's been a while since I've updated the blog. To my one reader, I apologize for my slacker tendencies. The family is about to embark on a vacation to Orlando for a couple nights then a 3 night Disney cruise with a baby and a really rambunctious toddler, should be entertaining. Which of course there's another week with out an article. I am planning on tweeting photos as I go (during the non-international roaming parts of the trip.) So if you're interested, play along on Twitter

In the mean time, I'm just going to throw out a few notes on the great TiVo crisis and a couple of articles I have bouncing around in my head.

TiVo crisis update: After a lot of troubleshooting which involved ripping apart the Western Digital TiVo extender (really an over glorified mybook eSATA drive) as well as the TiVo itself to run extensive hard drive tests from WD. Both tests came back clean which was odd. So that essentially left either the SATA cable, the CableCard (yikes!) or some actual hardware issue. Unfortunately the next option I had was to disconnect the extender and let the TiVo divorce it (therefore deleting all of my videos).

This test so far has proven successful, no issues, and my wife's American Idol episodes actually recorded. For some reason Idol was the first program that started showing signs of distress and it ALWAYS got screwed up after that. The unit has been crusing along for over a week with no signs of distress, so I am calling the issue as a bad SATA cable (or connector on one of the units, we'll soon find out when I order a new cable.

In the pipeline.
One the IT Pro font, I've gotten approval for the Drobo Pro to extend the Dell NAS server we use for our disk to disk backup system. Before I attach it there, I'd like to slap it on a workstation to play with it a little and get some peliminary performance numbers. Then I want to see if I can get it talking with a VMWare ESX host as an iSCSI device. If I can I'll then try to run some numbers on it vs. direct storage and our 2gbps fibre channel SAN. I don't expect a lot on the VMWare front as I think the unit will probably take a beating on I/O. But if it can actually work, it might be a good solution for guest machines that don't hit the disk system a lot or are low use type machines.

Finally, some iPhone love is in the works too. I went crazy and downloaded a ton of apps trying to win the billionth app contest (alas I lost). They were all free apps, and I've been culling the ones I deem crappy. When the reckoning is finally over, I'll write about what's left as I did find a couple of cool, or at least amusing (I'm talking about you, iPity (link opens to random review I found on Google)) apps.

That's it for now folks, time to find some sandals to pack!

iStat Menus

I'm not sure why I haven't written about iStat Menus before. I think it's because it's about the first thing I grab on any Mac I'll be using for more than 10 minutes. Some people do the same with Quicksilver (I have yet to figure out why it would make my life that much better, call me backwards). iStat Menus is the menu bar version of iStat, which is a utility for viewing a number of different meters representing system performance.

While I generally learned pretty quickly that menu bar apps add a whole lot of clutter very quickly, iStat has earned a spot on the second most coveted real estate on my screen. The first is the desktop and nothing goes there 'cept the little hard drive icons.

iStat gives you the ability to view CPU, Memory, drives, network, temp, fans, power, and Bluetooth status. You can throw all of these into your menu, or pick and chose which ones grace your screen. I personally like the CPU, Memory, Network, and oddly enough, date and time.

Date and time? Not exactly a performance measure, is it? Well no, but I happen to like it better than the default option (I hide that one in system prefs) It is more compact when you are displaying the date, and if you click the date it gives you a neat-o pop up calendar.


One thing I miss about my life in the PC world is my PC machines generally had some sort of hard disk indicator light somewhere on them. So when the PC was acting odd, I could always glance down at the hardware and see that the disk was thrashing around like mad. I was slightly clueless when my Mac did the same thing (oh yes Macs are just as capable at sucking as PCs). Now I have a cool blue icon that does the same thing. It's hard to tell from any screen shots, but it even has indicators on the icon to show if the disk is reading or writing.

The other three indicators are pretty much common stuff (you Vista users are familiar with the little desktop gadget that looks like a car instrument cluster and shows this stuff off, everyone has that one.) I have at a glance my physical memory in use, cpu usage and network activity. One cool thing about it is that you can click on one of the indicators and it will give you the top processes using the resource. This was great for finding out that our stupid printer driver goes nuts on occasion and ties up an entire core for no good reason whatsoever.


Sure, most of the stuff the app does isn't exactly revolutionary, there's tons of other apps out there that do the same thing. My favorite thing about this one is that it's a simple heads up at-a-glance indicator that takes up little screen real estate. I can easily click to get more in depth details on what's happening and even launch OS X's native task management software to kill misbehaving processes. The only thing I really wish I could do with this would be to kill an app directly from the menu rather than having to jump over to Activity Monitor.

The price is right at zero dollars, you can grab it at the iSlayer website.

The Great TiVO Meltdown of '09

***Update***
Well... it turns out that my celebration was a little premature. After plugging along for all of yesterday, the TiVo started again. I was actually in the process of pulling shows off of this DVR (I'll post in the future about iTiVo to do this) but I only got a few shows in before it started acting up, wife so not happy. I'm pretty sure it actually is a HDD problem now that I've got it back up and running again and I can see some of the oddball behavior.

The moral I guess is do whatever the internets tell you. But the info in this post is still a handy troubleshooting tip since CableCard problems can, in fact cause weird stuff to happen too.
***/Update***


Alright, so this doesn't exactly count as any sort of free stuff. But the internets pretty much failed me when Googling around for a solution, and if I listened to those lying liars I'd be out a new hard drive. So here's my little story that I figured I might share with my interweb friends so that someone else may not suffer.

Last night, as my wife and I sat down to watch a popular reality show in which punk ass kids ruin famous songs, I was greeted with a black screen and no audio. Yeah, I know it was God saying I should do something more constructive with my time. Basic troubleshooting ensued, and it was quickly determined the TiVO was behaving badly. So as is the tradition with said devices, I pulled the plug to do a hostile reboot.

For those of you keeping score, this was my big daddy TiVO, the TiVO HD with the TiVO Extender attached to our main (and only HD) TV. So what happened next nearly made me weep openly. The TiVO dutifuly went through its bootup procedure (the welcome powering up, just another minute screens) and then the screen went black and started back at the powering up screen, which means the unit had rebooted while powering up. Probably not good. Let it go through another sequence, same deal. Pulled the plug for a couple minutes, tried again, another reboot.

$@*!

Time for my BFF, Google to help me out here. I searched on reboot loops, and was horrified with what I saw. Apparently, constant reboots are pretty much always caused by a faulty hard drive.

Double $@*!

Very near weeping at this point.

I found some info on performing what are called "kickstart" codes that force low level diagnostics on a TiVO . For whatever reason, I couldn't get these stupid things to work, I'm pretty sure I did it right, but I want to say in the back of my mind I read somewhere that the new version 11 software uses a different procedure to do diagnostics. By the time I figured out the kickstarting wasn't going to do it for me a great deal of time had passed, and I was pretty much giving up, but first a few tests.

The first thing I did was power off, then unplug my extender. Interestingly the TiVO booted a little further and eventually came to the "hey what did you do with the extender" screen. At that point I could have hit clear to divorce my TiVO from the extender and try to continue to boot. A viable step save for the fact that my wife had several unwatched episodes of Grey's Anatomy on there, if I deleted those unecessarily, a dead TiVO would be the least of my trouble.

So now what? Well I went with a little more Googling, a few more kickstart attempts, and some abject panic to no avail. I was just about to give up and sacrifice Dr. Grey for the greater good when an epiphany of basic troubleshooting hit me. I hadn't messed with the cablecards yet. For those of you who haven't had the opportunity to deal with them, cable cards are a complete and total pain in the ass and the cause of no shortage of headaches on the road to HD TiVO goodness.

So I pull the plug yet again, open the access door on the front up and pop out the cablecard. I plug the TiVo back in and it goes through startup. Then it keeps going, and keeps going (startup is crazy slow on these things, so this is a really good thing.) After the usual several minute wait, I'm presented not with another reboot, but a screen asking me to configure my cablecards since the TiVo seems to have lost them. This is new and promising. I shove the cable card back in and go to the diagnostics, no signal listed, so I'm not overly optimistic yet. So I decide to cancel out of the cablecard setup menu.

AND THE TiVo GOES TO THE TiVo CENTRAL LIST!!!!! WOOHOO, it's all there, the 3 minutes of Idol it tried to record before its near-death experience, and yes, Grey's Anatomy was there just as it had been left, I get to sleep in my bed tonight!

Ok, but what about the cable? Well, after doing the happy dance, I got greedy and decided I'd like it to continue to record new stuff. I dropped out to live TV and at first the searching for signal screen popped up. Then, something beautiful happened, a TV channel appeared, then I channeled, and another channel was there, then one more and I was watching the Weather Channel in glorious HD (I know, crazy). All seemed right with the world.

Don't ask me what happened, I have no earthly clue. I just need to transfer those Grey's off of the thing just in case it breaks again.

Useful links:
http://www.tivocommunity.com
http://www.wkforums.com/forums/

Turn a cheap router into an easy wireless hotspot (with a few limitations)

There are a few different solutions running around out there if you have some need to run a wireless hotspot. Seeing how this is the free stuff blog, I’ll skip right over the commercial offerings, but know of course there are tons of those out there. We are responsible for providing wireless access for an entire multi-tenant office building. The goal was to have authenticated, but free, wireless internet for tenants and guests and whatnot.

We had been using the ZoneCD hotspot for quite a while. It ran on a virtual machine using a bootCD and a virtual floppy with config files, pretty small footprint, and it was a fairly stable solution. There were a couple of show stoppers with that solution that have cropped up recently. First is that it’s based on NoCatAuth which uses an annoying pop-up window to keep the user authorized against the hotspot and caused no shortage of support requests to get the stupid thing working right on strange laptops running 7 pop-up blockers.

ZoneCD was also configured to use a community authentication and configuration service, which is kind of neat and one less thing for us to worry about. The problem is that at least the free version (publicIP.net as opposed to publicIP.com, which is the paid service) is pretty much abandonware. The e-mail verification system stopped working some time ago, and now it appears the SSL certificate for the login page has expired as of Feb 2009.

Thus begun the search for a suitable replacement access point. There are a few different hotspot packages out there that offer different functionality. I looked at way more solutions than I can possibly recall and tested two different solutions, 2hotspot by Antamedia and CoovaAP.

2HotSpot is a Windows based solution which uses ICS (internet connection sharing) on a dual-homed windows XP or 2003 box. The software supports both free and paid access to your hotspot. If you require a paid hotspot, you’ll have to go through Antamedia’s payment services (paying them a cut of every transaction) or pay a fee if you wish to bring your own merchant services.

As we were rolling out free services, we didn’t require a hotspot that could handle payment options and the added overhead that went with having a deidicated Windows server to manage the hotspot. There were also a few other reasons that kept me looking around, but to be honest, I can’t remember what they were at the moment. Which brings us to:

CoovaAP is a custom firmware that runs directly on certain Linksys and other wirless routers. CoovaAP is based on a couple of different open source projects: OpenWRT for the actual router OS and Coova-Chilli to handle the hotspot duties. Coova-Chilli is the apparent successor to ChilliSpot which is a popular but no abandoned open source hotspot.

The first thing to address when going with a bult in hotspot is to make sure the router has sufficient storage and hackability to actually handle running third party software. Older incarnations of the Linksys WRT54G (revision 4 and earlier) work well for this purpose. However, Linksys downgraded the WRT line several years ago, and anything newer than revision 4 lacks the horsepower (and memory) to pull this off. Fortunately Linksys figured out they could sell the old router for more money so they rolled out the special “Linux” edition, the WRT54GL which has the same specs as the older versions of the hardware. Even the more expensive incarnation of the router can be had for under 50 bucks if you find it on sale somewhere.

The Good:

With the hardware acquired, setting up the software is painfully easy. You basically run the firmware upgrade from the Coova.org site on the router, log in, and start configuring. The firmware offers a number of different hotspot options, you can use the built in coova-chilli implementation like we did, or you can use your own ChilliSpot or WiFiDog servers. Heck you can even use FaceBook or Drupal as your authentication mechanisim.

If you go with the built-in hotspot, you have a number of options for handling user accounts. You can do a basic TOS agreememnt page with no authentication, you can allow only pre-configured users to authenticate, or you can setup a self-service registration page. Similarly, there are a few different options for where your user accounts can actually come from. The simplest option is to use a built-in flat user file, this is where self-registered users wind up. You can also use Coova’s own RADIUS/AAA service, your own Radius server (handy if you have Active Directory, but with a couple of gotchas), or even OpenID.

There are also options in the system to customize the login pages, setp a “walled garden” of allowed sites without authenticating. You can do a number of advanced features like a super-annoying top frame in all browser windows and traffic shaping when the appropriate additional components are added.

The bad:

There’s only a couple of things that really put me off about this solution. The first one is fairly minor, but it goes against completely basic security design. When you click on the link within the admin interface to view the local user database, it shows you a complete list of users with passwords in plain text. Also on the security front, there is an option to use SSL for the captive login, but it only appears to support a self-signed certificate, which means client browsers are going to freak out and throw a certificate security warning. Most providers will probably want to run simple HTTP to cut down on the panic.

The last issue I have with this thing is probably the one that really bugs me the most about a lot of open-source, and particularly Linux-based projects. Out of the box, pass-through doesn’t work for PPTP (read Windows) VPNs. After spending literally the better part of a day Googling on the subject, I gave up in utter frustration ranting about software devloped by hippies. There were two forum posts on the subject, one which was very helpful, but offered no information on how to accomplish the steps required to make this work. The other post was a quote of the first post asking if anyone could provide more info on how to follow the steps… of course there were no replies.

So… if you know the answer to this question by all means let me know, you will restore my faith in open source.

Despite its few shortcomings, CoovaAP is about as simple as it gets when it comes to setting up a wireless hotspot. I also didn’t mention that you also get to add a few advanced features to that little Linksys router thanks to the built-in functionality of OpenWRT. If you need a simple AP, and the villagers won’t hunt you down because they can’t make a PPTP VPN connection, this may be a great solution for you.

Recommendation: Buy (See what I did there, funny).

RD Tabs

RD Tabs by Avian Waves is one of those applications that I have to download before I can even thing about using my work computer to accomplish anything resembling work.

On the surface, RD Tabs is a remote desktop application that gives you a tabbed interface for multiple remote desktop windows. When you have to have multiple remote machines up on your desktop simultaneously, this thing is a godsend.

The application is also packed with other handy goodness for presenting remote windows. You can have your window dynamically sized based on the application window. You can use global settings so that every connection by default will disable audio for example. Settings can also be managed on an individual connection basis. There is also the ability to save connections as favorites, as well as a handy drop down of your most recently accessed remote desktops.

RD Tabs also supports the newer versions of the RDP protocol found in Vista and server 2k8. The application was created by a Windows administrator to handle daily admin tasks. You can grab a copy (or read more) over at http://www.avianwaves.com under the tech section. You can also check out the other applications (I’ll do a writeup on XS BAP in the future) as well as original music written and performed by the developer.

Spiceworks

We actually have a ton of system management and monitoring tools running around at the office, like MOM and some of the GFI stuff. The one we seem to keep coming back to is Spiceworks. It’s the most competively priced (Free) of them and it actually provides a ton of features and a fairly decent reporting interface.

Spiceworks can monitor any number of different things, such as disk space, up time, event logs, pings and so on. Especially on Windows boxes, it has some great inventory capability, and I often use the installed software reports to make sure the user base isn’t installing verboten items. The reporting interface is alright, there are a few things I wish it could do a little better (some of the queries are hard coded, unless you want to write the SQL yourself) and it has limited me in the kinds of reports I wanted to run.

There’s a good sized user community, and is updated very frequently as well. A number of things I’ve taken issue with in the past (such as duplicate machines) tend to go away in future releases.

The free version is ad-supported, but actually runs on your own hardware, so your intimate network data isn’t sent to the mother ship. For shops that take exception to the ad-based scheme, there is a fee-based version that removes all the ads. Either way it’s an excellent choice for a smaller shop with limited resources (that’s pretty much every small shop I think).

Microsoft Live Mesh

You’d think MS wouldn’t have a place in a blog about useful freebies. They actually do put out a number of handy little things, Live Mesh is one of them. http://www.mesh.com

Live Mesh is part of Microsoft’s cloud initiative on the consumer side under the umbrella of the Live brand (cloudy stuff like office applications, e-mail, chat, web sites and so forth.) Mesh gives you a modest amount of cloud storage (5gb) and lets you setup folders to automatically sync to the online “desktop” Not exactly revolutionary.

The cool part (which also isn’t terribly revolutionary) is that you can have multiple machines synchronize not only to the cloud storage, but to each other (See screenie below). Additionally, they’ve added support for the Mac OS. So now I can pretty much have the same stuff on each of my computers with minimal effort (you do have to make sure you set the Mac version as a startup item, it’s not automatic like the Windows version.)

There are other services that offer this kind of thing, but this is free and works with all of my stuff. They keep promising a mobile version as well. I’ll be interested to see if it’s exlusively Windows Mobile, or if they relase an iPhone app.

Screenshot of the Live Mesh Desktop and my computers

Quick mention of fave internet radio

Just for the sake of getting some posts in here… quantity over quality Here’s a quick blurb of some of my favorite internet audio spots…

Pandora I kinda prefer it to Last.fm just because it better fits my sometimes flighty music moods. It takes a little time, but with some training, and the creative use of multiple stations on a quick mix, you can get it to match some pretty oddball musical tastes. (Also available as an iPhone app).

KCCN Is an FM station out of Honolulu playing contemporary Hawaiian music. I’m a huge fan of Hawaiian music, so this is a nice little island retreat

Subsonic’s Disney Theme Park Audio Ok, this one makes me a tad strange, but there’s a couple of different stations on this site dedicated to music and audio from Disney parks around the world. There’s a background music station that plays instrumental stuff. I play this one at work turned down for a little bit of background atmosphere, it works great for that.

Radio Margaritaville A must stop for Parrotheads and people looking for a little audio vacation… This is an online stream of the Sirius/XM station. Plays a mix of kick-back music, classic rock, blues, and of course a ton of Buffett including rare tracks and whole concert replays.

Really Useful SharePoint Designer Workflows

Switching gears to work stuff this morning…

CodePlex is a repository of open source code similar to Source Forge, and features a lot of code projects for Microsoft stuff. One of my favorite things form there is the Useful Sharepoint designer workflow activities (that’s a mouthful) or SPDActivities for short. This extends the built in workflow activities you can select when creating custom workflows from within SharePoint designer (which you’d be using if you were fairly serious about custom workflows, but not quite a developer using Visual Studio).

SPDActivities adds some, well, useful functionality that should be built into SharePoint out of the box. There are several including some Infopath stuff that I don’t really use. There are a few of the activities I just can live without.

My personal faves let you tinker with list item permissions, start a different workflow from within your work flow, and copy list items to lists that aren’t even on the same subsite (or even application or farm).

I tend to get completely lost if I start trying to build workflows on a farm where I haven’t installed these extensions.

http://spdactivities.codeplex.com/

PyTivo

Welcome to my random musings of stuff I find useful, and blissfully cost free Remember, a lot of this stuff involves a lot of time and sweat from real people. You should support these efforts if you find them very useful by whatever method requested by the authors.

I’ll start off the festivities with a little writeup on an app that has transformed my TiVO from a simple DVR to a whole house video jukebox system.

PyTivo is an open source effort that uses a number of different open source tools to convert just about any video format you can think of and serving it up to any Series 2, 3, HD, etc tivos on your local network. When configured, your PC, or Mac, or Linux box will show up on your TiVO in a similar manner to other DVRs. Just select the video you want to transfer, and depending on your network speed and quality settings, either go find something else to do, or start watching right away.

PyTivo can be configured to serve up both Standard Def and HD content, and can even down convert HD content to your old caveman era SD TiVOs eliminating the need for multiple copies of the same content. Most video formats are supported including VOB, MKV, AVI, MP4.

I run PyTivo on my iMac with a USB external HDD. Oddly enough, the original version of PyTivo is actually pretty difficult on the Mac. You have to install the actual PyTivo as well as compiling a version of FFMEPG to run on your Mac (which involves XCode tools and downloading the components from an online repository). It’s pretty intimidating at first, but once it’s up and running its very stable. By contrast, the PC version is a simple single installer and you’re up and running. All versions use a web interface to tweak the settings.

Fortunately, someone has finally stepped in and built a GUI version of PyTivo called PyTivoX. The GUI version is very easy to configure, but does lack the ability to control some of the advanced settings from within the GUI (you can still modify the configuration files to change the advanced settings as you would in the regular version of PyTivo). I ran the graphical version briefly, but as I had my older version up and running with the advanced settings configured, I stuck with that version.

Once everything was up and running, I pretty much only have to fire up the DVD Player when I don’t want to take the time to rip a DVD. The kids wants to watch Finding Nemo for the 43rd time on any TV in the house? No problem, it’s on TiVO.

Useful links:

PyTiVO project: http://pytivo.armooo.net/

PyTiVO discussion forums: http://pytivo.krkeegan.com/

The steps I followed to install the original PyTivo: http://www.tivoblog.com/archives/2008/12/01/how-to-install-pytivo-on-a-mac/

PyTiVOX: http://code.google.com/p/pytivox/