October 2007 Archives

finder-shared.png In previous versions of OS X it was never really convenient to connect to fileservers. Whenever you rebooted or got back to the home network you had to go apple-K, pick the previous selection, login, etc.

Alternatively you could do a bunch of voodoo to have the system auto-login, but whenever the fileserver was unavailable the Finder would hang a lot and it'd all be really annoying. Oh, and configuring it was a gigantic pain.

Not so in 10.5! Shared servers automatically Just Appear in all finder windows. So awesome!

Of course our main fileserver is a Linux box running Samba, so by default that didn't show up, but that is easy to fix.

On the Linux server, add a samba.service file in /etc/avahi/services (or somewhere similar; that's the location in Fedora 6 and 7).

<?xml version="1.0" standalone='no'?><!--*-nxml-*-->
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM "avahi-service.dtd">

<service-group>
    <name replace-wildcards="yes">%h filer</name>
    <service>
        <type>_smb._tcp</type>
        <port>139</port>
        <host-name>zaphod.bn.dev</host-name>
    </service>
</service-group>

The <host-name> block was necessary on my system to get the client to connect to the right IP. If you server only has one IP on the network, it might not be necessary.

Now restart avahi (service avahi-daemon restart on Fedora / RHEL) and viola - you should see the server show up in OS X right away. The first time I connected I had to click the "Connect as ..." button to make it use my user credentials. After that it logs in automatically when I click on the icon.

Perfect!

I upgraded the MacBook Pro to OS X 10.5 last night and today when I was trying it out I noticed to my horror that the excellent Mail Act-On extension didn't seem to be updated to work with Mail 3.0 (the new version in Leopard). Eeek!

I use Mail Act-On to have some quick key-strokes to archive mail. For example I have one rule that'll put mail in archived "Friends" and "Family" folders for personal mail. Another to put mail in various "Clients" folders. One for generic "Saved perl.org mail", etc etc. Without it I know my inbox would overflow even more than it does already.

The developer wrote today though that it will work. Yay. I also found on a beta tester mailing list that there's a 2.0 version in the works. So: Mail Act-On isn't dead and should work in Leopard. Phew. I was just about to post-pone upgrading the PowerMac... :-)

Los Angeles Tech Events

We're starting a weblog keeping track of Los Angeles Tech Events, like Twiistup, Lunch 2.0, developer user groups and meetups, etc etc.

If you are in Los Angeles, go and subscribe to the feed!

NTP Pool News

Hollywood Sunrise If you come here to read the occasional NTP Pool News then you can finally get your fix from a dedicated place for just that (subscribe to the feed).

Some recent news from there: We migrated entirely to the new DNS server and we are getting more Meinberg equipment!

Anyway, that should keep me from posting too much of that stuff here... (And hopefully much more of it there).

About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from October 2007 listed from newest to oldest.

September 2007 is the previous archive.

November 2007 is the next archive.

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