Ok, Snow Leopard’s #1 best feature: it appears that iChat now works through firewalls! Or so it seems between a DMZ subnet and an internal subnet on our physical network…

iChat group photo

Go to Talon and grab the bookmarklet in the upper-right corner of the page.

Here’s a little trick for converting EMF (Enhanced Metafile) images. You’ll need Microsoft Word:

1. Drag the image into a blank Word document
2. Right-click on the image
3. Click Save as picture…

That will let you save it as a PNG, PDF, JPEG, BMP, or GIF.

This worked on Word 2008 for Mac and OS X 10.5.7.

I came across an excellent blog this weekend on the influence of technology on humanity.  It’s exactly what I was looking for, but had a lot of trouble finding.  Most of faith + technology stuff I had seen before was about how to use technology in ministry.  This site seems to tackle the question of how technology affects life as a whole, but from a biblical worldview.

Don’t Eat The Fruit

Yesterday I found a pretty serious security flaw in the Adjix software.

They wrote about it here: http://blog.adjix.com/2009/02/security-hole-found-fixed-and-deployed.html

Konica Minolta Di3010

Our office uses an old Konica Minolta Di3010 as our black & white copy/print/scan workhorse.  But when we switched over to Mac workstations, I found that the available drivers just didn’t work because it didn’t handle the job accounting codes properly (aka account tracking, job tracking, job management).

Anyone I talked to at Konica Minolta said that the machine was too old and wouldn’t work with the OS X 10.5, so we thought we would have to go out and drop 10 G’s on a new Mac-compatible machine.  Finally I got a hold of a Konica Minolta “Application Specialist” who said he would look into it and mentioned that I would need to input my Account Tracking code into the drive.  I got a little impatient, and after investigating some packet dumps from Windows, I figured out how to hack the PPD driver file.

Using Wireshark, I found that the PC driver was sending a line like this, which the Mac driver was not sending:

@PJL SET GROUPCODE="1234"

To make the Mac driver set the proper groupcode, I copied the KONICA MINOLTA Di3010 PS.ppd file to KONICA MINOLTA Di3010 PS HACK.ppd and added something like this inside of the “InstallableOptions” block after the set of lines regarding “Option11″:

*OpenUI *Option12/Job Management: PickOne
*OrderDependency: 20.0 AnySetup *Option12
*DefaultOption12: DEPT1
*Option12 DEPT1/Department One: "%@PJL SET GROUPCODE=<22>1234<22><0A>"
*Option12 DEPT2/Department Two: "%@PJL SET GROUPCODE=<22>2345<22><0A>"
*Option12 DEPT3/Department Three: "%@PJL SET GROUPCODE=<22>3456<22><0A>"
*CloseUI: *Option12

This block of code sets 3 different accounts with pre-defined accounting codes, which you will be able to choose when you install the printer (or when you go to the printer’s Options page).

In this process, I learned that each line has to start with “%” even though that character doesn’t get printed.  Hex values in <>’s get printed as their ASCII characters, which is how I managed to get quotes around the GROUPCODE value.  The <0A> at the end is just an ASCII newline character.

In the header section, I modified these lines to identify the new PPD file:

*PCFileName: "KONICA MINOLTA Di3010 PS HACK.ppd"
*ModelName: "KONICA MINOLTA Di3010 PS HACK"
*ShortNickName: "KONICA MINOLTA Di3010 PS HACK"
*NickName: "KONICA MINOLTA Di3010 PS HACK"

I also added this line underneath *Nickname so that the printer icon would show the actual unit, not a generic printer icon:

*APPrinterIconPath: "/Library/Printers/KonicaMinolta/Icons/Di3010.icns"

To use this, you’ll need to put the ICNS file in the location specified above.  Let me know if you want my ICNS file, and I’ll e-mail it to you.

Take your hacked PPD file and put it into /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources/.

Now, when you add a printer, the driver should show up in the OS X printer driver list as Konica Minolta Di3010 PS HACK, or whatever you set the name to be.

Another modification I made to the PPD file was set the defaults to match the hardware configuration of our unit, so I set:

*DefaultOption5: True
*DefaultOption7: FN117

It’s been working great so far as an LPD printer.  I’ve successfully tested duplex printing and landscape printing as well. I hope this helps someone out there and saves you money!

So, it seems that with a default installation of Leopard Server and a Windows XP client, you will be able to write a Thumbs.db file to a Samba share, but not read it. Seems silly enough but here is what fixed it for me:

1. Edit /private/etc/smb.conf and replace this line:
   

   vfs objects = darwinacl, darwin_streams

   with this: (removing “, darwin_streams”)

   vfs objects = darwinacl

2. Then change these lines:
   

   ; The darwin_streams module gives us named streams support.
stream support = yes
ea support = yes

   to this:

   ; The darwin_streams module gives us named streams support.
stream support = no
ea support = no

References

• Samba shares and HFS extended attributes – MacOSX.com

[Edit: The Thumbs.db problem is a separate issue with a separate solution -- SXN, 9/13/08]

So today was pretty much the worst day ever in the history of setting up a mixed Windows and Mac environment. 

At work we have an Xserve (Early 2008) running Leopard Server 10.5.4, serving Windows and Mac clients.  The one particular user having problems runs Windows XP SP3 on Boot Camp 2.1 on a late 2007 iMac.

---

Problem 0:  Booting into Windows XP in Boot Camp

Okay so I came out of the shower this morning and Tivs tells me someone called from the office.  On the voicemail: “How do I boot back into Windows?”  Whoops.  I had set the startup disk of the iMac to the Mac partition and he couldn’t get out.  

Solution 0

Easy enough.  Just reboot and hold Alt/Option when you hear the Mac startup sound until you see the startup disks show.  Then select the Windows partition.  

This foreshadowed the problems to come later in the day.

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Problem 1: Losing network connection

I ride into the office a little early and within the first hour, the iMac had lost the network connection and thus lost connection to shared drives, causing file corruption on files that were being saved to the server.  Other symptoms include getting “Delayed write failed” messages from the Windows XP client.  Client machine couldn’t ping any other hosts on the network, but could ping itself on localhost and local network IP interfaces (192.168.x.x)

Solution 1:  Workaround by restarting

I’ve been able to temporarily fix the issue by restarting the machine, but this is not a good long term fix.

---

Problem 2: User can save but not delete file on Samba share

We have several different sharepoints served through Samba, managed through Server Admin.  User had difficulty with one of the sharepoints.  He was able to save a file to the share, but thereafter was unable to delete or otherwise modify the file.  Upon further investigation (using `gpresult` to get the domain info on the user), I found that the user is missing some groups of which he is a member.  The first thing I did was try to change permissions on the sharepoint to give permissions to one of the groups that did show up in gpresult.  No dice.  Second thing was to delete the user from Open Directory and re-add him.  Nothing.  

Solution 2: ”acl check permissions = no”

Finally, I found a thread on AFP548 which had the solution.  Apparently the Samba implementation in Leopard Server is screwed up, so I had to add “acl check permissions = no” to the [global] section of /private/etc/smb.conf.

---

Problem 3: User profile not saving Thumbs.db and Quickbooks 2006 QBW files

Okay, so I’m stoked that I got the sharepoint going. But I tell the user to work off of his desktop so that I can properly test the sharepoint later on. Desktop is safe. I soon prove this assumption wrong. The user scans an image and saves to a folder on his desktop, then copies a few Quickbooks files to his desktop and opens them up to work on them. He finishes that, then realizes he needs to install Quicken 2008. Everything’s going smooth so far until the Quicken Installer requests a system restart. Two files fail to copy over to the roaming profile share on the server: the 2 Quickbooks QBW files that he had opened and closed.

Fine, I think. Just log back in, and the files will still be on the local profile. Wrong! They were deleted! WTF?! Now the user can’t log into his profile due to the fact that the user can’t copy all the files back from the profile on the server. So a couple hours later, here’s what I found:  >

1. If you open and close a Quickbooks file, the file will become read-only in Windows.
2. If a user owns a folder on the Server, he cannot copy a read-only file into that folder even if he is the owner and has POSIX permissions 700
3. Also, if a user has those permissions on a Quickbooks file on the server, the file will not open properly in Quickbooks.

I tested this by opening and closing a Quickbooks file, then checking the file properties. It was read-only. Then I tried dragging and dropping that QBW file into the user’s Desktop folder (\\xserve\profiles\user\Desktop). The progress meter goes all the way across, then I get an error. If I uncheck the read-only checkbox, the copy succeeds.

Solution 3: Full-Control Access Control Entry (ACE)

So what eventually worked was giving the user a Full-Control ACE, and propogating it down to all child folders and files. This allowed read-only files to be properly copied back to the user’s Windows profile on the server.

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Notes:

Another thing I did was turn off oplocks on the share that holds our Quickbooks files because I saw it on this page, and apparently they shouldn’t be used for shares which are available by AFP and SMB.

I had to write this out for my own catharsis.  If this helps anyone else, the day was not spent in vain!

We were having issues of scheduled posts not appearing at the scheduled time
WordPress MU 1.3.3

We tried adding this snippet in wp-includes/cron.php:

fflush($argyle);
fgets($argyle);
fclose($argyle);

Which was only half of the problem.

What happened in our setup was that our machine that was hosting our WordPress installation could not access the site properly from the machine itself due to improper DNS settings

So here’s what I did:

1. SSH into the machine which is hosting WordPress.
2. Attempt to access the site using `lynx http://example.com/`.
   This showed me that I couldn’t get to the site from the host itself, and therefore couldn’t execute the wp-cron.php script.
3. At this point I looked at the Apache configuration and realized that the virtual host for our WordPress installation was only listening on the public IP interface, not the localhost.
   The /etc/hosts was pointing example.com to the localhost interface, which made me see the default Apache web site when I tried to access http://example.com
4. So I had to change /etc/hosts to make sure that example.com would resolve to the public IP interface.

The end!

• http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3742

One of the best things about my job is that my company often buys the newest and best things for me to work with. One of the most recent purchases we’ve made is an Apple Xserve running Leopard Server. One of the reasons I was looking forward to getting my hands on this machine was so I could run Time Machine Backups onto it. Here are two big issues I’ve run into so far:

1. Users whose home directories live on the server can’t use Time Machine to access their backups 

Since the files live on the server, you have to log into the server to enter the Time Machine outer space interface. My solution to this right now is to create Mobile Accounts for users on their primary machines.

2.  I got the message ”No Mac OS X System Backups Found” when attempting a full restore

While trying to do a test Restore from Time Machine Backup from the OS X Installation Disc, I found that none of the image files had any backups listed. My solution to this was to go back into Time Machine Preferences and remove the “System” folder from my excluded backup locations, which seemed to do the trick.