Mike Cohen

Permission problems

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Repairing permissions is considered the Mac equivalent of snake oil or waving a dead chicken. It’s usually the first thing suggested for fixing problems, although in most cases it does nothing. There are a few rare problems that it actually does fix, and I encountered one of them today.

One of our customers has been having trouble installing our software on a certain group of machines. For the last week or so we were completely stumped. When I finally got access to their machine today I discovered that /Library/Frameworks had the wrong permissions.

On all of my machines, the permissions are 0775 (drwxrwxr-x), and owned by root:admin. On these particular machines it was set to 0755 (drwxr-xr-x). During the installation, a system specific module gets downloaded from the server and installed in that directory. Because of the incorrect permissions, that was failing. It turns out that the VPN software they installed was setting the permissions incorrectly.

Renovation Started

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The contractor surprised my by starting a day early on my kitchen. All of the cabinets & the stove are gone and he set up a temporary kitchen in the corner of my dining room. He got a lot done in only a few hours. Tomorrow the sink is being removed and the washing machine & dryer are being moved so he can open the wall and move the pipes. After he’s done they’ll no longer stick out a few inches so I can put a door or curtain in front of them.

Renovation day 1 Renovation day 1
Renovation day 1 Renovation day 1

Attack of the whiners

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Since Apple’s recent success, every whiner and troll has taken aim at them. Greenpeace, in particular, has been taking every opportunity to attack Apple, even though other companies have much worse environmental records.

Similarly, every phone company sells all of their phones locked, yet Apple is the only company that’s being criticized and even sued for it. Before these trolls start attacking Apple, they should look at other companies practices.

Kitchen Remodeling

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I’m about to have my kitchen remodeled. The contractor came last week & measured everything and he hopes to get started later this week. I’m replacing my ugly laminate cabinets with oak and adding more cabinets, replacing the laminate countertop with granite or quartz, getting rid of the ugly ceiling panels, and replacing the ancient stove.

I still haven’t made a final decision on the counter tops until I see both materials. Granite looks nicer (and costs slightly less), although it needs sealing every year and can scratch or stain. Quartz surfaces such as DuPont’s Zodiaq don’t need sealing and is scratch & stain resistant.

Kitchen Before

Backing up with an rsync server

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I’ve tried many solutions to do a daily sync backup of my MacBook Pro to my Terastation, but I was never really happy with any of them. Among the software I’ve tried were Chronosync (which is probably the best of the bunch), Synk Pro, and Deja Vu.

Samba on the Terastation can be painfully slow – it can take several hours to back up my home directory. I’ve hacked my Terastation to support SSH, NFS, and a few other features (information is available at terastation.org). NFS is a lot faster than Samba, but the version I have on the Terastation has lots of problems.

I found that by far the fastest way to back up is using an rsync server. It isn’t too difficult to set up an rsync server on a Terastation or another Mac.

1. Make sure /etc/services contains the following lines:

rsync           873/tcp                         # rsync
rsync           873/udp                         # rsync

2. Add the following line to /etc/inetd.conf, if it isn’t already present:

rsync   stream  tcp     nowait  root    /usr/bin/rsync  rsync --daemon


After you add that line, send a hangup signal to inetd (killall -HUP inetd).

3. Finally, you’ll need to create /etc/rsyncd.conf which should specify which directories should be available to rsync:

#you should probably use your own user & group IDs
uid = nobody
gid = nogroup
use chroot = yes
pid file = /etc/rsyncd.pid

#this is the name you will use in your rsync command
[share]
#this is the actual directory
  path = /mnt/array1/share
  read only = no

To use it, specify the destination as an rsync URL on your rsync command, for example:

rsync -avzC --delete --exclude="._*" Music Documents Sources Work Pictures rsync://tank.local/share/Backup/mike/

This will tell it to back up your Music, Documents, Sources, Work, and Pictures folders from your home directory to /mnt/array1/share/Backup/mike on the rsync server (using the full path specified in the rsyncd.conf file).

For convenience, you can create a shell script with any rsync backup commands and schedule it to run using cron. Cronnix is the easiest way to set up your backup cron job.

My first DSLR

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My Nikon D40x arrived via UPS late this afternoon. It’s very easy to set up, and in a few minutes I was able to use the automatic mode, which is just as simple as a point and shoot camera. I haven’t finished reading the manual, so I’m still not familiar with all of the features.

After using standard point and shoot digital cameras for about 10 years, this is a big step up. Even in auto mode the picture quality is fantastic. It’s also very fast. I can start taking pictures almost immediately when I turn it on, and there’s almost no delay before it’s ready to take another picture.

DSC_0005.JPG

This is the first picture I took with it, probably the clearest picture I’ve ever taken of Midnight’s face.