Wright This Way

getnameinfo fixed with 10.5.2

I have been able to confirm that the getnameinfo issue with Mac OS X 10.5 has been fixed with the 10.5.2 update. I never did confirm if this was an issue with 10.5.2 Server or not, but the fix is in the server version also.

getnameinfo issue with Mac OS X 10.5

I found a rather obscure bug with Leopard while troubleshooting my postfix logs. It seems that mail that I had been getting from some of the mail lists I usually receive was being bounced by my server because it couldn't resolve the IP address based on the DNS supplied by the sending server. If you've read my prior Postfix postings, you know that I'm fairly strict about the servers I accept mail from, and misconfigured servers generally don't get any mail delivered here.

So, this came as somewhat of a surprise that formerly working servers were now being rejected after my upgrade to Leopard. Some troubleshoot assistance from the postfix mail list uncovered the issue, the getnameinfo function in the OS was not resolving DNS addresses that resolved to a CNAME record, or anything other than a PTR record. The unix nslookup and host commands though, worked fine, but postfix relies on the getnameinfo function.

The good news here is that this bug has been reported to Apple, and signs are good that this should be fixed in Mac OS X 10.5.2 when it is released. I'll report back on that after release. For now, my temporary workaround is to identify servers that aren't resolving, and whitelist them in my helo_access list.

newsyslog Revisited

Earlier this month, I wrote about a new utility that handles log rotation in Leopard, and gave a tip on fixing logging for the mail.log. It turns out that my fix wasn't quite right...

The original line in the configuration file was as follows:

/var/log/mail.log			640  5	   100	*    J

This results in the log file being rotated when it reached 100Kb in size. What I wanted was for the logs to roll weekly as they had with prior systems, and my assumption was that this would continue to happen as part of the periodic.weekly script. Bad assumption.

I don't usually have to scroll too far back in my logs when researching things, but tonight discovered that I had entries going back more than a week, and that the log file wasn't rotating as I thought it should have been. A quick check of the periodic.weekly script revealed that log rotation wasn't there anymore, so I revisited the newsyslog.conf file, and made the following change:

/var/log/mail.log			640  5	   *	$W0D0     J

The asterisk there is in the size column, meaning don't worry about the log size, the $W0D0 is under the when column, this means to rotate weekly, on day 0 (Sunday), at hour 0 (12am).

The man page for newsyslog.conf gives a wealth of info on configuring this utility, and is well worth a read.

New log rotation utility in Leopard

Most folks have no need to ever check their system logs. Some folks check their logs religiously. Mac OS X 10.5 has thrown a new tool into the mix, and it might bite you if you don't know about it.

There is a new command line command called newsyslog, it is called every minute by the file /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.newsyslog.plist, and it's config file lives in /etc/newsyslog.conf.

Tonight, I needed to check my mail server logs for some information, and had to search prior logs. At first, my searches made no sense, as I kept coming up with today's date in the data, but my mail logs normally contain a week's worth of data. Well, not anymore, thanks to newsyslog, now they only contain 100Kb worth of data before they roll over to a new log. Ack! A simple fix, commenting out the log cycling for the mail.log file. Hopefully this tip might help out anyone else out there that gets bitten by this.

Details on upgrades

To recap my recent upgrades here, I was transitioning my old web/mail server from a G4 box running OS 10.4 to a new Mac Mini running OS X 10.5. Funny that I wrote about using a Mini as a server back in 2005, and I'm only now finally getting around to putting one in here...

So, the basic process here was shutting down Postfix, then using Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my existing server to the Mac Mini (booted in Target Disk Mode), then rebooting the Mini into the Mac OS X 10.5 Installer. The Installer had absolutely no problems upgrading a PPC version of OS 10.5 to an Intel OS running 10.5, which was great. I really did not want to do a clean install, which would have been more of a hassle in converting mail files and other lower level items.

The next necessary step after installing 10.5 was to install Xcode 3.0, in order to compile all the apps I needed. Once that was done, I was finally able to start getting things up and running.

From prior dry runs, I had done a lot of testing of various packages to make sure that things would compile properly, and run without errors. There was a good bit of trial and error, and lots of googling. And thanks to someone else googling and finding an earlier entry of mine, a helpful tip out of the blue (Thanks to Paul S.) that helped massively. I had partitioned my drive so that I had a nice workspace partition to hold files between attempts at cloning and upgrading, and I had saved a few helpful notes there as well, which was very handy.

As I had mentioned a few days ago, the unix system accounts for postfix, mysql, www, and others, now for some reason all begin with an underscore character, so I had to edit a few config files where these accounts were specifically used to make sure that they reflected the current users. Also, 10.5 now runs Apache 2.2.x and not Apache 1.x, so I had to do some reading up on how this gets configured in order to migrate my config files, there were few surprises there, once I paid attention to the sample config files. Having saved copies of my working config files from earlier runs, it was a simple matter to copy these over before starting other work.

In retrospect, I should have worked on getting the mail server up and running before the web server, I didn't lose any mail, but I just hated it being offline as long as it was...

Starting with the web side, I installed MySQL 5.0.45 using a pre-build package, I used the one built for 10.4 Intel, and plan to upgrade that to a 10.5 specific build once one is available. After installing this, I simply copied my data folder over, ran the mysql_upgrade script, and all was well. Next, I compiled DBI-1.601 and DBD-mysql-4.005. For some reason I wasn't able to track down, DBD insisted on looking for mysql/lib files in /mysql/lib/mysql, even though my install never mentioned this path anywhere. Some googling finally revealed that the easiest fix was simply to fake it with some symlink trickery:

cd /usr/local/mysql/lib
sudo mkdir mysql
cd mysql
sudo ln -s ../*

DBI compiled fine, DBD threw up an error about incompatible pointers, which I was stuck at for a day or two before finding out that this was just a warning and could be ignored. Sure enough, it ran just fine, and I found that MovableType was now working fine. During the final install of everything, I discovered that I had to reset access privs for my web folder in order for MT to be able to write files, but after doing that, it worked fine again. I'm saving my upgrade to MovableType 4.x for another day.

Compiling Postfix was fairly straightforward, as before, I built Postfix according to the standard install docs to include MySQL and PCRE support, but this time included SASL in the mix. It is very important to read the SASL docs, there was a bit of needing to create symlinks and make sure that header files were in the right locations, but once I followed all the steps outlined, it compiled fine.

The Courier-IMAP pieces drove me nuts for several days. Courier-IMAP 4.2.1, the latest build, just couldn't be made to work here, I eventually tried building an older version, 4.1.3, and that worked just fine. Courier-Authlib 0.60.2 compiled but had problems running, the trick mailed in my Paul S. was to enter the following before doing the compile:

export MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5

This handy command has been around for a few OS releases now, and forces some settings that apparently don't get set otherwise, a quick google search found many packages needing this to compile properly. Once set, AuthLib compiled properly and more importantly, ran properly.

Despite doing the 'migrate' steps, though, my old Courier settings never made it over, and so I had to edit the authmysqlrc and some other Courier files by hand using my older versions as templates, but this work was done in short order.

One site that helped a lot in checking over some of my steps was this one:

http://switch.richard5.net/isp-in-a-box-v2/building-the-mail-server-components/building-the-courier-imap-server/

The versions used there weren't current, but helped to validate what I was trying to do here, and setting the proper CFLAGS and compile arguments. His setup there was very similar to mine, virtual domains, MySQL authentication, etc, which was a great help.

With this done, I was now actually able to check mail the last necessary step, which made a good stopping point for the night with a fairly functioning server.

The next day, I tested a few more functions of the system, and found that one of the web packages I had installed was having problems with MySQL. This turned out to be a PHP issue connecting to MySQL, it was looking for the mysql.sock file in /var instead of /tmp. The easiest fix here was to create a /etc/php.ini file, consisting of the following:

; Default socket name for local MySQL connects.  If empty, uses the built-in MySQL defaults.
mysql.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock
; Default socket name for local MySQL connects.  If empty, uses the built-in MySQL defaults.
mysqli.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

The second section for mysqli was required for version of MySQL 4.1 and later, once this was in place and Apache stopped and started, this problem was now history.

The last hurdle I had was getting policyd running, this is the greylisting package I use with Postfix. I had been struggling for some time to get newer builds of this running. I had somehow hacked the 1.7.x version into running previously, and was never able to duplicate my success with later builds. Thanks to some outstanding work by the developers, the final fixes to this are now available in the latest SVN builds, and I was able to get the 1.9.x experimental build to compile successfully, and more importantly, to run successfully as well.

In closing, what I'd like to say here is that when you're rolling your own code, patience is your best friend. Take things one step at a time, make sure you have a backup, and when you hit a wall, do searches and ask questions on mailing lists until you find the answers you need. If all else fails, post about your failures, and someone else might stumble across your post and supply the answers you need, it's amazing how things like that work out sometimes.

Server upgraded successfully

The server here has been successfully upgraded to Mac OS X 10.5. A few tips rolled in earlier this week that resolved the last of my compile issues (details to follow soon), so last night I cloned everything over to the new box and started the upgrade process.

One important tip, installing Xcode is kinda important. It's the little things you forget to do... :)

Upgrades... Hmmm.

A relatively sleepless weekend, and not in a good way. Here's an interesting tidbit, the common unix accounts such as postfix, mysql, www, and others, are now prefaced by an underscore character in OS X 10.5. Why, I have no idea, but when configuring scripts, make sure to change the usernames.

The switch to Apache2 for the most part went pretty well, it took a bit of trial and error to get my virtual domains working, but once I went back and poured over the sample configs, it all started to make sense. Just copying and pasting relevant bits from my old config files was not the way to go. :)

Minor issues compiling the DBD::mysql module, I had to use a slightly older version and it worked fine.

Courier-IMAP is what drove me absolutely nuts, I finally thought I had it all going, and then discovered that the auth module was throwing errors in the log, and I'm still trying to track that down. Also, despite attempting to migrate my older Courier settings, this apparently didn't happen, best thing may be to build it all up from scratch.

Leopard Day...

Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) is available in stores, and of course I've been playing with it for a bit. The new tabbed Terminal is great, having several terminal sessions all open in separate tabs instead of multiple windows is great, it really helps keep things organized.

Anyway, my first pass at upgrading my mail/web server from PPC 10.5 to Intel 10.5 went pretty well, everything actually seemed to launch and run correctly, web services worked, postfix was running, etc. Of course, I want to compile Intel binaries and not use the PPC codes, so I've been testing some installs. So far, most of them are going well, a few minor snags though, but I hope to have things working on the new hardware by the time the weekend is done.

Upgrade prep

I had forgotten what a pain in the ass a major upgrade can be... Made even worse by switching platforms, going from a PowerPC based Mac to an Intel based one.

I did a number of 'test compiles' on the Mac Mini just to make sure that things looked like they'd be working come Leopard day, and figured out that in order to clone my old server over to the new box, I'd have to format the drive with a GUID partition map, something not done by default when formatting from a G4 system... It's the little things that get ya.

So, quick checklist of things to do:

Format Mini's drive as GUID
Download latest MySQL 5, MovableType, Courier-IMAP, Courier AuthLib, Postfix, PCRE, PHP, Cyrus SASL, policyd
Shut down all services
Clone drive from G4 to Mac Mini
Boot 10.5 Installer
Upgrade system
Install MySQL, PHP (built for 10.4.x, will upgrade to 10.5 versions when available)
Build/Install PCRE, Cyrus SASL, Courier AuthLib, Courier IMAP, then Postfix (order probably important)
Build/Install policyd
Keep fingers crossed

Hopefully I haven't forgotten anything that's a dependency, if so, I'm sure I'll find out about it.

I'll probably try for a dry run this weekend, and see what happens.

Major Upgrades

I'm in the beginning stages of some major upgrades to the machine running the web/mail system here, every major piece of software on the back end is being upgraded, and the hardware is seeing some major changes as well Gone will be the old G4 system, in favor of a new Intel Mac, and a whole host of software upgrades for the new hardware to bring everything current with the latest releases (MySQL 5, MovableType 4, Courier-IMAP 4.1.3, Postfix 2.4.5, pcre 7.3, PHP 5.x, etc, etc). Oh, and of course, Mac OS X 10.5, when it ships, hopefully next month.

The plan at this point is to prep the new hardware, install all the software, then migrate the data from the old server, followed by much testing to make sure that everything is working as it should be. If all goes well, shortly after Mac OS X 10.5 ships, I'll be able to wipe the drive and install all the latest bits and be able to go live in early November. There should be no noticeable difference (unless I play with MovableType a bit!), but my UPS will have a lighter power load to deal with, at least. :)

OS X Firewall

Out of necessity, I've been playing around a bit with the built in firewall in OS X, ipfw. It definitely isn't as full featured as iptables, the firewall built into many linux distros, but it's very easy to configure. One feature not controlled by the Firewall GUI settings in System Preferences is the ability to block a specific IP or range, and my old Netopia router didn't provide this either. Thanks to some kiddie trying to hack my system, I found that I now needed this ability.

I came across a slightly dated article at MacDevCenter.com that gave some excellent background on using ipfw, including setting it up as a Startup Item so that you can customize whatever settings you want, and have them take effect at each startup.

One change that I made here was instead of setting up my config file in the /etc directory, I saved it into the Firewall folder in StartupItems, and referenced it there, it seemed a much more logical place to keep this.

iPhone prediction from 2004

As most of the tech and business world is aware, Apple has at long last announced the iPhone, currently set to ship around June. Rumors have been flying for years on this juicy bit of technology, so I thought I'd dig up my own thoughts from 2004, 2 years and one month ago, and oddly enough from close to the same time that this current product was conceived...

In looking back, I think I hit the mark pretty well, the full screen, touch sensitive display, built in WiFi and Bluetooth. I have to admit that the thought of something this size running a version of OS X never occured to me, but a more robust OS was certainly what I was after at the time, capable of handling QuickTime and iTunes content, web, and email access. It's amazing how technology has advanced in two years.

One key point that I hit on was games, something currently lacking on this product, the screen shots and demos do not include any hint at a games area, but as these are things available for current iPods, I'm sure that by the time the iPhone ships, a nice selection of games will be available for purchase, as well as a select few bundled with the phone, or possibly available as a free download. As FCC certification is pending, the bundled software may be fixed at this time, but should be easily expandable later.

Router Time...

I'm once again thinking of replacing my aging Asante router here, and am leaning heavily towards the Linksys WRTSL54GS, it has a lot of great features, and best of all can run an alternate (and customizable) firmware, which sounds like a lot of fun. I've been exploring several options over the last week or so, and right now this guy is leading the pack. More info in a week or three on this front.

What is really bugging me though is that I've also been searching for info on turning my web/mail server box (running Mac OS X 10.4.x) into a router, I can easily throw another ethernet card or two in there, and I can find these little embedded Linux devices everywhere that function as routers, and I know that OS X has to have everything I need in there, but docs are pretty sparce from what I can tell. Of course, I'm also looking for a fancy front end so I don't have to figure out all this IPFW stuff on my own, but is that too much to ask?

Upgrade to 10.4.5

The server here has been upgraded from 10.4 to 10.4.5. I was a little apprehensive about this update as I didn't have a chance to test prior to performing it, but everything went well, Postfix kept chugging, web services uninterrupted, other miscellaneous non-standard compiled code went well. Looks like Apple didn't stomp on anything that I'd upgraded. ;)

The big hangup was an issue with Carbon Copy Cloner, under 10.4, it wasn't able to clone my drive due to an authentication issue, normally I'd clone my drive and test out the upgrade first, so I just had to chance it. The main reason I needed to upgrade was 10.4 apparently had some issue that would keep log files from rotating properly, and possibly other scheduled tasks from running, so it was high time to get that issue fixed.

Apple & Palm = ?

Hot rumor floating around (again), several big Palm investors seem to want this to happen, but nothing brewing in the Apple camp that has been leaked yet...

I've said for a while now that Palm could use some help, an Apple takeover would certainly help them out, and could give their products a bit more flash than they have currently.

Evolution TV Review

EvolutionTV is a PVR (Personal Video Recorder) for the Mac. It allowed the user to view and record TV, as well as pause/rewind live TV.

The unit features a USB 2.0 interface for bringing the audio/video into the Mac, which can leave some older systems out in the cold. A USB 2.0 PCI card can add this functionality to most systems that meet the speed requirements of the software (PowerMac G4/1Ghz or better), which would let most supported Macs but the iMac join the fun.

The unit is very stylish, with the brushed aluminum case providing looks as well as dissipating what little heat is produced. The one drawback was the lack of a stand for positioning the unit vertically, a nice feature for a cramped desktop. The back of the unit includes the coax input for TV, but also includes composite and s-video inputs, as well as stereo audio, so video from older sources (VCR or camcorders) can be imported easily.

The software provides several encoding options for optimizing video quality, or minimizing file size, and the built in iMovie integration allows recorded video to be edited and burned to DVD from within iMovie. Integration with TitanTV or (tvtv for European users) allows convenient scheduling of recordings, and integration with iCal provides yet another option for keeping track of your viewing schedule. And don't worry if your Mac is asleep or powered off, the software can automatically wake or boot the Mac in plenty of time to catch the next recording.

The one problem I had with the software (but not something that was claimed to be possible), was that it did not provide a complete one-stop solution for viewing/recording/scheduling, so it's no TiVo replacement just yet, but as the name implies, the software is continuing to evolve, the most recent version having gained the ability to pause/rewind live TV. So it is certainly possible that a future version may include such increased functionality.

Miglia also provides great support. When the package was first opened, a slight rattle was heard from the power adapter, apparently from a small bit of metal that had sheared off during manufacture. Though still functional, the adapter was quickly replaced. Later in my testing I downloaded a new version of the EvolutionTV software when setting this up on another system, and was not able to properly view video, a support ticket went in and it was quickly revealed that this software update was problematic with NTSC video, and a revision was quickly posted.

All in all, the Evolution TV is a fine product, and one that should continue to improve over time. The evolutionTV is available from many online retailers or direct from Miglia's online store, and has a suggested retail price of $279.

Wasting time in search of a clock

There are days when I miss running Classic. Not many, but a few. And it isn't so much that I miss the old operating system, but some of the fun things that used to be available for it. In particular, a wonderful package from Berkeley Software called After Dark, and more specifically, the Clocks module from After Dark.

The clock was a nice, floating clock, that slowly moved around the screen, ticking (or morphing) away the seconds. Alas, After Dark became rather broken sometime around MacOS 8.6, and is now a distant memory for most OS X users. The days of a simple clock that told time, and told it well, as a screensaver, seem to be long gone. Sigh...

TV Time

I'm putting the finishing touches on a review of the Miglia Evolution TV, and will be comparing it to the Elgato EyeTV 200, comparing features and usability. I hope to have this online in the next week or so, after I've put these through their paces a bit more.

Stay tuned...

Postfix & Tiger upgrade

I've finally made the upgrade to Tiger on my mail server. That is, I've finally 'successfully' upgraded, it took a few attempts to get everything just right for what I wanted, and now that I'm done I thought I'd share a few details.

Probably the most important step is to make sure that you have a good backup before starting. For me, this step was critical, as it allowed me to back out at any time and get running again from the backup. I wasn't just upgrading from 10.3 to 10.4, but was also upgrading Postfix, MySQL, and PCRE all at the same time...

Tiger (10.4) includes version 2.1.5 of Postfix, for most folks this is probably more than sufficient. However, I wanted to upgrade to the Postfix 2.2.5 release, as it includes a few more bells & whistles that I wanted, I wanted to bring MySQL current, and also bring PCRE (Perl Compatible Regular Expressions) up to date. Basically, this meant upgrading my system to Tiger, upgrading/compiling each new piece, and finally getting it all up and running.

MySQL was a snap, thanks to a ready made Installer built for Tiger. I was upgrading from an earlier 4.1.x release, so there were no worries about my databases not working correctly, and it was a simple matter of copying over the data directory from the old path to the new and getting MySQL running.

PCRE compiled well, but prior to compiling I also upgraded to the latest version of Xcode to get all the latest libraries installed. Standard docs on how to install worked just fine.

The last and trickiest step was getting Postfix compiled properly. After trying a few times and having problems, I finally took a step back and found my error, a simple typo caused from a copy/paste error when trying to get both the MySQL and PCRE code compiled in. For reference, here's the correct MAKE instruction for that:

make -f Makefile.init makefiles \
    'CCARGS=-DHAS_MYSQL -I/usr/local/mysql/include -DHAS_PCRE -I/usr/local/include' \
    'AUXLIBS=-L/usr/local/mysql/lib -lmysqlclient -lz -lm -L/usr/local/lib -lpcre'

After that, it was just a matter of running Make, and then Make Upgrade.

The last and trickiest step was to get Postfix running at Startup again. The Tiger upgrade removed my Postfix StartupItem (included with the Postfix source code), so that just needed copied back to /Library/StartupItems, and I also removed the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.postfix.master.plist file that Tiger includes for starting Postfix on demand, as I wanted this running all the time, and it also didn't seem to be launching my newly compiled version of Postfix properly. I also needed to edit the /etc/hostconfig file to change MAILSERVER=-NO- to -YES-, and after that Postfix launched perfectly.

In hindsight, I probably should have upgraded 10.4 to 10.4.2 before upgrading everything else, but no mail related updates seem to be part of the upgrade, so this shouldn't be a problem. But if you're planning on going to 10.4 and recompiling other software, get your OS fully current first, then start in on your other work, it'll save you the trouble later.

I used Mike Bombich's excellent Carbon Copy Cloner to clone my working system to a backup drive, upgrade that and was able to do all my testing on a backup drive prior to the actual upgrade, and at any time I could simply reboot from my primary drive and be up and running. Very useful when you can't have a production system down long but need to do some 'live' testing.

Keyspan USB Print Server

About a week ago, my doorbell rings, and before I can get to the door I can hear a large truck driving off, and on the doorstep is a small box. It really irks me when delivery drivers just drop stuff on the porch, but when I found out it was a new goodie to review, I quickly forgot all about that and tore into the packaging.

Behold, the Keyspan PS-4A USB Print Server! Not to be confused with the older US-4A model, which looks identical, the new PS-4A model is bi-directional (printers that can report back ink/paper status can now do so), and includes full USB 2.0 connectivity.

So, just what is a USB print server, exactly? Basically, this will turn your USB based printer into a networkable TCP/IP based printer, sharable to every computer on your network. I know, some of you are probably thinking, hey, I've got a Mac, I can share my printer already. And of course, I was thinking the same thing, until I decided to take this little box for a spin.

The first thing I thought that would be handy is that you wouldn't need to leave a system running to keep your printer shared. The second thing I thought of was that you could print to your printer from an entirely different network over IP, either from a separate subnet in a corporate environment, or to your home system from elsewhere through your home router, something that Rendezvous, er, Bonjour, doesn't do. So, I set about to set things up and see how it all worked.

The box included a CD with software that installed easily on my Mac, and basically this will let you configure your Print Server, set it up with a static IP or use DHCP addressing, etc, etc, and will essentially make it appear to be a separate USB port on your Mac. A connected printer will immediately pop up in your Printer Setup Utility as an available printer with no configuration necessary, assuming you have the necessary drivers already installed for that model, very nice.

The PS-4A directly supports attaching 4 USB devices, but according to the documentation devices that happen to supply extra USB ports for pass-through (internal hubs) will let it chain up to 8 devices total off the one server. Personally, I don't see folks having that many USB printers all in the same spot, but still, nice to be expandable.

First thing I tested was a HP Deskjet 5550 at the office, plugged everything in per the directions, installed the software, and after launching their config utility, sure enough, the printer popped right up. One thing that I didn't care for was that the default setup must have the user 'connect' to their printer in this utility to make it available for use (basically make it unavailable to other users), they can then print, and finally free it up for others to use. Didn't seem very Mac-like, must be a Windows thing. Fortunately, they also include an auto-connect option, which just as it sounds, lets the Mac connect on the fly without checking out the printer first, and releases it once finished.

The big advantage of the new model printer server is that it is bi-directional, meaning that the printer can communicate back to the Mac, for things like paper and ink status. I was able to use HP's utility to get the status of my ink levels and other info, worked just like it was there on the USB bus.

I tested with a few other model printers at the office, several HP models, both Inkjet and a Laser, all worked as expected. So, I packed up my trusty HP 5550 and the PS-4A and brought them home, hooked it all up here, installed the software, and again things worked as expected. I then set up my router's firewall to port forward the particular port I had assigned the print server to the print server's IP address. I connected back to my work system, entered the IP address of where the print server was now located, and in a few moments had again established a connection to the server, but this time across the internet from my office to my home, through my router, and finally to the print server. As before, the HP 5550 popped right up, and another print job came through just fine.

This last test wasm for me, the most impressive. My particular router doesn't like my IP printer at home, or probably any standard IP printer. The router included an option on some models to hook a parallel printer up and print to it via IP, my model didn't include this port, but the router still hogged that port assignment just the same, making printing to a standard IP printer impossible through the router, so I could never print to my home printer from the office before. At last, I was able to send jobs through to a printer here, basically because the Keyspan server uses a non-standard port (reassignable by the user) for printing.

All in all, I was very pleased with this product. In addition to supporting printers, it also supports scanners, multi-function printers, storage devices, PDAs, digital cameras, etc., but no audio/video type devices. I hope to get my hands on one of the newer HP multifunction printers soon and give that a try with this server, HP sells ethernet adapters for several of their printers, but the price on those is much higher than the cost of this little box, and if it works just as well, why spend the money?

Keyspan is well known for their great products, and this looks like another winner for them.

Intel Inside

Well, it looks like the rumors were true, future Macs will infact feature Intel processors, starting in January 2006. Apparently a secret project deep within Apple has had every version of OX X running on Intel powered machines since the beginning.

I'm sure many folks will now think that a future version of OS X will run on an off the shelf PC, but I highly doubt that will ever happen. It also isn't clear on exactly which Intel processor will power future Macs, and if the x86 exploits that are so prevalent will be an issues for these Macs. Many details are still up in the air, but this is incredible news, and it's going to take time to sink in and get my brain wrapped around this whole issue.

Mac/Intel rumors continue

The press is still falling all over itself hyping a move for Apple to Intel chips. Monday kicks off Apple's WWDC conferense, with a Keynote on Monday by Steve Jobs. Full details will be available at that time, but I'm standing by my prior prediction that there will not be any announcement of Macs on Intel processors. Some other type of device, possibly, as I've said, Intel chips have been used in the past in Apple hardware. But if Intel is even mentioned at all, except as a denial, I'll be surprised.

Intel chief (almost) recommends Macs

Intel's CEO Paul Otellini has stopped just short of recommending the Mac, but admits that security concerns on Intel hardware won't be fixed anytime soon.

Let the Apple/Intel rumor mongers chew on that one for a while...

Apple/Intel rumors - Bah!

Well, the media is just going nuts thanks to a rumor started by 'analysts' at the Wall Street journal about Apple possibly using Intel chips in upcoming products, and everyone's just falling all over themselves buzzing about the possibility. Personally I think that anyone in the media that starts talking about such things should be fired for their incompetence, but here's my take on all of this.

First of all, nowhere in the original article was the word PROCESSOR mentioned. You know, that really big chip that runs the whole show? Last time I checked, Intel made more than just Pentiums, and Apple has used Intel chips in the past in its products. In fact, at this very moment I'm staring at an Apple multi-port Ethernet card removed from a G4 server, and it has Intel chips all over it.

Next, even if there was the thought of moving to Intel processors, as I mentioned Posted by Jim at 7:28 PM | TrackBack