The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jan
1
Running NMAP on Intel Macs
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Security, System Administration on January 1, 2007 | 4 Comments
Before I switched to an Intel based Mac I had always used NMapFE as my nmap front end. Since I only need to run nmap on my G4 MacMini at home and my G5 PowerMac at work I didn’t notice until today that NMapFE doesn’t work in Intel Macs. I had recommended NMapFE to Allison of the NosillaCast and she replied to tell me it didn’t work for her. I tried it on my own MacBookPro and sure enough, it doesn’t work. So, I went hunting for a good nmap GUI for Intel Macs and eventually came up with a good solution. The bad news is that this solution involves installing three things separately. But, don’t worry, all three are small and painlessly simple to install.
[tags]nmap, security, Mac, OS X[/tags]
Nov
28
The Easy Way to Completely Remove an App on OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on November 28, 2006 | 4 Comments
There are two ways of dealing with the configuration details that applications need to store. You have the Windows model, throw the lot into the Registry, and the Linux/Unix model, use text files in people’s home directories. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but on balance, I prefer the Linux/Unix model. Apple have taken the Linux/Unix approach but rather than storing the configuration files in straight in your home directory OS X stores them in the Library folder within your home directory. Although 99% of an application is gone when you drag it to the trash can, the configuration files in your Library are left behind. These take up very little room and don’t really get in your way but you might still like to get rid of them. If you’re the kind of person who is constantly installing and removing applications to test and play them you probably should look into tools for completely removing applications.
On the Mac there are two tools for this that I am aware of, AppZapper and AppDelete. It was Allison Sheridan of the NosillaCast that put me on to AppDelete. Like Allison I’ve played with both and agree that AppDelete is the better App of the two. It’s UI is the hight of simplicity, but perhaps so simple it may confuse people (more on this later). It also allows you to see what will be deleted and to un-do the deletion so there should be no nasty surprises! This is the perfect example of a tool that solves one problem very well. Basically, it does exactly what it says on the tin!
Nov
24
Nagios DHCP Checking on RHEL4
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on November 24, 2006 | 4 Comments
One of my current projects in work is to set up a Nagios install to monitor our network. We have been monitoring with the free version of BigBrother for a while now but BB isn’t as good so we’re switching to Nagios. I had plenty of problems getting Nagios running on RHEL 4 because in work we try to do as much as possible using only RPMs. I’m working on simple how-to for setting up Nagios on RHEL4 which I’ll publish here soon but the base install does not give you DHCP monitoring. I tried to look for RHEL rpms that provide check_dhcp but I couldn’t find any. There were lots for Fedora but they don’t work on RHEL (I tried FC4 and 5 rpms). I tried to manually build the latest version of the Nagios plugins which do contain a check_dhcp binary but there is a problem with that binary that results in it always showing your DHCP server as down. I know the problem is with the binary because if I watch the logs on the DHCP server I see it issuing an offer and tcpdump on my Nagios server shows the offer arriving, yet the plugin still insists that the service is down. The solution is to use this Perl script. However, if you follow the instructions on that page it won’t work on RHEL. I spent an entire day beating this script into submission but in the end I got it working.
[tags]Nagios, RedHat Enterprise Linux, RHEL, RHEL4, DHCP[/tags]
Nov
14
Installing mod_jk for Apache 1.3 on Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on November 14, 2006 | 8 Comments
I’ve done a few previous articles on Apache Tomcat (one for installing it on Linux and one for installing it on OS X), but I haven’t yet mentioned installing the JK Connector (mod_jk) in any environment. For those who are wondering what on earth I’m on about, mod_jk allows the Apache web server to serve your Tomcat web apps so they appear on port 80. There are a number of reasons why you might want to do this. Firstly, it provides a simple and secure way to get Tomcat to respond to requests on port 80 without having to have it run as root. Apache is more efficient at serving static pages so it can help increase the efficiency of your web app, and finally it allows you leverage all the power of Apache’s many features for your Java web app.
[tags]Tomcat, Apache, OS X, Mac, mod_jk, Tomcat Connectors[/tags]
Sep
29
RedHat Need to Learn Some Common Sense
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on September 29, 2006 | 5 Comments
I’ll hold my hands up now and say this will be a rant post. I’m annoyed. I’ve just wasted and entire afternoon at work because of pure and utter idiocy by the RedHat people. I don’t suffer fools well so that also adds to my annoyance 🙂 Read more
Aug
19
Image Magick on an Intel Mac
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Photography, System Administration on August 19, 2006 | 2 Comments
I'm a huge fan of ImageMagick . I think it's great but I'm constantly and continuously disappointed by their lack of proper support for the Mac. It took them ages to get a binary release out for the Mac at all and even now, a year after the announcement of the Intel Macs and after Apple have compltely stopped selling PPC Macs the only binary release available for the Mac on the image Magic site is still for PPC. You can of course get the source and build it yourself but that's a bit of a mine-field because of the amount of libraries that you need first if you're to end up with a useful ImageMagick install. In the past I've wasted a lot of time and effort getting ImageMagick compiled properly on OS X. When I had to install it on an Intel Mac for the first time today I nearly cried when I saw that there was no binary release! However, my prayers were answered when I cam across this blog entry. I still had to build the lot myself but this took all the pain out of it!
[tags]ImageMagick, Intel Mac[/tags]
Jul
6
The Problems with the IE Domain Registry
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on July 6, 2006 | 3 Comments
For those of you who have no idea who or what the IE Domain Registry (IEDR) are, they are the people who decided who does and does not get what .ie Internet domain name. You can find out more on their home page. Below is a quote from their front page in which I have bolded the bits that I find particularly positive.
“The IEDR is an independent not-for-profit organisation that manages the .ie country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD) namespace in the public interest of the Irish and global Internet communities.
The IE Domain Registry is not a governing or regulatory body, but provides a public service for the .ie namespace on behalf of the Internet community.”
These people have a very important responsibility, they manage the Irish-branded presence on the internet. They literally determine who is good enough to belong to Ireland on the internet. Were they to genuinely live up to the bolded parts of the above quote I would have nothing but praise for them. However, my many experiences with them over many years have lead me to the conclusion that they are falling far short of these ideals. Read more
Jun
8
PostgreSQL on the Mac
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on June 8, 2006 | Leave a Comment
Having recently discussed running MySQL on the Mac I’d now like to tackle PostgreSQL. I’m sorry to say things are not quite as rosy just yet. PostgreSQL don’t provide us with a binary distribution for the Mac nor do they provide a nice Panel for the System Preferences App. There are also less choices when it comes to GUIs for manipulating and designing your database but there are still options and things are still a lot better than they could be. Read more
May
22
Installing Apache Tomcat 5.5 on Linux
Filed Under Computers & Tech, System Administration on May 22, 2006 | 33 Comments
I’ve previously done a guide on the right way of installing Tomcat 5.0 on the Mac but things are a little different on Linux so I figured I’d do another guide. This one is a little less advanced because it only covers running Tomcat as root and not as a non-root user. Depending on how busy I am in the next while I may or may not do a follow-up article on the additional steps needed to run Tomcat as a non-root user. I have tested this procedure on RHEL ES 4 with Tomcat 5.5.17 and the Sun JDK version 1.5.0_6 but it should be the same on all Linux distros and for all 5.X Tomcat versions, the only thing that is likely to change is the location of $JAVA_HOME. Correction, the startup script included is for Redhat based distros only (RHEL, Fedora, CentOS etc).
May
15
MySQL on the Mac
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on May 15, 2006 | 2 Comments
MySQL on the Mac has come a long way in the last few years. MySQL now release binaries for the Mac and those binaries are contained in a nice OS X package and even contain a preferences pane for the System Preferences App to allow you to easily control your MySQL server. I installed the latest version on my machine in work today and it is fair to call the installation process painless. You just click next a few times and enter your password once or twice. Because of this I have no problem saying that the server end of things with MySQL is now sorted on the Mac, but what about client GUIs? In this article I’ll be describing three free MysQL GUIs that I found and tested. All my tests were carried out with the latest stable binary release of the MySQL server for OS X (5.0.21) on a G5 PowerMac.
CocoaMySQL
The first GUI I came across was CocoaMySQL and I have to say I was far from impressed. Although the interface is nice in it’s simplicity the app simply does not play nice with the latest versions of MySQL server and hangs and does funny things so until the app starts to work correctly with modern servers the simplicity of it’s interface is irrelevant. After failing to create a table I un-installed this program.
MySQL Administrator
MySQL Administrator is released by the MySQL people so I considered this app to have great promise. The first thing I noticed is that it gives you an awful lot of
information about your MySQL server and also lets you control the server
and edit it’s config very well. However, when it came to creating tables I
was horribly disappointed.
I tried a simple test to create a table with two columns, an auto
incrementing integer called ‘id’ that is the primary key and then a
column called ‘name’ that is a varchar. The interface let me
prepare it all beautifully but the moment I clicked ‘Apply’ I got an
SQL error. I tried repeatedly but no matter what I did with the GUI I
could not get this simple table created. The GUI shows you the SQL it’s
about to execute and lets you edit it so I did eventually get the table created by manually editing the SQL being sent. I did experiment on a bit
and found that if you don’t use auto increments the interface does work
but since I use them a lot I just got fed up with this application. My
disappointment was magnified even more when I realised that there is no
way to enter data with this app either.
I had very high hopes
that this app would turn out to be my on-stop-shop for everything I
want to do with MySQL but it simply isn’t. The fact that it’s obviously
still buggy as hell and that you can’t use it to insert data means that
I really have no use for this app.
YourSQL
YourSQL is another nice simple front end for MySQL. I tested the latest stable version (1.7.2). This is very much a program for people who are familiar with MySQL and know the various datatypes etc.. This program will only make sense to people who know what they are doing but for those people it will save a lot of time. It uses a Finder style column-based interface for navigating servers, databases and tables which works really well if you have a lot of databases to manage. This is a good app for speeding up simple DBA tasks if you know what you are doing. The app is small and fast and hence I actually really like it.
I spent a few hours using this app today to build a fairly complex database and I have to say I found it a joy to use. It was easy to add a database, to add and edit tables and to view, search and insert data. To me that is what a MySQL GUI should do so this app gets 9 out of 10. Why not 10 out of 10? Well it didn’t do one thing, it didn’t give me an easy way to set up foreign keys. However, the interface makes it very easy to run SQL queries directly so if you want to add a foreign key to a table you can do so yourself quite easily in this way.
Below is a screen shot I took while I was experimenting today.
Conclusions
Although the actual MySQL server is now very easy to set up and control on the Mac there is still a shortage of good GUIs out there. ATM there is only one that I would recomend over the classic phpMyAdmin route and that is YourSQL.