The Author – Bart Busschots
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Jan
11
Himmel Bar – Another Great Little Utility for OS X
Filed Under Computers & Tech on January 11, 2006 | 2 Comments
In general I really like the Dock and prefer it to the Windows Start Menu. It’s great for the apps you use a lot but not so great for getting at apps you don’t use often. Well, with Himmel Bar that problem goes away!
[tags]OS X, Himmel Bar[/tags]
Dec
15
JellyfiSSH for OS X – SSH Heaven
Filed Under Computers & Tech on December 15, 2005 | Leave a Comment
OS X comes with SSH built in but it is command line only and gives you no easy way to store all your bookmarks or customise your SSH windows. For your average user this is probably not a problem but when you have to SSH to as many servers as I do it becomes a real shortcoming. However, after much googling I found the answer – JellyfiSSH for OS X.
First things first, you can get JellyfiSSH from here: www.arenasoftware.com/grepsoft
Needless to say it does the basics like allow you to save hostnames, usernames and tunnels but it also allows you to group your bookmarks and, best of all, to have different window settings for each bookmark. The OS X terminal is very powerful and very configurable so rather than re-inventing the wheel what JellyfiSSH does is to spawn a terminal windows with your settings for you and then send the SSH command for your bookmark to that terminal.
Because the OS X terminal lets you set a background image this means you can set your backgrounds to different things for each server. I did up a template with the GIMP so my SSH shells now all have the name of the server in huge writing on the background and in the case of the servers here at work I’ve colour-coded them to have a red background if they are production servers and a blue background if they are fail-over/test/development servers. Basically, if I see red I take extra care because one slip-up could bring the entire campus network crashing down around us all! The other nice thing about this is that our servers in work are not called after their function because stuff gets moved from server to server all the time but by their hostnames which are all trees/fruits. Since I only started work here a few weeks ago I still get very confused as to what is what so I’ve added the function to the background image too so at a glance I can see that Larch is the production mail server etc.
Once you get everything set up just the way you like it you’ll never understand how you lived without it! Anyhow, below are some screen-shots from my system to show JellyFiSSH in action.
The Basic JellyfiSSH GUI
The Extended JellyfiSSH GUI
JellyfiSSH in Action
Dec
7
SSH via a Socks proxy on OS X with connect.c
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on December 7, 2005 | 15 Comments
NOTE: tested on OS X 10.7 Lion, works fine!
These instructions are for setting up a mac to use connect.c to get SSH through a SOCKS proxy. If you are not using OS X this may still be of some use to you because connect.c will compile on Windows and *nix as well. If you’re in the NUIM oncampus accommodation and are having problems SSHing this could be the answer to your problems!
The first step is to get a copy of connect.c and compile it. The website contains instructions for doing this on other platforms but for the mac use:
gcc connect.c -o connect -lresolv
This will spool out a ream of warnings but don’t worry about that.
Then you have to copy this to a folder in the path and set up the correct permissions:
sudo cp connect /usr/bin sudo chmod 555 /usr/bin/connect sudo chown root:wheel /usr/bin/connect
At this stage connect.c is installed, you now need to tell SSH to use this proxy for any servers you want to connect to that is outside the campus.
To do this you need to add lines of this form to ~/.ssh/config:
Host xxx.yyy.com ProxyCommand connect -a none -S socks.yyy.com %h %p
The example above is for connection to xxx.yyy.com, you’ll need pairs like this for each host you want to connect to. You should separate the pairs with a bank line.
That’s it, you can now ssh as normal and ssh will use the SOCKS proxy.
ssh [email protected]
Nov
19
Synergy on OS X – the easy way
Filed Under System Administration, Computers & Tech on November 19, 2005 | 6 Comments
If you have multiple machines on your desk and you are fed up of having a mess of keyboards and mice all over the place then Synergy is just the thing you need. What makes Synergy even better is that it works cross-platform so you can share a single keyboard and mouse between Linux, OS X, any Unix and even crappy old Windows!
To find out more about installing synergy on non-OS X platforms or
about the practicalities of setting up a Synergy server checkout
Synergy’s home page: http://synergy2.sourceforge.net/
The synergy home page allows you to download binaries for OS X but that package literally gives you just the executable file for the server and client and nothing more. If you want Synergy to be easier to use and install on OS X don’t get it from the Synergy website, get Synergy KM instead.
SynergyKM gives you a nice Synergy icon on the Menu Bar to allow you to easily see and change Synergy’s state (see screen first shot below). SynergyKM also adds an extra panel to your System Preferences to allow you to configure Synergy both as a client and a server (see second screen shot).
You can get SynergyKM here: http://software.landryhetu.com/synergy/
Addendum – 24-11-05
For some reason when you are using Synergy to connect your Mac to another keyboard and mouse and you have a hot-corner set up to lock the screen it doesn’t work while Synergy is on. If you turn-off synergy it works fine. for the last week I’ve been turning off Synergy each time I wanted to lock my computer and that’s just not ideal at all so I did some Googling on the matter and found a good solution.
You can get a padlock icon to appear in your Menu Bar and when you click on that one of the options in the menu is "Lock Screen" (see first figure below). This will allow you to lock your screen even while using Synergy. Getting this padlock is a little counter intuative but here goes:
- Open the "Keychain Access" program in your Applications/Utilities folder
- Open the prefferences for this app (Keychain Access -> Preferences)
- I nthe "General" pane check the checkbox labled "Show Status in Menu Bar"
Simple as that!
Aug
14
OSXPM – How did I ever do without it!?
Filed Under Computers & Tech on August 14, 2005 | Leave a Comment
Something that I always thought was a bit wrong with OS X was that there seemed to be no way of un-installing a .pkg file once you installed it. As a result I tended to avoid software that used .pkgs and instead opt for software that used the more standard OS X technique of being entirely encapsulated in a .app file with no installer. Not anymore thanks to OSXGNU.org!
OSXGNU.org have created a nice COCA GUI to allow you to easily install and more importantly un-install .pkg files. It is an absolute must have and comes it self as a .pkg and installs it self in the Applications folder under Utilities.
You can download it here: http://old.osxgnu.org/software/Utils/OSXGNU/
Here is a screenshot from their webpage:
