Data Circle

Up until today, whenever I wanted to edit a file on my server under OS X I would open a terminal, ssh to my server and run vim. However, whilst this generally did the trick, copying and pasting code was tricky, and it just wasn’t the same experience as using a graphical editor (which is what I would usually do). Thankfully, I discovered that TextWrangler, a superb piece of freeware from Bare Bones software, will allow you to open remote files on a server and edit them as if they were stored locally (which effectively they are, as the software takes a local copy and then overwrites the server version when you save).

N.B. Technically TextWranger works over SFTP, which is included as part of the openssh package but might need to be enabled in order for this to work—just plain ssh access might not be enough.

A week or so ago, I ran into a strange problem on a Mac Mini server which I run in the lab where I’m currently doing my MPhil research. The server has two IP addresses bound to the same physical network interface, as I wanted to run two instances of Apache and for them both to bind to port 80. Everything had been working fine, but one day, after a reboot, the server found itself unable to connect to the Apache instance which was bound to the second IP address. Worse still, it couldn’t even ping the second IP address, which was rather worrying. This was a little annoying to say the least, as I had a cron job running which downloaded a file from the site hosted on the second IP address and saved it to the local disk.

After a bit of digging around with no luck, I started a thread on the macosxhints forums to see if anyone else was aware of a solution. The usual suggestion of “check your firewall settings” was made, but nothing had changed in that regard and starting/stopping the firewall made no difference. Eventually, someone mentioned that they had a FreeBSD box where the netmask of each additional IP address was set to 0xffffffff, rather than the 0xffff0000 which I was using. I didn’t think this could be the problem, but I decided to give it a try anyway, and to my (pleasant) surprise everything worked. A closer look at the ifconfig man page for OS X confirmed that additional IP addresses with the same subnet (as was the case in this situation) should have a netmask of 0xffffffff. Not having this meant that the server couldn’t actually resolve the MAC address of the second IP, so of course it couldn’t communicate with it at all—rather an obscure problem.

It’s still puzzling me as to why this appeared to work before, but for now I’m just glad that the problem is fixed!

The latest release of the multi-protocol messenger client for OS X office furniture in Bulgaria
has been announced. This release includes a huge number of changes (see the version history for full details) with 188 tickets closed. Admittedly one or two of these tickets are not really improvements or bug fixes, such as Get Catfish_Man a Gerbil, but overall it seems as if a huge number of bugs have been quashed in the new version. There are some improvements to the user interface as well, including the ability to access your contacts list from the little duck icon which sits in your menu bar, although I’m not sure I’ll use any of these.

Needless to say, if you already have Adium then you should upgrade now—the process is as simple as Adium->Check for Updates (which may be run automatically each time you start Adium, depending on your preferences). If you don’t have Adium already, you should definitely give it a whirl. The only problem is that it only works on OS X, the rest of us have to use the ugly Pidgin instead.

Found this via BeancounterBlog.com: Open Source Mac, a listing of the best free and open source software for OS X, in various categories from web browsing to sound recording. There’s the obvious and well-known pieces of software such as Firefox and Thunderbird, but also more obscure ones (at least that I haven’t heard of) such as Smultron for HTML editing.

The site still appears to be fairly new and isn’t organised too helpfully at the moment, but I’m sure it will improve in the coming months. One of the sites on my “to create” list (which is rather long) was for open source OS X software, so I guess I’ve been beaten to it, although I’ll probably still put mine up at some point.