LCFG repository access on a Mac

Mac OS X Leopard’s subversion client (as of 10.5.6), or more accurately its subversion client’s dependency library libneon, appears to be slightly broken when used with Kerberised WebDAV.

As you’d expect, subversion 1.6 as provided by MacPorts does not have this flaw.

This blog entry (LI Tech Blog » Patching neon on OS X 10.5 for GSSAPI authenticated SubVersion) provides a solution to the problem.  In summary: patch or replace libneon.

An interesting point is that the Mac build of the ‘pysvn’ subversion libraries does not appear to have been affected by this bug.

VMWare MAC override

Quick reminder:

To allow a VMware guest to use a “real” MAC for one of its emulated network adaptors (specifically one outwith VMware’s own manufacturer range allocated for virtual machines) one need only add the following to its .vmx file:

ethernet0.checkMACAddress = "FALSE"
ethernet0.addressType = "static" 
ethernet0.address = "<new MAC>"

 

Interesting edit (22-Apr):

It appears that, although this prevents VMware restricting MACs to within its ‘manual’ range (00:50:56:[00-3F]:*), this is not sufficient to allow assignment of addresses within the VMware ‘automatic’ range (00:0C:29:*). VMware simply ignores any statically assigned MACs in this range, instead reverting to the generated MAC within that range (removing the ‘generatedAddress’ resource is not sufficient to override this). I’m still not sure if this is by accident or design.

gnome-mount without GUI

Just because I use twm, doesn’t mean I don’t want user-space mounting. So I use gnome-mount without invoking the whole gnome desktop environment. It appears impenetrable from the shell (though its man page is somewhat more useful).

The key is in the ‘-t -v’ options, which enable verbose console output rather than the useless X dialogs.

A simple mounting example:

$ gnome-mount -tv -d /dev/sdb1 [-m mountlabel]

where /dev/sdb1 is your device to mount, and mountlabel will be a subdirectory of /media (often ‘disk’ by default).

gnome-umount works in the same way:

$ gnome-umount -tv -m mountlabel

There’s plenty more configuration to be had, but sometimes you just want to look at a disk.

Adding a form to webmark

Webmark is my slightly hacked-together system for producing PDFs from a Web Form. As it was intended to be entirely stateless, single-use, and to require no connection between input and output, except for some fields, it was never designed to hold schema information or metadata, so there’s a little duplication of effort in adding a form to the system. Still, it was designed so that this task could be done with zero code modification.

Continue reading

Passive Monitoring

Familiar?

Profile Translation WARNING 1/4 WARNING: Service checked passively

If you’re getting this warning for a service which is checked passively by default, the solution is simple: just disable active checking!

It seems as if a more appropriate message would be something along the lines of “WARNING: cannot perform active checking” or similar. Still, now I know, if it saves someone else attempting to re-enable every option three times over… or reading documentation…

offlineimap and alpine

Edit: The future is here! I’ve shortened my wishlist since OfflineIMAP now supports the IDLE command.

Further Edit: Kerberos instructions for Mac OS now available

For some time I’ve been meaning to make use of some sort of mail caching, in order to use my favourite email client whilst offline.  The end result of this process is that my incoming mail now takes a somewhat circuitous route of:

imap server
  |
offlineimap - local uw-imapd - alpine
                    |
               local cache

on my laptop.

Continue reading