BIGSEA News

m1n1wall

Scott Girard — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 06:24:59 GMT

Netgate is offering a nice M0n0wall-based firewall for about $200. It seems to be a new item, because when the Soekris and WRAP boards went end-of-life, Netgate was forced to drop their M1n1wall products. It's nice to see the M1n1wall is back.

m0n0wall

Scott Girard — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:52:47 GMT

m0n0wall is a really nice open source packet filtering firewall. It is designed to run on a firewall appliance. Learn more about m0n0wall here: m0n0wall

Install Drupal on Signature Hosting Accounts

Scott Girard — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 17:38:16 GMT

Here's a quick tip for installing Drupal on a Signature hosting account.

Follow the installation instructions on the Drupal site, but before you run the install script, modify your sites/default/settings.php file like this:

Fill in your database connection details in the following line:

$db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/database';

Then fill the following line about the URL of your Drupal installation:

$base_url = '';

Save the settings.php file, then run the installer script.

I found this tip here.

Desktopple

Scott Girard — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:43:29 GMT

Desktopple is a cool donationware application for quickly clearing your desktop for a screenshot, presentation, or to just make you feel better about your lack of organization skills.

After launching Desktopple, you will see a new menu bar item that triggers a toggle from messy desktop to a clean slate. Messy to clean, clean to messy. It's fun just to see it work.

Try Desktopple and see what I mean.

Host-Tracker

Scott Girard — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 14:29:11 GMT

Host-Tracker is a free web-based service for monitoring remote web servers.

Simply set up an account, set your preferences and the servers you want to monitor, and Host-Tracker will monitor your servers and send you email reports of server uptime (or downtime).

It's a nice, clean, simple service that makes you wonder "Where's the catch?"

OS X Tiger More Sticky Menu Problems-- and a Solution!

Scott Girard — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 05:25:06 GMT

After installing the latest OS X Tiger security update, the problems I was having on November 13 have returned. But this time, I think I have identified the problem after finding this thread on the Apple OS X Tiger discussion forum.

It turns out I had never installed the Logitech Control Center for my Logitech wireless laser mouse. I just assumed OS X didn't need the additonal software as the mouse had worked fine right out of the box for months.

After downloading and installing the current Logitech Control Center mouse drivers, the problems have gone away.

How to reset Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) in Windows XP

Scott Girard — Sat, 18 Nov 2006 04:53:07 GMT

I was having difficulty getting a friend's Windows XP laptop connected through his new BellSouth FastAccess DSL router, and after trying everything I knew, I threw in the towell and called BellSouth FastAccess technical support.

The strange thing was that the laptop could connect to the router, it just couldn't route through it. Using ipconfig, I could see that the gateway was incorrect, but I could not figure out why. The laptop was configured to get its network config from the DSL router using DHCP, but I could not see any settings on the router that would give a 192.168.0.1 gateway address (the correct gateway address is 192.168.1.254).

I spent about an hour on the phone with the BellSouth tech and I thought I had him stumped when he came back to the phone and said we could try one more thing. He walked me through the command to reset TCP/IP on Windows, and it worked. Here is the command we used:

netsh int ip reset resetlog.txt

I did a little research and found this page which describes the very thing. Cool.

I need to give the BellSouth FastAccess techs more credit. They really do know their stuff.

10.4.8 Software Update

Scott Girard — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 19:51:18 GMT

A week or two ago Software Update updated my system to Mac OS X 10.4.8 and while at first everything seemed to be OK, I started noticing some wierd behavior.

My mouse pointer would never turn into the pointy-finger when I moused over a link in Safari. I could still click the links, but sometimes it was hard to figure out what was a link, and what wasn't. Also, the status bar in Safari would not show any link locations. I often hover over a link location and look at the status bar to see where the link will lead. After the update, I couldn't do that anymore.

The menus in the Finder lost their flexy-stickyness-- that is, if I clicked on a menu name, the menu would drop down and stick, but when I moved my mouse to the next menu item, the first menu would stay stuck down, and the next menu would not open until I clicked it.

My screensaver hot corners stopped working. I would move my mouse to a hot corner, and no screensaver. I tried resetting the hot corners in the System Preferences, but no dice.

My machine would not stay asleep, instead deciding on its own when it should be awake. Not unlike my 5 year-old son used to do.

Today, I found a solution. I had seen a comment somewhere that using the full installer for 10.4.8 could solve these types of issues. So, I downloaded the 10.4.8 updater from the Apple Support site, mounted the disk image, and started the installer. After the system rebooted, my mouse was back to it's good old self. Whew.

ScreenCastsOnline: Video Tutorials for the Mac

Scott Girard — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 18:06:29 GMT

ScreenCastsOnline provides high-quality video tutorials for Mac users. The tutorials cover a variety of software applications and are updated weekly.

It can be much easier to learn and understand new concepts when you can see them demonstrated with good verbal instruction.

Check it out: ScreenCastsOnline can be downloaded directly from the screencastsonline.com web site, or through iTunes.

Try YouSendIt for large file transfers

Scott Girard — Wed, 20 Sep 2006 16:14:20 GMT

I once brought down our university mail server while trying to send a 50MB PowerPoint presentation to myself in preparation for that evening's case study.

Needless to say, the IT Admins were not happy, nor were the Professors or my classmates who lost the ability to use email while we waited for the IT folks to arrive and fix the problem.

It was only then that I learned that large email attachments are not a good thing.

I sometimes have clients who request the ability to send large email attachments, but our servers limit email attachment file sizes to 10MB, and even with smaller attachments something chokes along the way and the message fails.

Enter YouSendIt. YouSendIt is a simple, browser based interface for uploading files to a repository where they can later be retrieved by the recipient. My guess is they are using http uploads rather than email attachments, but the technical details are irrelevant-- YouSendIt is just an easy way to move large files around the Internet.