Unduly Noted

This happened soon after the 10.5.6 update came out. Having a stupid moment and not testing the update on one machine I wen’t ahead and upgraded them all from 10.5.5 to 10.5.6. Then I started to notice that when a user would log out it would put up the gray kernel panic screen (reboot your computer by holding down the power button in several different languages). A few solutions. The problem was in 2 folders, the frameworks and the fonts folder in ~/Library (thats /Users/username/Library). If they are deleted you can logout fine. In 1 case that would not fix it so a removal of the entire /Users/username/Library folder did the trick. Don’t worry, when you log back in 10.5 server will repopulate that folder for you.  I did it from the terminal on the server before the user logged in. Just cd into the users directory and type:  sudo rm -r Library
There are some server side tools to mass delete this, or you can just write an automator script to run at logon.

Kind of ugly but it does the trick. If you can’t rip a DVD with anything that you have tried via some sort of new copy protection VLC to the rescue. In VLC go to open disc and choose your dvd. At the bottom of this window you will see a box that says “Streaming/Saving:”. Check that and then open the settings button next to it. Configure what codec/wrapper you would like to use and tell it where you want it to save. Thats it. Watch your movie and stop it when its done. Warning, This thing will keep on recording after the movie is done so you have to babysit or else you will end up with a 100gb mpeg file that needs trimming.

EDIT:
Jut released a version compatible with 3.0 Installed and works great. Don’t even need helper app. Just create ad hoc and connect to it with iphone. Then run iphonemodem3 (addition) on you iphone. less flakey than pdanet even.

OLD EDIT:
As of 3.0 this app would not launch for me - use my guide here for an alternative

From my experience the helper app is flakey. Doesn’t always work or create an adhoc network. Easy solution is to create an adhoc network on your own and name it whatever you like (ex: mynetwork). Now on the iphone connect to that network. Next click the arrow next to the name of the network (on the iPhone). It will take you to a page where it lists your IP address. By default it will be on DHCP. Wait until the IP address self populates. Once it does hit the static button (instead of DHCP) and those numbers should now stick. Now back on your mac go ahead and configure  your socks (port 1080) http and https (port 3128) with the IP from the phone (If using firefox you have to do it in its own preferences under advanced -> Network -> Settings. The same for Windows Firefox). That should do it. Open the iPhonemodem 2 app on the iPhone and it should connect. Now every time you have to connect via iPhone make sure you create a network with the exact same name (ex: mynetwork). The iPhone will automatically assign that static IP to it. If you want to connect to another wireless access point make sure to uncheck the boxes from the earlier steps here. Don’t worry, when you want to go back just check them again, mac os x remembers your config. This also works for windows of course, just make the changes in your network config.

Bonus: iPhoneModem 2 can serve out interent to several computers at once as long as you configre them like above and stay away from the helper app.

ALSO: If you want to tether your iPhone to play games like word of warcraft (WoW) or FFXII or any other MMORPG with this app it is doable. Just download this program called Proxifier (mac and windows). Start up the app and go to “Options” ->”Name Resolution” and check it. Also “Options”->”Proxy Settings” and fill it in with the settings above. I have had great luck with this. Ventrillo even works while in a 10 man raid with an EDGE connection. Granted you get latency of around 600ms but as long as you are not a healer and you don’t have a constant stream of noob chatter, this is doable. Just make sure this app is running before any other apps.

I noticed this problem soon after one of the 10.5 upgrades. Running deepfreze on the macs that were bound to a 2003 AD server. These macs were also dual boot with XP but it doesn’t matter if you have a single boot setup the problem still occurs. After a few days the mac would unbind its self from Active Directory (or Open Directory if you are running 10.5 server). Apparently the mac needs to update the trust account password with the server. So every few days it changes it, but after a reboot deepfreeze of course reverts to the old file making it a bad trust and forcing you to rebind.

Without further ado….

on the UNTHAWED macs….

1. login locally

2. unbind from the directory (you have to unbind or it won’t work)

open terminal and type the following (hit return at the end of each line)

sudo rm -R /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService

sudo dsconfigad -passinterval 0

3. rebind to the directory

4. in the terminal again  (hit return at the end of each line):

sudo cp /Library/Preferences/DirectoryService/ActiveDirectory.plist ~/Desktop

sudo chmod 777 ~/Desktop/ActiveDirectory.plist

4. now open the new file on your desktop in textedit called ActiveDirectory.plist

look for this…

<key>Password Change Interval</key>

<integer>0</integer>

Make sure it reads 0  <—yes that is a zero

if it does……

5. freeze and reboot

this essentially is telling the mac never to change the trust account password.

remember…when you run some of the commands you might not get a confirmation

This was a bear with my macs and an 10.5 open directory server with deep freeze on the clients. I finally removed DF and just used proper group policy restrictions (which I recommend over deep freeze for a lab setting any day). But i revisited the problem when a colleague had the same problem.

So i was being naughty this weekend and getting pcsx2svn (mac) and pcsx2 (windows) running. How to do it will be another post. I needed to convert my FFXII.dmg to a .iso. Although there is an easy way to do this in Leopard with disk utility nothing beats the ease of dragging and dropping the .dmg on an icon….and its done. The program is called ISOlator. Remember, if your .dmg was compressed this is going to make it a little bit bigger. Took about 5 minutes on a 2.4ghz dual core macbook pro 3.7gb image.