tin-men is the part-time home of Graham Gilbert; a 24 year old geek who loves nothing more than geeking out about web stuff and Apple kit - which is kind of handy, since that happens to be what he does for a living. He also has the annoying habit of talking in the third person.
Maybe. I just don’t have tome for this anymore. I’m still on twitter, you can keep up with what I’m up to work wise at grahamgilbert.com and I’ll possibly come back to this once life slows down a little, but for now I think I’m going to have to put this one to bed.
Although I’ll probably think of a killer idea for a post next week…
When I started looking after Apple servers, I quickly learnt one thing:
Most of the built in services are rubbish.
I’ll admit, that’s quite a bold statement. Of course, there are plenty of things Mac OS X Server does very well (disclaimer: I’ve yet to try 10.6 Server, I’m referring to 10.5 Server here). We use AFP, SMB and DNS (for our internal DNS servers) and they work very well.
There are however, a couple of services that we use every day that are are positively prehistoric:
FTP
We needed an FTP solution for “real people”. These are the average users who just needed to send a large file to someone. Sure, the built in FTP server does the job, but it requires two things to happen. Firstly, you need to train your user on how to use an FTP application. Admittedly, not too hard as most of the Mac FTP clients are hardly any different from the Finder. The second is much harder. You need to rely on the recieving party to have an FTP client. This proved to be the major stumbling block. Enter Rumpus. The first major plus for it (apart from the easiest installation process I’ve ever been through for an FTP server!) is that is has a very simple to use web interface. It’s much easier to tell your users to just go to a web page, log in and click on “Upload files” than it is to teach them to use an FTP client.
Secondly, they have an awesome tutorial on setting up a “Drop Ship” – a form that only requires the user to choose the files they wish to send, put in the receiving party’s email address and click Upload. The files are uploaded, and an email is sent out containing a link to download the file through their web browser – no FTP clients, no logging in, just a simple link. And of course, if they want to use a traditional FTP client, then they can.
Mail
When I first started here, we were running the built in mail service that comes with Tiger. It was awful. It crashed regularly (to be fair, that was probably due to the failings of the previous IT person here), webmail was next to useless, when things did go wrong the logs were virtually non existent, there was no easy way to back up the mail store (and is there anything more important these days than a company’s email?) and finally, there’s no freakin’ “Out of Office” without some serious hacking. None of these shortcomings were solved by simply moving to 10.5 Server, so something more drastic needed to happen.
I’d used Kerio Mailserver at a previous client and it had worked well. It had everything we were lacking with the built in mail, plus full Exchange like features such as shared calendaring (although we’re yet to move from Meeting Maker – and don’t even talk to me about iCal Server. Have you ever used it? Absolute junk.) and shared contacts. Add in the stupidly simple setup procedure, and we were sold.
So there you go. Apple would do well to learn from these products.
For the past month or so I’ve been working on a little idea I had. I thought it would we cool if you could search twitter, delicious and google all at the same time. So, I made findth.at.
What does it do exactly? Well, the fine points are obviously supar sekrit (although I’m open to cash offers if you want to buy the software!), but basically it works like this:
I have been asked “what’s your pitch?”. To be honest, I don’t have one. I’d love to take findth.at further (to the point of it being my full time job if possible), but that’s not why I made it. I use it as my primary search engine now over google – it’s a lot better at keeping up with breaking news, generally finds cooler stuff and well, I made it so I’m a bit biased.
To quote the about page “…but we think people are just a little better” – and they are. Google might have all these really clever ways of finding stuff, but people only tweet about or bookmark stuff that they think is relevant. We just leverage all their big juicy brains.
Anyway, after two blog entries in two days I’m feeling a little giddy, so go over and have a look at findth.at (ta!). And please get in touch if you want to advertise on there, or if you’re a web 2.0 bigwig and want to talk about how we can take findth.at further.
I’ve been hankering after a smaller mac for quite some time now after finding my MacBook Pro a bit too heavy to lug around all the time. I need to keep my MacBook Pro as my main day to day machine (FireWire, optical drive and 4Gb of RAM being the main reasons), so selling it to fund a new machine was out of the question.
I looked at both the MacBook (not much lighter than my MacBook Pro) and the MacBook Air (how much?!) but they were quickly ruled out. With Apple having decided that they aren’t going to sell me a small laptop for a sensible price, it became clear I needed to go down the murky path of the hackintosh. [Read more →]
I ran into a problem at work today; a user was unable to save any MS Office file to an AFP share that she clearly had access to. All other file types worked fine, but she was getting a permission denied error with Office files. After a bit of googling, it turns out that that Office saves it’s temporary files in /.TemporaryItems/folders. (local UID) /TemporaryItems where the local UID is the user’s unique ID on their local mac.
By default, the first user account created on a mac is 501, the second 502 and so on. The problem starts when you have multiple users with the same UID on their mac using the same volume – they’re unable to access their own TemporaryItems folder as someone else is the owner.
There are two solutions:
So here’s how to fix it on Leopard (the principle is the same in tiger, but you use NetInfo instead):
That should be it. I’ve done this several times now and it’s all worked out fine.