tin-men

Apple’s built in services are rubbish

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.

My first hackintosh

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 →]

Saving MS Office files to Apple servers

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:

• To use network login (not practical in this case)
• To give the problem users a new globally unique UID

So here’s how to fix it on Leopard (the principle is the same in tiger, but you use NetInfo instead):

• First make sure you’ve got another Admin user on the system. If there isn’t one, make one. You can delete it after you’ve finished.
• When you’re logged in as the user whose UID you want to change, open Terminal.app and type in “id” (without the quotes) and take note of your current UID (e.g. mine says uid=504(graham), so my UID is 504)
• Still in terminal, type in the following (once again, without the quotes) “dscl . -change /Users/username UniqueID old# new#” so to change my UID from 504 (obtained above) to 2345 I’d enter “dscl . -change /Users/graham UniqueID 504 2345″
• Now log out of that account and log in as the other Admin user. Navigate to the user’s home folder that you’ve just changed the UID of. Right / Control click on it and choose Get Info. In the Sharing & Permissions pane click on the Plus icon and give the user Read / Write access to their home folder.

That should be it. I’ve done this several times now and it’s all worked out fine.

London calling

So, it’s been quite a while since I’ve posted anything on here. Quite a bit has changed in the past four months.

I’ve been at RMStudio for over three months now. I’ve loved every second (well, nearly anyway!).

I’ve picked up an iPhone 3G (I love that too).

And as you may have noticed, I knocked up a new theme because I was bored with the old one. It’s full of javascript-y goodness and as an added bonus, it looks like shite in IE. And I don’t care. They shouldn’t be using the devil’s browser anyway.

So, the job. I’m an all round mac nerd. I do a bit of web stuff, I look after servers, I fix people’s email (“no, click on send, not delete…”). On the whole it’s pretty cool. I’m learning new nerdy stuff every day (ever wondered how Mail.app stores the email addresses you’ve sent mail to? I know more about it than anyone would ever want to, and I also have a series of scripts that will populate that database with email addresses for when people migrate from Entourage and haven’t been using their address book properly – I might do a post on it if anyone cares), and I work with a bunch of cool people. They might be the only people I know who get as excited by the prospect of being able to run OS X Server on a virtual machine as me!

I’ve learnt that I really, truly, deeply hate Adobe Air apps. Thankfully the ones we use here all have a mysql back end, so I can write my own interface to access the data (well, I will be when I stop working until 7-8pm most nights!).

Living in London is pretty cool too. It’s a little impersonal; it feels (and is) much, much bigger than Manchester. There’s loads going on, but I’ve been too busy with work to do anything of note. I am looking forward to meeting up with a few twitter people at the filming of Diggnation next week (must remember to call Nik at some point…).

Well, that was a random post. Sorry about that. I just had a few things buzzing around my head recently and I’ve been annoyed at myself with my lack of blogging.

iPhone 3G

I’m sure I don’t need to inform any of you that the new iPhone was announced yesterday. There was me fully expecting to have to pony up another £269, as well as a more expensive contract, because let’s face it – mobile companies have a bit of a reputation for being greedy buggers.

But get this, O2 have come up with a new business model: (take note Vodafone and the others)

If you don’t shaft your customers, they’re more than happy to spend their money with you.

O2 are going to give me the same amount of texts and minutes, as much 3G data as I can eat (remember it’s twice as fast as EDGE, and EDGE isn’t that bad if we’re honest), and if 3G isn’t fast enough and I need WiFi, I now get BT Openzone as well as The Cloud (which covers pretty much everywhere I will ever go in Manchester and London), all for the same £35 a month. I would have happily paid an extra few quid a month for 3G speed and the Openzone access, but O2 really pulled it off and kept it all at the same price.

And they’re selling the 16Gb model that I’ll be getting for a measly £159 – £110 less than I paid for my original iPhone in November. All they’re asking in return is that I restart the same 18 month contract that I signed up for in November.

So, well done O2. If you and Apple keep this up I’ll more than happily buy a new iPhone every 8 months or so, and you’ve got yourself a customer for life.