One thing worth noting as Diver Guy mentions, if you’re using a Mac then the settings for XMarks won’t be where you expect them to be… Normally they’d be under the preferences within Safari itself but they’ve decided to keep the settings outside and place them as a preference pane option within System Preferences.

Simply click on the preference pane and soon enough the wizard will start to take you through the setup of your account.

Personally I’ve been very fickle with browsers – with the most light weight or fast one usually winning my favour, Google Chrome won my attention away from FireFox in Windows, and Safari’s speed was the main reason for use on my Mac. Unfortunately there is no Google Chrome version of XMarks yet, and I’m not sure if it is planned but given that Chrome isn’t out on the Mac properly yet but the cross browser syncrhonization is a huge plus if you’re as fickle as me!

$ sudo su -
sudo: /etc/sudoers is owned by gid 121, should be 0

This is not a problem if you have a root password set up but if you don’t – e.g. if you’re running a Ubuntu like distribution (I’m using Mint at the moment) then chances are, you don’t have a root password set up and dont ever log in directly to root. So, cursed with the chicken and egg scenario of needing sudo privileges to fix sudo, you’re left with booting into a live CD or restarting in recovery mode.

Or are you…? There are alternatives like using kdsu or kdsudo I think but that means you have to have had them installed already. What if you don’t? Well, if you’re an admin user then log in to gnome, run the User Settings program and you can still use the unlock button and then edit the root user and give it a new password!!

Mint Linux User Settings

Then you can obviously fix the permissions after switching user to root:

su - root
chown root:root /etc/sudoers

I’ve not seen this as a solution in my brief hunt around google so I thought I’d share it with the net…

Here’s how I did it…

1. Get the code
2. Set up the router
3. Send the packet

1) Get the code

Paul Mutton has put up some Java code that allows you to send a Wake On LAN packet. Now the great thing about Java, as everyone knows, is that it is cross platform so all you need is Java to be installed to be able to run the code.

Now, if like me you’re perhaps worried about bots etc on the net that poke around on known internet ports as they crawl the internet, you might want to change the port number that is exposed to the internet so that its a bit more difficult for someone or somebot to work out that it can send a Wake On LAN packet to the address. I know that you need to also specify the MAC address when you send the packet but I just like the extra layer of disguise.

So, open up the WakeOnLan.java file and edit the following line to a port number that you want to use:

WakeOnLAN Port Number Code

There is no change you need to make to the target ‘sleepy’ computer – port 9 is still the port that will be used to wake it up, but we’ll convert the port 9 to port N that you’ve chosen to expose to the internet at the router level (See next step).

Compile the code by opening a command line up to the location of the WakeOnLan.java file and type:

javac WakeOnLan.java

This should create a WakeOnLan.class file so check that there were no errors and that the file was created.

2) Set up the router

Right, now this bit is going to be specific to your router but here’s what you need to do:

1. Make sure that your ‘sleepy’ computer is known to the router and either has the same IP assigned to it every time locally OR that the router is intelligent enough to map the firewall rule to the same device each time, regardless of which IP it dishes out to it.
2. Set up the firewall rule to map your chosen exposed port to port 9 on the ‘sleepy’ computer.

For me, I have an O2 Thomson Router (TG585v7) some people on the internet have described that they’ve had to telnet to the router and set up arpadd, this is necessary to enable the permanent routing of the wake packet  even after the computer has been off for a long time (see below).

Here’s how I’ve set it up on my router, if you’re using a different router you’ll have to try something similar:

1. Go to the router web page and navigate to Toolbox > Game & Application Sharing.
2. Click “Create a new Game or Application”
3. Name it as you like, I’ve called mine WoL
   

   Firewall Rule Name

   Be sure to select “Manual Entry of Port Maps”

4. Select UDP and enter in the exposed port number range in the first boxes and the target port of 9.
   

   Port Range

   I’ve used 12345 as an example port exposed to the internet here, but use whichever port you’ve chosen. Click Add when you’re done.

5. Now we need to assign this rule to the ‘sleepy’ computer… Click on “Assign Game or Application” near the bottom of the page:
   

   Assign firewall rule link

6. Assign the newly create rule to the computer you want to wake and click Add
   

   Select device

7. You’ll have to define a static ARP entry on the router, just creating a static IP from within the GUI wasn’t enough for me – after a while if the ‘sleepy’ computer was off-line then the Wake packet seemed to have no effect. I think this is because of the dynamic nature of the router perhaps marking the device as down and no longer forwarding packets. Anyway, based on a similar issue to here, this is what you need to do:

telnet o2wirelessbox.lan
Username:SuperUser
(Google for the password)
menu
[ip]
arplist

(If there is an entry for your device then use arpdelete to remove it first)

arpadd
Select intf and hit return
Use the down arrow to select LocalNetwork and hit return
Fill out the IP and MAC address also

When done, type arplist and see that there is an entry with STATIC listed

NOTE: I had this gotcha when I had to redo this on my router after a hard reset… You need to have your target machine powered down once you delete the ARP entry, otherwise it gets assigned another one dynamically – so beware of this if you find that your new entry is still DYNAMIC rather than STATIC.

If you don’t make sure it is STATIC then the route times out after a while and your WOL packet won’t get sent on.

8. Tab to cancel to exit the menu
9. Type “saveall” to persist the configuration after a reboot
10. Type “exit” to log out of the telnet session.
11. Done!

3) Send the packet

So hopefully, the router rule is set up with the same port that you’ve coded into the Java class and are ready to send the packet from the internet to the router.

I’ve set up a DynDNS address so that I don’t have to find out the IP address every time. Most modern routers support the ability to update a Dynamic DNS service such as DynDNS, it will mean that you don’t need to know the IP and it will automatically get updated should your internet connection be reset for any reason.

So, the information you need to be able to send the packet using the ‘customised’ code is:

1. The external IP address of the router OR the Dynamic DNS address that you’ve set up
2. The MAC address of the network card that’s listening for a Wake on LAN packet on your ‘sleepy’ computer

Upload the code you compiled in step 1) to a computer you’ll be using from outside the local network and execute the code from the command line in the folder you’ve placed the code. For example:

java WakeOnLan your.dyndns.address 00:11:22:33:44:AA

You can swap the dynamic address above for the IP address if you wish.

Next step – give the box some time to boot up!

Summary

If you’re setting this up at home and have remote access to a computer outside of your local network, it will help you to be able to test and verify that things are working. You can use the external computer to send the Wake on LAN packet from the outside and watch to see if the computer actually wakes up.

I hope this post is useful to anyone trying the same, I’ve written it up mainly for my own benefit to remember how to do it next time around but let me know in the comments if you’ve found a better way for your set up. I personally like the Java code approach as I can run it anywhere and don’t have to install a program to the external computer that’s doing the waking; I use a variety of computers with differing operating systems so I like the light-weight approach

Firefox 3.5 4gb addons

Anyone else see this odd one when upgrading from Firefox 3.0 to 3.5? Everything went smoothly despite the description of 4gb addons and they were all updated but thought this was an odd one…

My first impression of Firefox 3.5 is that it is still a bloated beast when compared to Google Chrome or Safari 4. The load times for the application itself seems sluggish still, Chrome opens in an instant and I think Safari is a mid ground between the two. It’s all a bit speculative as I’ve not done a proper test but they’re my impressions anyway.

I’ve become very fickle with browsers and use whatever suits my mood but when it comes to work I use Chrome and Firefox if I have to because of some compatibility issues on a few sites for Chrome. For home use I tend to use Safari 4 at the moment but I have Firefox 3.5 and even Flock installed, though I don’t even remember the last time that was fired up!

I look forward to when XMarks is available for Safari 4 as it will help maintain my favourites across systems and browsers, its a shame Chrome isn’t even on the list yet though!

Up until now, you might notice I’ve left out a certain (pointless) browser out of the picture but I feel I have to mention it purely because of the rediculously comical PR stunt as shown at lifehacker! Hilariously they believe that IE8 is more secure, private and reliable than Firefox or Chrome, all I can say is HAHAHA Microsoft are branching out as global comedians. Thanks for the laughs lol

Well, I remembered that the beta stored a ridiculous amount of cache for the top sites previews and thought, hrm I wonder if thats the cause… turns out it was (at least for me anyway!). You can clear out the cache in the official release by going to the Safari menu > Reset Safari and selecting the options below.

Safari 4 Reset Top Sites and Clear the preview cache

Of course you can select more if you want to.

Facebook loaded much faster, as did iGoogle. Not sure how efficient the public release will be at maintaining a tidy web page preview cache but the above steps not only made the pages load faster, it stopped the errors I was getting for some reason – I can only guess that Safari was having a hard time trawling through the cache and gave up the ghost and pretended it didn’t have a connection by timing out… that’s just my guess obviously.

Anyway hope this helps anyone else who has a similar problem.

By old I mean AMD 475Mhz old and when it eventually loaded up the installer it got so far as partitioning the disks and then failed! I thought it must be yet another hardware issue so gave up for a while. I tried again and this time booted into the live cd and tried to partition it manually – it failed with the following:

/dev/hda1 is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!

So, did a bit of digging about and it seems like its a long standing issue in some installations of Ubuntu based installs, but there is a fix that worked for me and to save anyone else that might be looking to fix this error I’ll post it here so you dont have to sift through forums or bug reports to find it:

From the bug report here:

vi /lib/partman/commit.d/30parted
Put ‘update-dev’ right after close_dialog.

#!/bin/sh

. /lib/partman/definitions.sh
for dev in $DEVICES/*; do
    [ -d "$dev" ] || continue
    cd $dev

    open_dialog IS_CHANGED
    read_line is_changed
    close_dialog
    [ "$is_changed" = yes ] || continue

    disable_sap "$dev"

    open_dialog COMMIT
    close_dialog
    update-dev
    done

Thanks to my friend Spode I tried out Mint Linux on my old Laptop (HP dv2054ea) and started wondering how well I could integrate it with my Mac.

Mac’s have a nice discovery service called Bonjour which will look for devices that are advertised using Bonjour. There is an open source version called Avahi – this will allow you to use Linux to advertise services that you want to share from your Linux box – such as afp based file share (where Netatalk comes in).

Now this is where you need to be careful – Mac’s will require encryption to let you connect up to any file shares and so you need to do a bit of compiling with ssl enabled of the netatalk package. There is a blog post by someone who’s set up his share’s so that you can even use your linux box as a remote time machine (similar to Apple’s time capsule).

Since I already have a time capsule, I didn’t need to set up all of the things suggested there but most of it applied to what I needed and all in one page!

The “ndrew’s rem…” below minty is the VNC connection advertised from the avahi daemon running on ‘minty’ (the Linux Laptop). I’m pretty sure I didn’t have to define that in avahi, it just advertised it.

So, if you want to set this up, go follow the relevant parts on the article at kremalicious.com.

Big mistake, apple discussion forums and comments on iusethis all say that it breaks Leopard. It doesn’t just temporarily break things, in my case I installed it, ran it, it crashed, then every other program running crashed, then i couldn’t log out or restart! Only thing left was to hold the power button and try and restart and uninstall.

Well that didn’t work because on boot up, you can’t get past the blue screen before the login window. Most people with this problem have managed to safe boot their mac and delete the application files. Just my luck that I can’t even get that far!

So yes, avoid this software completely! More fool me for thinking that I could need more than the OS X built in firewall. Thankfully I have everything backed up on my time machine so I’ll just wipe and restore when I dig up the Leopard install DVD.

I almost don’t want to post the icon of this page but I think it deserves to be shown so you know to associate this logo with MacMurder…

Update: I called up applecare who told me of another little keyboard shortcut for startup – the ALT a.k.a Option key. This asked for my firmware password then allowed me to select the Leopard install disk. From there you can select Utilities > Restore System From Backup and use your Time Machine to restore the system completely.

It’s going to take a while (3 and half hours) but at least it will be restored! No idea why on my particular issue, none of the other startup key commands would work.

So I googled for free vpn and somewhere down the list this blog caught my eye and had a link to Anchor Hotspot (funnily enough his last name is Drew too – Bill Drew). There are versions for Windows and Mac too and basically it connects you to a free VPN.

It provides a means to encrypt the data between you and any other people listening out on the unencrypted network. It does say that it encrypts the data between you and the wireless router but I’m not sure if it goes further into an external network!

Either way it protects users from listening to exactly what you’re doing on unencrypted pages if they’re sitting in the same cafe or hotel.

Update: It appears to have stopped working for me – both on the public wifi I was using and also trying it out on my local home network. This product isn’t quite refined enough for reliable use, leaving me to look into setting up my own VPN as an alternative for safe public wifi use on a Mac…

Update 2: It would seem that theres a 3Gb a month limit – still the software doesn’t tell you this when it fails to work – it just seems its broken.

Now THATS extreme testing…