NathanDrew.org

Ever wanted to use the simplicity of Bonjour on your home network but don’t have a zillion squid spare to spend on an entirely mac based collection of computers? Well if you’re like me and tend to end up fixing up previously used computers and making them useful again then you’d probably either leave Windows on them (yeah right) or stick a distribution of Linux on to test it out.

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.

Right, if any of you own a Mac with Leopard on it… AVOID GLOWFORM FIREWALL LIKE THE PLAGUE. Yes its my fault for trying it out without reading other people’s comments on http://osx.iusethis.com before installing it but in my curiosity I just went ahead and tried it.

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.

OK so call me paranoid but I don’t trust much to do with the internet and am paranoid about things like using unencrypted wireless networks, even if I’m not doing internet banking on a public network. Since I’m staying in a hotel with just such a network I wanted to see if there was a way to protect my connection…

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.

I thought this advert was awesome!

Beware – the dangers of “Man Flu” – an horrific strain of the seemingly tame common cold…
 

You have been warned…