If you didn’t know, iCloud has a really neat feature that allows it to act just like dropbox. If you activate the “Document & Data” synching option in the iCloud pref panel, it allows you to sync any file using iCloud. This is contrary to what Apple is selling the service as being just for “Custom” Apps that have the iCloud feature (i.e.: keynote, numbers, etc.).

So here is how you take advantage of this. Once you’ve turned on the feature in the preferences panel, you open up Finder. Hold down the “option/alt” key and from the finder menus choose “Go/Library“. This should land you in your not so secret Library directory. You need to hold down the option key to see this, since OSX Lion hides the users Library directory by default. Now in the Finder window find the “Mobile Documents” folder (and if you like) drag it to the favourites list in Finder (in the left pane). Done. Now whatever file you save into “Mobile Documents” folder from any application will “sync” with all the other mac’s you’ve setup with this feature. You can treat it like your “free” 5GB dropbox account.

I got a request to add mcrypt support to our Leopard server today and here is a brief step-by-step installation instruction. This works well under the current 10.5.8 server installation. It should also work for 10.6 (snow leopard), but I have not tried it. Before you start here are the requirements:

• Backup your system
• Install (and update) the latest XCode (I’ve got version 3)
• Install X11 client stuff from your server install DVD
• install X11 SDK stuff from your server install DVD
• Ensure you have server 10.5.8 (latest update as of Feb.04.2011)
• Make sure you have not tried to install mcrypt using another method. We need a “virgin” 10.5.8 install (as far as homebrew/local installs)
• BACKUP

Please note that this will add mcrypt support to php. This is NOT the same as compiling mcrypt.

Okay, so now that we have all the requirements, you need to get a command line window opened and get a root shell (sudo -i). The rest of this document assumes you’re typing the commands in a root shell.

There is one dependency that we need to clear before we actually get down and dirty and that is libmcrypt. Follow the instructions below to get this installed:

mkdir /SourceCache
cd /SourceCache
curl http://sourceforge.net/projects/mcrypt/files/Libmcrypt/2.5.8/libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.bz2/download -o libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.bz2 -L

This is the latest version as of this writing (Feb.04.2011).

NOTE: If you’re compiling on a G5 machine you’ll need to tell the compiler that you want to build/configure for a ppc64 target so instead of the below configure command you need to use this:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 CFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch ppc64 -bind_at_load" ./configure --enable-shared

tar -xjvf libmcrypt-2.5.8.tar.bz2
cd libmcrypt-2.5.8/
./configure
make
make -n install

The last command will simulate the installation process. Make sure the stuff is getting installed in /usr/local/lib

make install

At this point you should have a working installation of libmcrypt. This next command prints out the current version of your php engine. In my case under 10.5.8 it’s php 5.2.14.

server:libmcrypt-2.5.8 root# php -v
PHP 5.2.14 (cli) (built: Oct  6 2010 16:57:10)
Copyright (c) 1997-2010 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies

Grab the appropriate php-5.2.XX.tar.bz2 file from php.net. I just grabbed the stock PHP 5.2.14, since I wanted a perfect match between my php engine and the extension. I transferred the file using sftp to the /SourceCache folder on the server.

NOTE: If you’re compiling on a G5 machine you’ll need to tell the compiler that you want to build/configure for a ppc64 target so instead of the below configure command you need to use this:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 CFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch ppc64  -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS=" -arch ppc64  -bind_at_load" ./configure --with-php-config=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk/usr/bin/php-config

cd /SourceCache
tar xjvf php-5.2.14.tar.bz2
cd /SourceCache/php-5.2.14/ext/mcrypt
phpize
./configure --with-php-config=/Developer/SDKs/MacOSX10.5.sdk/usr/bin/php-config
make
make test
make -n install

The last command will simulate the installation process. Make sure the stuff is getting installed in /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613

make install

Now we need to modify our php.ini file and tell the php5 engine of the availability of this new module. To do this you need to copy php.ini.default to php.ini (in /etc directory). For details of why have a look at this article.

cd /etc
cp php.ini.default php.ini

Edit the newly created/copied php.ini using your favourite editor. Add the following line to the appropriate location (read the comments in the file to find the location):

extension=mcrypt.so

Still in the same file find the variable “extension_dir” and change it’s value to “/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613″ path instead of “./”. Save the php.ini and use the following command to see if mcrypt extensions are available:

server:etc root# php -i |grep mcrypt
mcrypt
mcrypt support => enabled
mcrypt.algorithms_dir => no value => no value
mcrypt.modes_dir => no value => no value

Done. Restart Apache service from the server manager (just for the sake of completeness).

I got a request to add GD support to our Leopard server today and here is a brief step-by-step installation instruction. This works well under the current 10.5.8 server installation. It should also work for 10.6 (snow leopard), but I have not tried it. Before you start here are the requirements:

• Backup your system
• Install (and update) the latest XCode (I’ve got version 3)
• Install X11 client stuff from your server install DVD
• install X11 SDK stuff from your server install DVD
• Ensure you have server 10.5.8 (latest update as of Feb.04.2011)
• Make sure you have not tried to install GD using another method. We need a “virgin” 10.5.8 install (as far as homebrew/local installs)
• BACKUP

Please note that this will add GD support to php. This is NOT the same as compiling the GD graphics library (libgd).

Okay, so now that we have all the requirements, you need to get a command line window opened and get a root shell (sudo -i). The rest of this document assumes you’re typing the commands in a root shell.

There is one dependency that we need to clear before we actually get down and dirty and that is libjpeg (known as jpegsrc). Follow the instructions below to get this installed:

mkdir /SourceCache
cd /SourceCache
curl -O http://www.ijg.org/files/jpegsrc.v8c.tar.gz

This is the latest version as of this writing (Feb.04.2011).

NOTE: If you’re compiling on a G5 machine you’ll need to tell the compiler that you want to build/configure for a ppc64 target so instead of the below configure command you need to use this:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 CFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS="-arch ppc64 -bind_at_load" ./configure --enable-shared

tar -zxvlf jpegsrc.v8c.tar.gz
cd jpeg-8c/
./configure
make
make test
make -n install

The last command will simulate the installation process. Make sure the stuff is getting installed in /usr/local/lib

make install

At this point you should have a working installation of libjpeg. Now we double check our php version.

server:jpeg-8c root# php -v
PHP 5.2.14 (cli) (built: Oct  6 2010 16:57:10)
Copyright (c) 1997-2010 The PHP Group
Zend Engine v2.2.0, Copyright (c) 1998-2010 Zend Technologies

Notice in the output that I have php 5.2.14 installed on the machine (again the latest update as of Feb.04.2011). Apple does not provide source code for this exact version of PHP. On top of that The numbering scheme that they use is weird. On my machine it is “apache_mod_php-44.6″, you can find yours using the following:

server:jpeg-8c root# php -i |more
phpinfo()
PHP Version => 5.2.14

System => Darwin saturn.rcc.ryerson.ca 9.8.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.8.0: Wed Ju
l 15 16:55:01 PDT 2009; root:xnu-1228.15.4~1/RELEASE_I386 i386
Build Date => Oct  6 2010 16:55:34
Configure Command =>  '/SourceCache/apache_mod_php/apache_mod_php-44.6/php/confi
gure'  '--prefix=/usr' '--mandir=/usr/share/man' '--infodir=/usr/share/info' '--
disable-dependency-tracking' '--with-apxs2=/usr/sbin/apxs' '--with-ldap=/usr' '-
-with-kerberos=/usr' '--enable-cli' '--with-zlib-dir=/usr' '--enable-trans-sid'
'--with-xml' '--enable-exif' '--enable-ftp' '--enable-mbstring' '--enable-mbrege
x' '--enable-dbx' '--enable-sockets' '--with-iodbc=/usr' '--with-curl=/usr' '--w
ith-config-file-path=/etc' '--sysconfdir=/private/etc' '--with-mysql-sock=/var/m
ysql' '--with-mysqli=/usr/bin/mysql_config' '--with-mysql=/usr' '--with-openssl'
 '--with-xmlrpc' '--with-xsl=/usr' '--without-pear'

The thing you’re looking for (“apache_mod_php-44.6″) is under Configure Command. If you go to the following URL (http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/apache_mod_php/) in your browser (safari, firefox) you’ll soon discover these weird directory names with numbers that don’t match the php versions. Again, as of this writing (Feb.04.2011), I can’t find apache_mod_php-44.6 folder in the listing so I grabbed the nearest numbers apache_mod_php-44.2 which is php 5.2.8…….close enough. It seems to work. Follow the steps below to get the file and compile the GD portion of it. Remember we’re not recompiling the entire php, just the GD plugin portion.

UPDATE: You CAN install the exact version of your PHP’s GD extension. Instead of grabbing the file from Apple, figure out the version of your PHP using “php -v” and grab the appropriate file from php.net instead. I just recompiled the GD portion of PHP 5.2.14, since I wanted a perfect match between my php engine and the extension. The instructions below (except curl which needs to be modified) work.

NOTE: If you’re compiling on a G5 machine you’ll need to tell the compiler that you want to build/configure for a ppc64 target so instead of the below configure command you need to use this:

MACOSX_DEPLOYMENT_TARGET=10.5 CFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe -no-cpp-precomp" CCFLAGS=" -arch ppc64 -g -Os -pipe" CXXFLAGS="-arch ppc64  -g -Os -pipe" LDFLAGS=" -arch ppc64  -bind_at_load" ./configure --with-zlib-dir=/usr --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-png-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-freetype-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6

cd /SourceCache
curl -O http://www.opensource.apple.com/source/apache_mod_php/apache_mod_php-44.2/php-5.2.8.tar.bz2
tar xjvf php-5.2.8.tar.bz2
cd /SourceCache/php-5.2.8/ext/gd
phpize
./configure --with-zlib-dir=/usr --with-jpeg-dir=/usr/local/lib --with-png-dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-freetype- dir=/usr/X11R6 --with-xpm-dir=/usr/X11R6
make
make test
make -n install

The last command will simulate the installation process. Make sure the stuff is getting installed in /usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613

make install

Now we need to modify our php.ini file and tell the php5 engine of the availability of this new module. To do this you need to copy php.ini.default to php.ini (in /etc directory). For details of why have a look at this article.

cd /etc
cp php.ini.default php.ini

Edit the newly created/copied php.ini using your favourite editor. Add the following line to the appropriate location (read the comments in the file to find the location):

extension=gd.so

Still in the same file find the variable “extension_dir” and change it’s value to “/usr/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613″ path instead of “./”. Save the php.ini and use the following command to see if GD extensions are available:

server:etc root# php -i |grep GD
GD Support => enabled
GD Version => bundled (2.0.34 compatible)

Done. Restart Apache service from the server manager (just for the sake of completeness).

I just installed a new 128GB SSD drive in my older C2D 17″ macbook Pro and let me tell you….WOW….This thing is on fire. The system is extremely responsive and apps literally jump onto the screen. The machine now boots up to full desktop in roughly 17 seconds. Now that’s nice. I did do a bunch of changes to the way Snow Leopard is setup to optimize a couple of things that are normally tuned for HDD’s.

• Turn off Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS): If you are replacing your primary (and only) HDD internal drive with a SSD, you can get a bit of a performance boost by turning off the Sudden Motion Sensor technology that comes with your laptop. Remember your SSD doesn’t use read/write head on rigid platters so there is no reason to keep this feature turned on. You can safely turn it off by issuing the command below in Terminal, type in administrator password when asked.

  sudo pmset -a sms 0

• Turn off hibernation and delete sleepimage file: Using SSD, you can achieve under 20 seconds boot-up time. Why bother using Hibernation and waste too much space on your SSD. To do so, issue the commands below in Terminal, enter administrator password when asked.

  sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 0
  sudo rm /var/vm/sleepimage

• Reduce disk I/O by mouting partition with noatime: Stop OSX from updating “last access time” or atime everytime a file is touched on your filesystem. This is IO expensive and unnecessary. In a terminal window create a file called com.nullvision.noatime.plist under /Library/LaunchDaemons folder and stick the following lines in the file. Save the file (you need to sudo when you edit the file) and reboot your machine.

  <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
  <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN"
          "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
  <plist version="1.0">
      <dict>
          <key>Label</key>
          <string>com.nullvision.noatime</string>
          <key>ProgramArguments</key>
          <array>
  		<string>mount</string>
              	<string>-vuwo</string>
              	<string>noatime</string>
              	<string>/</string>
          </array>
          <key>RunAtLoad</key>
          <true/>
      </dict>
  </plist>

  Once the machine has rebooted you can check to make sure your root partition is mounted with noatime by issuing the following command

  mount | grep "/"

  and look for something similar to this in the output

  /dev/disk0s3 on / (hfs, local, journaled, noatime)

This should do it. Have fun with your new SSD drive.

TSIA

Here is a quick recipe for making a network drive auto mount on your OSX machine. This works with pretty much any protocol supported by Finders “Connect to Server” option. Here is how you do it:

1. From the Finder, hit Command+K or select Connect to Server from the Go menu.
2. You’ll see the following window, enter the relevant information (ie: the network drive location, be it afp:// or smb:// or http://) and hit Connect button.
3. Enter your login/password and click “OK”
4. Make sure your Finder Preferences are set so Network Drives are visible on your desktop:
   
5. At this point you should have a icon like on your desktop
6. Now go to System Preferences under the Apple menu
   
7. Click on the Accounts icon under System and select Login Items tab (you might have to unlock this panel by clicking the small lock icon on the bottom left of that screen):
   
8. Click the “+” sign to add a Login Item to the list and in the following screen go to your Computer icon (on the left under Devices) and select the mounted volume icon from the list on the right and click Add:
   
9. You’ll end up with a screen similar to the one below. Click on Show All and exit Preferences. Reboot and make sure it all works.
   

That’s it…..Enjoy

Not sure what’s happening lately in the Apple UI design department. Someone over there decided to reposition the window control buttons (you know x,-,+ aka. close,minimize,maximize) vertically in the latest itunes10 (see pics below).

If you prefer the old (proper) way of having them ordered horizontally (see picture above), you can use the commands below:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -1

If you need to reset it back, you can use the commands below:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes full-window -0

com.apple.launchd[1] (0x10f860.cron[43786]): Could not setup Mach task special port 9: (os/kern) no access

If you’re seeing this warning/error in your OSX Server log files, it is more than likely caused by cron running jobs for mailman subsystem. Even if the Mail process is disabled in Server Admin, OSX will try to run these cron jobs. The way around this (only do this if you’re NOT running mail server or mailman mailing list manager on your box) is to comment out all lines in /usr/lib/cron/tabs/_mailman file (insert a # character at the beginning of each line that doesn’t have it). This fixed the problem for me…..hopefully it will also work for you .

This mainly applies to how you deal with a backup DHCP server and it’s configuration, but might also be useful for backing up other service settings. One of the things that kinda bugs me about how some services are configured in OSX Server is the fact that the configurations are stored in the directory. For example, if you have a DHCP server servicing a subnet with a ton of reservations hardcoded in it, there is no way of editing and/or moving the information from the command line (ie: there is no single config file that contains the current configuration) to another server. That’s where the “serveradmin” commandline program comes to rescue. If you have two identical servers (ie: both running the same OSX server version), you can use serveradmin to export the settings from a specific service and then move the file to the new server and import it there. All using the CLI.

• To Export the settings (in this case the DHCP service):

sudo serveradmin settings dhcp > dhcp-config.txt

• To Import the settings on the other server:

sudo serveradmin settings < dhcp-config.txt

We recently upgraded our servers from old XServe G5′s running Tiger to the latest greatest running Snow Leopard. In this small howto I will deal with the procedure I followed to setup mysql master-slave replication between two new servers. I start out with two (master, slave) empty DB’s, setup the replication and then import my data from a third server (my old G5 X-Serve). Of course like anything else I will try to show you how to get out of — what I like to call — Steve Jobs Hell Holes . There are other ways of doing this procedure, for more info check out this page.

- First things first….the magic command that stops mysql server from command line, just in case you screw something up and need to restart (This should be used on your master and slave servers prior to them going live…..DO NOT USE THIS ON A LIVE SERVER):

sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.mysql.mysqld.plist

This will stop the launch Daemon from continously launching mysql when trouble is brewing. This usually happens when you screw something up badly and the symptom is that the Server Manager Status for MySQL will say “Starting up“, but never changes to “Running“.

- Next I want to blow away my DB files on the master and slave (remember these are NOT production servers yet…..I’m still rebuilding them. You DO NOT want to remove the DB’s on your production servers). You’ll need to find the path in the “Settings” tab of the server manager, under “Database Location“. I removed everything in that directory (rm -rf *) from the command line. AGAIN, I CAN NOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH, BE CAREFUL WHERE YOU ISSUE THESE COMMANDS.

- I did this on both the master and the slave.

- Now on the Master change the following in /etc/my.cnf (You should have this file, if you’ve got a my.cnf.default, copy it my.cnf).

[mysqld]
log-bin=mysql-bin
server-id=1
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1
sync_binlog=1

- On the Master still, check the “Allow Network Connections” check box in Server Manager and set the root password (for mysql) by pressing the “Set MySQL Root Password…” button. Then press “Save” followed by “Start MySQL“. This will initialize mysql with the default tables and setup the root password.

- Now on the Slave change the following in /etc/my.cnf (You should have this file, if you’ve got a my.cnf.default, copy it my.cnf).

[mysqld]
log-bin=mysql-bin
server-id=2

- Back on the Master, you need to create a user (I call it repl) that has REPLICATION SLAVE privilege. Use the following two commands (make sure you replace mydomain.com and slavepass….LEAVE repl as the userid:

mysql> CREATE USER 'repl'@'%.mydomain.com' IDENTIFIED BY 'slavepass';
mysql> GRANT REPLICATION SLAVE ON *.* TO 'repl'@'%.mydomain.com';

- Next we need to flush the tables and issue a read lock (yes, just because we can):

mysql> FLUSH TABLES WITH READ LOCK;

- Still on the master we find out the current binary log file name and position:

mysql> show master status;
 +------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
 | File             | Position | Binlog_Do_DB | Binlog_Ignore_DB |
 +------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
 | mysql-bin.000004 |      340 |              |                  |
 +------------------+----------+--------------+------------------+
 1 row in set (0.00 sec)

Note down the filename and the Position number. We will need them later.

- Back on the Slave, go to Server Manager and set the root password (for mysql) by pressing the “Set MySQL Root Password…” button. Then press “Save” followed by “Start MySQL“. Connect to the DB as root and issue the following command:

CHANGE MASTER TO MASTER_HOST='master.mydomain.com', MASTER_USER='repl', MASTER_PASSWORD='slavepass', MASTER_LOG_FILE='mysql-bin.000004', MASTER_LOG_POS=340;

This will setup the slave to talk to the Master and do it’s thing. While we are here, we might as well verify that the repl user can log into the master from the slave:

mysql -h maste.mydomain.com -u repl -p

should prompt you for password and if you type in the ‘slavepass’ you assigned above, you should be able to get in.

- Back on the master unlock the tables:

mysql> UNLOCK TABLES;

- Last but not least on the slave, turn on the slave mode:

mysql> START SLAVE;

Done…..Now you can go to your production server and suck it’s brains (ahemm…..DB’s) out and import it into your master. Your slave should follow and replicate whatever you import into the master Server. I used the following command (you mileage might/will vary):

mysqldump -x -c --add-drop-table --add-drop-database -u root -p --databases dbname1 dbname2 dbname3 >goodies.sql

Transfer “goodies.sql” text file from your production server to the master server (ssh/scp/ftp….whatever).

mysql -u root -p < goodies.sql

Okay so this only works in Boot Camp 3.0+ which comes with Snow Leopard (10.6). If you ever find yourself in Windows and need to quickly — using command line — change your boot option to reboot into OSX (process known under OSX as blessing) you can use the following command:
c:\progra~1\Bootca~1\bootcamp.exe -StartupDisk "Mac OS" Shutdown /r /t 0
This will reboot your windows session and boot the machine back using the Volume named “Mac OS”. If you omitt -StartupDisk option, then the system will boot into the first Mac OS X volume located by BootCamp.exe. Done

You all probably know about the trick with holding down 6 and 4 keys on your keyboard to force OSX 10.6 to boot using the 64-bit kernel. What you might not know is that it’s temporary and the next time you reboot, you’re back to using the 32 bit kernel. Now I can’t guarantee that your machine will not catch fire and blow up (just kidding)…..but if you know what you’re doing and want to have 64-bit kernel goodness all the time you can do the following:
sudo vi /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/com.apple.Boot.plistModify the file to make it look like this:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string>arch=x86_64</string>
</dict>
</plist>basically add “arch=x86_64″ (without the quotes) to the line that reads<string></string>
That’s it….reboot and enjoy Full 64-bitness….to undo this (if something breaks), edit the file and make it look like this:<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>Kernel</key>
<string>mach_kernel</string>
<key>Kernel Flags</key>
<string></string>
</dict>
</plist>Save and reboot and you’re back to stock Snow Leopard. The way you check for this — running 32 or 64-bit kernel and extensions — is to run System Profiler (Apple Menu/About This Mac/More Info…) and check the software tab. If you’re in 64-bit mode you’ll find “yes” as the value of “64-bit Kernel and Extensions” entry.

I came across a issue and the solution required a bit of tweaking in php.ini. After looking around my Leopard Server I finally found php.ini.default under /etc directory. After making the changes and restarting apache, I got nothing, zip, zilch. Well after digging around the output of phpinfo
<?php
phpinfo ();
?>
I found that /etc is the expected location of php.ini. So after copying php.ini.default to php.ini and restarting apache everything started working nicely. Lesson learned….By default the php module uses baked-in values, if you need to change something (eg: maximum upload file size) you need to copy php.ini.default to php.ini (in /etc directory). Make the changes to php.ini and restart apache.

Well, you learn something new everyday. I was always under the impression that you needed Apple Remote Desktop application to connect to a mac that was sharing it’s screen (or vncviewer app). Today I stumbled across another way of doing this without any of these apps……just using the build in “Screen Sharing” application. The easy way (and how I stumbled across this) was to open up Finder/Go/Connect to Server menu option (Apple-K) and type vnc://remote.server.dns.name.or.ip in the “server address” field. This is something that works nicely under Linux (gnome desktop) and I always wanted it in mac……well it was there all along…..

And for the command-line junkies there is a even easier way. Open up terminal and type the following command to connect to the remote server:
open vnc://remote.server.dns.name.or.ip

NICE

Really cool video of Jim Reekes talking about his thought process in designing sounds for the mac, including the big fat C major chord which your mac plays every time you start it. Jim Reekes was a programmer at Apple Computer for 12 years. His work has significantly affected operating systems, most notably System 7 and QuickTime. He also is responsible for creating many of the system sounds for the Macintosh operating system. Some of the most famous creations during that time were the Mac startup sound and the system sound sosumi. Full 1 hour video can be seen on Youtube.

In this guide I’ll show you how to stream live HDV/DV video to your iphone using a linux box (Ubuntu 9.10) with firewire input running vlc/ffmpeg and a Imac with OSX 10.6.2 running mediastreamsegmenter and apache2.

Start out with the iPhone streaming media overview. Without understanding this document you’ll have a hard time getting things working.

First things first, you need to have a working Ubuntu 9.10 machine. I’m using a small footprint 2.4Ghz Core2Duo machine with PCI firewire 400 card in it. For video input I’m using a Canon HV30 set to HDV mode (1080i/60) connected via firewire.

Next you need to follow the instructions on this page (steps 0-5) to get a working ffmpeg with x264 and aac encoding. Without this working you’re not going anywhere….sorry. If you’re trying this on a different Ubuntu installation follow the other links to get a working ffmpeg setup.

Then install vlc using “sudo apt-get install vlc“. I used vlc as my encoder frontend as I understand it better than ffmpeg. You can use just straight ffmpeg as well if you can figure out how to get it to encode the live HDV stream over firewire.

You’ll also need dvgrab utility. Install it using “sudo apt-get install dvgrab“.

Now we want to make sure the internal firewire module is working so type this command and see if you get a vlc window with the camera output in it (make sure you turn the camera ON and hook it up first).
sudo dvgrab -f hdv -noavc -nostop -|vlc -
You have to use sudo under ubuntu to get proper access to the firewire device. The above command runs dvgrab with hdv format and makes sure that 1394 AV/Device control is turned off (this way you can be in Camera mode and get a live feed). The nostop switch prevents dvgrab from sending stop commands to the camera everytime you stop it via Ctrl-C, which I though was a good thing. The last dash forces dvgrab to output to stdout, which we’ll then pipe into vlc (the dash for vlc tells it to use stdin as input).

Next we need to create a media stream out of our linux box and ship it over UDP to the Imac. The vlc command below gets the job done. Remember you’re sudo’ing and need to provide the password after you enter the command.
sudo dvgrab -f hdv -noavc -nostop -|vlc - --sout '#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=256,venc=x264{aud,profile=baseline,level=30,keyint=30,bframes=0,ref=1,nocabac},acodec=mp4a,ab=64,scale=0.25,deinterlace,width=320,height=240}:duplicate{dst=std{access=udp,mux=ts,dst=192.168.1.97:1234}}'
The IP address toward the end of the command is the IP of the Imac machine receiving the stream. Port 1234 is arbitrary. The stream is comprised of h.264 video @ 256K and AAC audio @ 64K. Those elementary streams are then packaged in mpeg2 transport stream before being shipped to the Imac. This is the standard way of doing HTML5 video (from what I understand).

So now we can go over to the mac and see if we receive the video stream. For that just run VLC for OSX and open UDP network port on port 1234 (udp://). If things are working nicely you should see a 320×240 video from you HDV camera on the Imac.

Now that we have the video on the mac, we need to use the “mediastreamsegmenter” command line tool to create HTML5 video stream out of it. mediastreamsegmenter listens on a UDP port for incoming transport stream chops it (by default) into 10 sec. “mini” transport stream files and writes these mini files to wherever you tell it. This location is important since it needs to be accessible to your webserver. Remember, at the end of the chain (day), the webserver is doing all the heavy lifting of delivering the mini transport stream files to your iphone. mediastreamsegmenter also produces a file of type .m3u8
which is basically a live updated playlist.

Something you might not know is that apple ships standard OSX with apache builtin. All you have to do is use the following command to get it started.
apachectl start
Now point your browser on the mac to localhost and see if it loads a page. Now that apache is working we need to modify it so it knows how to deal with .ts and .m3u8 files. This involves adding a couple of lines to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf
AddType application/x-mpegURL .m3u8
AddType video/MP2T .ts
and /etc/apache2/mime.types
.m3u8 application/x-mpegURL
.ts video/MP2T
Next we need to restart apache
apachectl restart
By default OSX apache is setup to load it’s documents from /Library/WebServer/Documents, so I created a directory called “stream” to contain the media stuff (.ts files and .m3u8 file) and put the following into the index.html file in /Library/WebServer/Documents.
<html>
<head>
<title>Video Test</title>
<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>
</head>
<body style="background-color:#FFFFFF; ">
<center>
<video width='320' height='240' src="prog_index.m3u8" controls autoplay> </video>
</center>
</body>
</html>

Now that we’ve got all the prep done on the mac, we issue the following command from terminal window to get the mediastreamsegmenter going (details can be found by using man mediastreamsegmenter).
mediastreamsegmenter -b http://192.168.1.97/stream -f /Library/WebServer/Documents/stream 192.168.1.64:1234
Here -b specifies the base of the URL that will be encoded into the .m3u8 file (this is the IP address of your Imac, stream is the folder in /Library/WebServer/Documents/ where the mini .ts files and the .m3u8 file are). The -f switch specifies the output directory for the mini .ts files and the .m3u8 file. and the last IP address:port is from your Linux box.

Now you should be able to open up your browser on your iphone/ipod touch and punch in http://192.168.1.97 (assuming the Imac is reachable from your phone) and see the streaming video (You might have to turn on “Plugins” feature under settings/safari on your device. Mine was turned off and drove me crazy until I figured it out). If Plugins is turned off, the index.html page will load, but no video.

Hopefully there is enough meat here to get you guys started……btw. I hear the following command (or variations of) can be used on linux side (instead of vlc). I haven’t tried it and can’t confirm if it works.
ffmpeg -i <in file> -f mpegts -acodec libmp3lame -ar 48000 -ab 64k -s 320×240 -vcodec libx264 -b 96k -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -partitions +parti4×4+partp8×8+partb8×8 -subq 5 -trellis 1 -refs 1 -coder 0 -me_range 16 -keyint_min 25 -sc_threshold 40 -i_qfactor 0.71 -bt 200k -maxrate 96k -bufsize 96k -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 10 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -level 30 -aspect 320:240 -g 30 -async 2 <output file>

Some excellent information can be found on Carson McDonald’s blog:

• iPhone HTTP Streaming with FFMpeg and an Open Source Segmenter
• iPhone Windowed HTTP Live Streaming Using Amazon S3 and Cloudfront Proof of Concept
• HTTP Live Video Stream Segmenter and Distributor

One of the original reasons I bought my first ipod (first gen 5 Gig) was that I could hook it up to my mac and use it as a firewire drive. I could literally run around with this in my pocket and boot OSX off the ipod. Well that came to an end with the intro of iPhone/iTouch. Apple took the “disk mode” out. Well that was then, go grab a FREE copy of iPhone explorer and all that USB stick functionality can be your again. Oh, and did I say there is no need for Jail Break either

Features:

• 100% Free iPhone browser for Mac and Windows
• 100% Drag-and-drop interface for easily copying files to and from your iPhone
• Create, delete and rename files and folders on your iPhone or iPod Touch
• Works with all iPhones and iPod Touches including the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G
• Allows you to use your iPhone as a flash drive / pen drive or put your iPhone into disk mode
• Tiny download size
• (Optional) If you jailbreak your iPhone you can access the real root of your iPhone and recover your address book, SMS, e-mails and more.

The answer to that is maybe, we’ll see. But all that aside if you’re interested in a minimalistic video player that can handle more codecs than VLC and is generally faster then give Movist a try.

The unique thing about the player is that it allows you to switch codec engines between ffmpeg and quicktime based on file extensions. Oh and did I say it’s FREE aswell .

Well the title is a bit misleading…..here are the details. I found out that if you have a NTFS native shared directory on your server, everything works fine as long as you’re using OSX 10.5 (Leopard) or below as a client. You can move files from Leopard and/or Tiger clients to the share and as long as you don’t mind the ._ files everything works.

Well something new has been introduced in Snow Leopard that kinda breaks this. If you have a Snow Leopard client machine accessing a NTFS native shared directory (via smb), by default the shares are mounted with the new xattr (Extended Attribute) feature, instead of those “old” ._ files. This messes everything up if you’re in a mixed environment with 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6 clients all accessing files in a NTFS native smb share.

Snow Leopards version of samba will read those old resource fork files, but files uploaded or modified by the Snow Leopard client will be unrecognizable by the older samba clients (10.5-) as far as the resource fork goes. This introduces some problems with programs that use the resource fork to store information.

All this headache is related to the ‘NTFS Streams’ feature of SMB mounts, so if we disable that, everything goes back to normal. To do this you have to create a file named /etc/nsmb.conf on all your 10.6 clients with the following contents:

#######
[default]
streams=no
#######


If you ever have a need to simply hide extraneous files and/or folder entries in Finder you can use the following command:
chflags hidden ~/Movies
This example will hide the “Movies” folder from showing up in Finder. There is a easy way to get to the folder if you decide to later on, just go to Finder’s “Go to Folder” menu option. If you want to reset this option you can use the following command:
chflags nohidden ~/Movies
If you want to check a file or folder for hidden files you can issue the following command:
ls -lO