Puff up OSX

Odd title but given the software is named Fugu which is a very deadly Japanese puffer fish, it works. Fugu is a GUI client for OSX(duh!) for SSH, SCP SFTP. Nice easy to use interface and it's FREE!! You can download it from Research Systems Unix Group. Make sure you tell them thanks for such a nice piece of programming. Everyone likes to be appreciated.

The more I dig for OSX gems, the more I'm impressed. The biggest difference I've seen as a Windows Switcher is that there is very little crap software that I have seen so far. Most has been very high quality even if I did not want it. Very unlike Windows where you have sort through a pile of crap to find a gem. But I keep finding nice, well written replacements for my Windows tools so the need for the Dell is becoming less and less with each passing week. I still hate the Mac keyboard, I really need to find a decent replacement.

Where have your bits been?

Between diaper changes and chalk time on the driveway (I just taught the 2year old how to draw a body outline), I managed to find time to keep tweaking on the iBook and the iMac. I got Ethereal working with the Aqua front end I mentioned earlier. While ethereal is fine on the wired side, it's not so happy with the airport express cards. Like not at all :( Oh well.. I also played around with iStumbler which is an OSX take off of NetStumbler. But, it picks up not just the 802.11 stuff, it gets bluetooth, Bonjour and more... very cool. See image number 1.

Ethereal was installed using Darwinports and PortAuthority. Went mostly perfect, I have seen that getting the files can be spotty. Website are down, time out or whatever but after a few days, you can normally get whatever it is that you want.

I found a couple cool shell sites. One found at xalasys.com is a complete tutorial on the bash shell which is now the default for Tiger. The second tutorial which is at LinuxCommand.org is written for Linux but it will also apply to OSX users.

1. 

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Visible Secrets

I was told about a cool tool for anyone using the Mac as a forensics tool. The tool is called FileJuicer and is available only for the Mac. This tool does a byte by byte search for any file it knows the format of while they are embedded in text file, MP4, browser cache, AVI, HTML and many other formats. This ablity to dig into a file and extract data out is very powerful for a varity of purposes. The example on the website is pulling images out of a windows screen saver application. I did a test to pull up the images from my FIrefox cache. It pulled up all the images and movie files that I had previewed over the past weeks. It made a good case to clear the cache each week :) I have not tried the flash card recovery trick but I have no reason to doubt it would work well for that also.

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Locate me

I noticed that my iMac did not want to play using the command "locate" of which I am quite fond. And then I saw that my iBook did not want to play either. Well, that was annoying! So I started to dig around some and found others with the same complaint and an easy fix.

sudo /usr/libexec/locate.updatedb

and

sudo /usr/libexec/makewhatis

Presto! Locate works as it should and the second script takes care of apropos. Wheeeee.

Now in my weekend's adventures, I also got a favorite tool running using Darwinports. My old pal 'ettercap' which is pretty handy on the wire.














When I start seeing my tools like this installing and running on OSX, it makes the need for Windows or Linux even less. Now it's off to get Ethereal up and running with the Aqua frontend I found.

Port of Darwin

One of the best things about OSX is that it is based on Darwin/BSD. This means that there are ports to Darwin of popular software like Gnome, Abiword, NMAP and many others. I already showed you the PortAuthority that helps manage the Darwin ports for easy installation and easy removal of the ports. In this sample I have installed and I'm running TinyCA which is a GUI management tool for OpenSSL and the managing of X.509 certificates. I also have a screen shot of NMAP with the Gnome based front end.

The ports are found at http://darwinports.com/ along with alot of information on making your own Darwinports from source files. Portauthority is really the tool of choice for handling the installation of the Darwinports.

New life for Digital8 Tape

Odd title but I just finished testing a program called DV Backup which will backup your Mac data to a camcorder using Digital8 tape or DV tapes. In my testing, I used my old (?) Sony camcorder with Digital8 tape. The software is easy to use with pretty clear menus and a "butterfly" effect for the flying menus. THe performance was pretty good using firewire 400. Even while backuping up data, you could still use the Mac since the CPU load is pretty low. I did a test restore to my server of the iBook data and DV Backup restored the data over the wireless link to the server without a problem.

My next project was to install drawinports and Port Authority which helps to manage the installation, updating and removal of Drawin ports of applications. This is a pretty clean way to deal with the drudgery of compiling applications and trying to manually deal with all the dependencies.

Remote Me

One of my complaints and gripes so far with my Mac has been the lack of remote access from my Windows boxes. But, I found an OSX version of VNC at Redstone. This version of VNC server has proven to be stable on my Mac. For the Mac version of the client, I am using Chicken of VNC for OSX. This has worked flawlessly on my iMac G5 and the client on a iBook G4. I've also been testing VNC on the OSX over my m0n0wall using static NAT. My Windows PC using version 4.x VNC is able to connect and control the G5 iMac. The connection has been stable and it connects each and every time.

The performance of the iBook is a pleasant surprise to me. I bought a refurbished iBook from Apple for a good price. The iBook is one of the newest versions with the 60 gig drive, 512Meg of RAM and including the shock sensor on the hard drive. I would prefer the powerbook to be sure but at 1K vs. the 2K for a powerbook, it was a no-brainer for now. Maybe next year I will break down to get the powerbook. Or maybe I'll just wait for the new and coming Intel based notebooks.

Start Your X

I finally got the Mac to push out X applications via SSH. I did not know for a while that tunneling X was off by default on the OSX's sshd config. So the following two lines are needed:

sed 's/#X11Forwarding\ no/X11Forwarding\ yes/' /etc/sshd_config > /tmp/sshd_config

and then
sudo mv /tmp/sshd_config /etc/.

Now I can push out applications via SSH just like I do with my Linux boxes.

More details can be had at:

http://developer.apple.com/qa/qa2004/qa1383.html
















I have tested this with RedHat, Fedora Core2 and Cygwin. All work well.