10.26.07

The New Cat in Town

Posted in Commentary, OSX Software at 9:54 am by hackamac

I have had the last current dev copy of Leopard running now for a few weeks on a new MacBoo Pro. I have to say, it’s impressive. It’s fast and very stable. I have not had a single crash at the OS level yet.

Firefox has had some teething problems as the Cisco VPN client refuses to work. My upgrade from Tiger failed completely. I had to boot leopard, whack the drive and install from scratch so words of warning there for you. Many of my daily apps such as SOHO Notes did not work right or at all until the vendors issued the Leopard patches. Some apps dont seem to care one way or the other. Open Office never missed a beat. Yep works well as does my serial port driver for my Keyspan USB to serial adapter.

If you dig back, I ripped on Time Machine a while back as sloooooow. It’s much better now, not as fast as Superduper but very much improved and slick, oh my god, slickest app going for backups that are painless to use.

The iLife apps like iPhoto rips on Leopard and with the new screen on the MBP, I’ve died and gone to heaven. Photoshop works very well, I think better under Leopard than under Tiger. It’s faster or at least faster responding and loading.

My new Sprint EVDO RevA card kicks on Leopard, I did not have to either activate the card on windows or even load a driver. It worked just by plugging it in.

I love the new preview mode of the folders and files. I can open up a directory of PDFs and see niffty thumbnails now without having to use a 3rd party app or try and remember what that cryptic name really meant.

I have not had any issues with sharing my SImple NAS drive via SMB or mounting up shares on any of my other Macs. Leopard even worked with my Netapp SAN at the office without a single complaint. Wireless has been good, I think better than Tiger but I never kept Tiger on my MBP long enough to get a real feel for it.

I have not tried the dual boot for Windows yet, I have the partition set but not enough time. VMware works well and so far that has been good enough.

10.12.07

More S3

Posted in Commentary, OSX Software, OSX Technical at 10:54 pm by hackamac

The S3 adventure has been going great guns around here. Here are some notes from getting my Mac on two WAN connections so one is for my daily stuff and the other is for the uploads I’m always doing. This post was put up originally at pixelcorps.com where I also live for a while each day.

“”“” start of post “”“”“
I thought I should detail how I’m running dual WAN connections at my home office and why.

I have mentioned that I am using the Amazon S3 server farm to archive my critical data and not just images but key files like spreadsheets, PDFs etc. The cost is very cheap. For example, last month I archived 9 gig to the S3 servers and it cost me 98 cents.

So this type of backup is very dependent on your upload speed. My cable is 312 Kbps upstream but I was able to get DSL with an upload of 512 for twenty four bucks a month. So what I did was some research on what IP addresses Amazon was using for their S3 farm and some simple adding of routes to my Mac.

I should mention that I run OSX but Windows can do this but its a bit more effort. I added a couple of statements that look like this:

route -n add 207.171.0.0 192.168.1.254
route -n add 72.21.0.0 192.168.1.254

Now typically, I shy away from using whole ranges of IPs but in this case, AmazonS3 bounces around alot of them in a round robin which is good for load balancing but not so good for route statements. So you put in the subnet for the S3 servers and call it a day.

So now any packet destined for the 207.171.0.0 and 72.21.0.0 subnet will exit my Mac via the wireless to the DSL while my day to day stuff will continue to use my ethernet port and my cable connection.

Works well, in fact I have 500 meg or so going up right now as I type this post. Works great, lasts a long time.. assuming I put it all in a batch file or script that loads each time I boot up

So now I have a failover for my cable connection, a 2nd link for high speed uploads and a way to keep my uploads from screwing around with my downloads. All for the princely sum of 24 dollars a month in addition to my cable bill.

”“” end of post “”“

I should say that the new beta 2 of Snitch is way cool. They really made some cool improvements to the interface. Now you can get alot more detail and be more granular on the filters. The best feature is the network monitor that can be visible or not. You see the connection history and the activity on a graph or copy it to clip board with numbers.