June 2007 Archives

I have just purchased a 12g nano tank. I will post a full update in a couple of days.

My 480g tank is doing quite good... I am starting to have good micro algae growth so the snails should be happier.

Here is a shot of my Chocolate Chip Starfish eating some juicy mussel:

My Anemone Hermit Crab loves to walk all around the tank:

It seemed one of my snails was very busy (this is from my Reef tank):

And a closeup (this is from my Reef tank):

I built a special cave for my Lionfish - here is a (bad) picture of him finally hiding in it:

Since the hair algae started growing in my tank on the LR, I decided to add a herbivore to control it. Here is the Foxface (currently in QT) snacking away on some grape caulerpa. I will be moving him to the 480g this weekend if all goes well...

I have not posted any pictures of my reef aquarium in a long time, so here goes:

I have removed some mushrooms, the leather coral and some zoanthids from this tank, and placed them in the 480g. They were originally purchased with the big tank in mind. I had some bad chemical warfare with all those softies and stonies mixed - never again. I'd rather have a bit barren looking tank (like above) but no warfare between the different species, than an overcrowded war zone.

Now to get rid of that damn Bryopsis...

I needed to connect to one of my client's VPN networks today. They used some form of Microsoft VPN server - they could not tell me exactly what version...

Since I am running on a Mac, I tried to use the built-in VPN client from Internet Connect. Since this is a Microsoft VPN it would most probably be PPTP based and not L2TP. So I created a new connection and tried... No luck - I got an authentication error, even though my credentials were perfect.

To test the credentials were really correct, I connected using Windows XP. The system prompted me to change my password as this was the first time I logged in, which I did. After that I was logged in successfully.

So I tried logging in using the Mac VPN client again. This time it worked! So the lesson learnt here is that you have to log in at least once using a Microsoft client to reset your password, before you can use your Mac client.

Now I know...

In the Linux world one has netstat and fuser to figure out which PID has opened a given socket. In Mac OS X, netstat does not provide PID's and fuser is missing...

I found this interesting article on how to solve this dillema.

Basically you use the lsof utility that displays a list of open files (a socket is handled as a special file) and the owner PID's:

waldo@waldopcm waldo $ sudo lsof -i -P | grep 500
Password:
racoon 189 root 6u IPv4 0x9a92820 0t0 UDP 10.211.55.4:500
racoon 189 root 7u IPv4 0x8deb0d0 0t0 UDP 10.211.55.4:4500
racoon 189 root 8u IPv6 0x9a92270 0t0 UDP [fe80:8::21c:42ff:fe00:1]:500
racoon 189 root 9u IPv4 0x9a92410 0t0 UDP 10.37.129.3:500
racoon 189 root 10u IPv4 0x9a920d0 0t0 UDP 10.37.129.3:4500
racoon 189 root 11u IPv6 0xa0af380 0t0 UDP [fe80:7::21c:42ff:fe00:0]:500
racoon 189 root 12u IPv4 0xa0af520 0t0 UDP 169.254.108.92:500
racoon 189 root 13u IPv4 0x9a92c30 0t0 UDP 169.254.108.92:4500
racoon 189 root 14u IPv4 0x8deb4e0 0t0 UDP 192.168.0.72:500
racoon 189 root 15u IPv4 0xa0b5270 0t0 UDP 192.168.0.72:4500
racoon 189 root 16u IPv4 0x9a93790 0t0 UDP localhost:500
racoon 189 root 17u IPv4 0x9a924e0 0t0 UDP localhost:4500
racoon 189 root 18u IPv6 0x9a93040 0t0 UDP [fe80:1::1]:500
racoon 189 root 19u IPv6 0x8dece10 0t0 UDP localhost:500

In this case port 500 is a UDP port opened by process with PID 189.

It is then a trivial matter of finding the process's name:

waldo@waldopcm waldo $ ps auxp 189
root 189 0.0 -0.0 27680 328 ?? Ss Sat07PM 0:01.06 racoon

or you could simply determine the name from the first column in the output from lsof.

racoon is Mac OS X's IKE (ISAKMP/Oakley) key management daemon. This process interfered with my Cisco VPN.

Voila!

About four days ago I started seeing very faint signs of diatoms on my glass - and knew it was not long before the pods would start showing up. Well, three days ago I started noticing them - thousands of tiny copepods.

This is a good day.

Seems I like consolidating things... I have just merged my reef blog with my main blog - I just hate all these billions of small sites floating around.

I'd much rather have one place where I can blog about everything and people can filter based on the categories they are interested in.

Hope this works better for everyone.

So yesterday I upgraded to 10.4.10 only to discover my Cisco VPN is not working anymore. It gives an Error 51... That was real bad since I have a client that I support using VPN.

I tried everything to revert to 10.4.9 but it is not that easy to roll back a service pack. Eventually I stumbled across an article on Parallel's forum indicating that my problem might be related to the fact that yesterday I also upgraded from 4124 to 4128...

I did the following to fix it:

1. Disabled the fw0 interface (this only fixed the Error 51 - it loaded VPN client but I could still not make a connection)
2. Uninstalled Cisco VPN
3. Uninstalled Parallel
4. Installed Cisco VPN
5. Rebooted
6. Started Cisco VPN and connected successfully to remote VPN site
7. *Whilst being connected to my remote client, I reinstalled Parallels.
8. Rebooted
9. Everything is working!

So a word of caution - never install two updates simultaneously.

My wife's Parallels broke today. For some reason it just died when starting up - no matter what mode we tried to start Windows XP in. We tried repairing Windows XP by means of the installation CD, but this caused even weirder errors.

So I ran a Disk Repair and Permissions Repair - neither working.

I then decided I am going to try and upgrade the disk image to the latest Parallels - 3.0. Well, whilst copying the .hdd file this happened:

karin-nells-computer:~/Library/Parallels/winxp karin$ cp winxp.hdd winxp_backup.hdd
cp: winxp.hdd: Input/output error

Hmmm.... Bad sector? So my mission started to find a utility that can (a) find bad sectors, and (b) relocate them. This was necessary since both Finder as well as cp failed with an IO error.

I looked at TechTool Pro 4, but alas, just as I was about to purchase it I discovered it is only available as a shipping product - not a download. Bummer.

Next I looked at DiskWarrior - this seemed like it could do the job so I paid $115 for it, and downloaded it. Running it on my laptop with the iMac in firewire target disk mode, I rebuilt the directory structures but it did not fix anything. Damn - $115 wasted.

(PS: I needed to recover her Parallels image since all our accounting information is stored in QuickBooks for Windows).

I found a trial of Drive Genius - and ran the surface scan. About 1/3 way through the disk it started picking up some bad sectors - so at least now I confirmed this. But it cannot do anything with those bad sectors. By now I was getting desperate.

I googled some more (this is now after about 10 hours on/off searching for solutions) and found a solution. A free solution too!

The idea is simple - I want to copy the Parallels disk image to a new area on the hard drive where there are no bad sectors, and I am willing to sacrifice the couple of bad blocks causing all this trouble. So by using

dd if=winxp.hdd of=winxp_copy.hdd conv=noerror,sync

I managed to copy the file with 10 bad blocks filled with NUL bytes - a fair compromise.

PS: dd is a standard Unix utility for copying raw data blocks.

I started up Parallels - ran through the automatic NTFS check at startup and only lost 10 files - all which are replaceable.

If you run a Swing application under Parallels for Mac v3.0, and are using Java 1.6 and your direct draw extension is enabled you will find the application never draws (render) it's canvas.

It is not a bug in your code - just turn off all graphics acceleration in XP.