So I got a mac. Nothing new...
Just.....
this time....
it is a little monster.
What would you do with an
8 Core 2.8GHz Xeon CPU with 1.6GHz 64-bit dual independent FSB
8GiB RAM
3.75TB Redundant Storage (RAID1 + RAID5)
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT with 512MB of GDDR3
30" 2560 x 1600 Cinema LCD
Here and another one. First blogged here.
I recently installed Resharper 3.0.2 for VS2008. I found that many of my OnClick etc. handlers were marked as errors as the symbols could supposedly not be found. The project compiles fine though. IntelliSense also stopped working properly on many symbols.
After lots of searching I found the cause of the problem - since this issue remained even when I reverted back to VS2005.
http://intellij.net/forums/message.jspa?messageID=5202694#5202694
The essence of the problem is that VS2008 sometimes adds this to your web.config file:
<controls>
..
<add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI.WebControls" assembly="System.Web.Extensions, Version=3.5.0.0., Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" />
..
</controls>
To solve the problem change the tag prefix asp to something else like aspajax.
I tried to run Motic Images Plus the other day, and it kept on crashing with a segment fault. It did not make sense since it used to work perfectly and I have not done any major updates to the system. Today I tried to run Microsoft Word 2004 and it failed in the same manner, so I immediately suspected Rosetta as both apps are PowerPC based.
I found this link that confirmed my suspicions - just never figured the culprit was the recent Quicktime 7.2 upgrade I did:
In addition, I had to perform these steps:
Word et. al. are working again.
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!
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:
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.
It is not every day that Microsoft comes out with something having awesome possibilities - Surface
Once again I believe I am the first person in South Africa to own these fine products:
Eat your heart out! South Africa's importers should only begin receiving stock in a couple months' time.
