If you simply want to monitor processes on Mac OS X, the included Activity Monitor in applications/utilities works well: There is also a free third party application called App Stop available here that will allow you to pause applications and set priority. If you have a heavy application you are running concurrently while doing more […]
Monitoring, Pausing, and Prioritizing Mac OS X Applications
Xcode is Required for Nmap and Fink
Both Fink and Nmap have problems compiling with earlier versions of Xcode. Xcode is found here. The error I got with Fink was: compress-zlib-pm586-1.34-11 failed With Nmap: ./pcap-bpf.c: In function ‘pcap_inject_bpf’:./pcap-bpf.c:348: error: ‘BIOCSHDRCMPLT’ undeclared (first use in this function)./pcap-bpf.c:348: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported only once./pcap-bpf.c:348: error: for each function it appears in.)make[1]: *** […]
Testing Apple Hardware With Mac OS X Install Disk
The first Install disk has a hardware test routine on it. Just boot with the CD and old down the Option key as the computer starts up. Here is what the test program looks like:
Checking the Filesystem on Mac OS X
Simply hold down Command-S as the system boots to get into single user mode. To check and fix the filesystem run fsck -fy:
Installing Apache 2.2 on Mac OS X From Source
Apache 2.2 compiles perfectly on Mac OS X. We are running an Intel Mac Version 10.5.6. Let’s create a place to compile this that is separate from other software. First we need to log on as root for convenience: srv-5:~ usr4$ sudo su Password: sh-3.2# Let’s create a /usr/local/src to compile the software in. This […]
Installing Dia on OS X
Dia is a diagramming tool that includes many symbols. Here are the Cisco symbols: Install on Mac OS X with Darwin Ports and then simply run dia from the command line: srv-8:~ usr4$ sudo port install dia —> Fetching libpixman —> Attempting to fetch pixman-0.14.0.tar.bz2 from http://distfiles.macports.org/libpixman —> Verifying checksum(s) for libpixman —> Extracting libpixman […]
Bringing up Solaris
There are *a lot* of really cheap Sun boxes on Ebay these days. We picked one up for our lab. Here are a few tips for newbies trying to bring up Solaris on a Sun Sparc box that might be useful. First off, go to sun.com and download the CD images of Solaris. If you […]
Solaris Companion CD
There is a free set of utilities for Solaris available here that provides many of the GNU tools and other free software for Solaris. If you don’t have a console you will need to make sure that the host you telnet in from is resolvable from your Solaris box (add the host to /etc/hosts or […]
Bringing Up a Base GCC Compiler on Solaris 9
In this article we talked about the Solaris companion CD. The location for the Solaris 9 companion CD is here. Now, if you want to *just* compile software with GCC, the best place to go is sunfreeware. Grab the closest mirror. We found that this mirror works well in the US. To get enough software […]
Manually Mounting a CDROM on Solaris
We had trouble with a CD automatically mounting, so we had to dig in a bit to mount the CD manually. First we ascertained that the cd was on the same controller as the internal HDD, so listing the devices on controller 0. # ls /dev/dsk/c0* /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s0 /dev/dsk/c0t10d0s6 /dev/dsk/c0t12d0s4 /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s2 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s1 /dev/dsk/c0t10d0s7 /dev/dsk/c0t12d0s5 /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s3 /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s2 […]
Configuring IP address Manually on Solaris
We have an Ultra2 box that is hooked up to a serial console that screws up the format when trying to edit files. It is much easier to use an xterm session over the network, rather than rely on the configuration of our serial console/terminal. Anyway, since we were trying to edit files that set […]
Getting the Solaris Management Console to Run Remotely
We have a fresh install of Solaris 9 that we are administering. Agatha is a wuss, and wants to use the Solaris Management Console. To do this, we set up X forwarding via SSH. First, we need to change the default sshd config: # vi /etc/ssh/sshd_config Find this line and change it: X11Forwarding yes If […]
Using uClibc For Control Systems
We wrote about keylogging in this article, and used gcc and Linux to intercept and decode a key push via the parallel port. We have also written in the past about various homebrew projects where a limited development system would be very useful. The perfect platform for many of these projects is discarded PCs that […]
Startup Scripts for Housey
Housey is hooked up to the 8048 dev system. Housey wasn’t very smart at startup, so I added some init scripts. uClibc uses System V init, which means (among other things) that S scripts in /etc/init.d are executed in ASCII order. So, S10 runs before S20. I put two scripts in /etc/init.d. In S40net I […]
Creating Filesystems On Hdc
The default uClibc install doesn’t have hdc devices. You can’t make an ext3 filesystem or use fdisk either, for that matter. The first task is to create the hdc devices using mknod: mknod hdc b 22 0 mknod hdc1 b 22 1 mknod hdc2 b 22 2 mknod hdc3 b 22 3 Not too painful. […]
Video for Crackers
Now, you could consider this an article about how to set up a web cam using GNU/Linux or something… Naw… We want to write a story involving chickens. Crackers is Agatha’s new GIAGD machine that she uses to put up pictures of the chickens living in her moveable chicken coop. We bought a used SE440BX-2 […]
SSHD on GIAGD
The uClibc dev system includes SSHD, but you need to set up host keys in /etc first: [root@crackers /]# ssh-keygen -t dsa -f /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key Generating public/private dsa key pair. Enter passphrase (empty for no passphrase): Enter same passphrase again: Your identification has been saved in /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key. Your public kkey has been saved in /etc/ssh_host_dsa_key.pub. The […]
New GIAGD distribution
For more information on the fabulous furry GIAGD fun, see this article. I revisited this, because there is a new root filesystem available at uclibc that includes perl and ssh. I nosed around for new versions of the extra source code I needed to get housey to boot. Here are some links: Lilo NASM GPM […]
Debian on a USBCard — Part 1 – Creating the filesystem
We have used our GIAGD distribution for our various utility computers that run stuff like our 8048 dev system and our chicken cam. It is a bit of a pain to maintain our own distribution based on uClibc; however, there is a fabulous new development. You can now get a port of Debian woody compiled […]
Debian on a USBCard — Part 2 – Transferring the Filesystem
In this article we discussed the Debian port to uClibc, and we created an ext3 filesystem on a USBCard. Now, we need to transfer the filesystem from the tarball to the USBCard. First, let’s mount our newly created filesystem: root@srv-1 / # mount -t ext3 /dev/sdc1 /mnt root@srv-1 / # mount /dev/hda3 on / type […]
