The vm_stat command in Mac OS X will show you the free, active, inactive, wired down, copy-on-write, zero filled, and reactivated pages for virtual memory utilization. You will also see the pageins as well as pageouts. If you wish to write these statistics routinely then you can use the vm_stat command followed by an integer. For example, to see the virtual memory statistics every 5 seconds:
vm_stat 5
Chances are that if you have a NetBook you don’t have a DVD drive. And chances are if that NetBook is running a previous version of Windows that you’re probably thinking about upgrading it to Windows 7. If you are using a NetBook with Vista then you might want to check out the new Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. With the Download Tool you would use a 4GB USB drive to cache the installer files and install Windows 7. Therefore you wouldn’t need an optical drive! But you will need the .NET Framework 2.0 or later and to configure the BIOS to boot off the jump drive.
Happy upgrades and if you need any help, as always, feel free to call 318.
Windows 7 has been released officially released. You see the wacky people standing in line and you know that’s just wrong when you can get it on Microsoft.com as an immediate downloadhttp://store.microsoft.com/microsoft/Windows-Windows-7/category/102. All that time spent driving home could instead be spent running the installer and crossing your fingers that your hardware works! Well, if you’re going from XP or Vista then you should be fine on that point… Windows 3.1, maybe not so much…
Apple has released a new Mac mini that retails for $999. You might be thinking that $999 is just a little bit high for a Mac mini – and you would be right, that is, if it didn’t come with Mac OS X Server. The combination of the price point, the hardware and the software make the new Mac mini with Mac OS X Server a perfect purchase for small businesses and servers geared for use as specific utility servers!
The new Mac mini server comes with no optical drive, which is great because instead you get a pair of internal drives that can be setup in a RAID to protect your data! The server also comes with 802.11n, Ethernet and bluetooth – allowing a variety of uses.
Call 318 today for more information on this great new product from Apple!
Ever lost the data on your computer and then realized that your media library was on your iPod or iPhone but not on your computer? Or maybe you had some data backed up but not your massive media library? Well what you need is iTunes backwards: copy the media files from your iPod or iPhone to you computer. Luckily there’s Senuti, which is iTunes spelled backwards because it does just that; it copies data from your mobile device into the iTunes library. This should not be used as a backup tool but it does make for a nice recovery path in some cases!
When you plug in the iPhone, iTunes opens up automatically as does iPhoto if you have any images in your Photo Roll. But what if you want to use your iPhone as a regular old USB jump drive? Run this little program:
http://code.google.com/p/iphonedisk/
Thawte is no longer offering free accounts for mail. As an interim, they are going to offer a free year (through a partner deal) of VeriSign’s similar service which is then $19 after that initial year.
https://search.thawte.com/support/ssl-digital-certificates/index?page=content&id=AD196&actp=LIST&viewlocale=en_US
10.6 has introduced the use of Greylisting as a spam prevention mechanism. In short, it denies the first attempt for an MTA to deliver a message, once the server tries a second time (after an acceptable amount of delay, proving it’s not an overeager spammer), it can be added to a temporary approval list so future emails are delivered without a delay.
The problem with this is many popular mail systems, including gmail, don’t exactly behave as expected, so the messages may take hours before they are delivered. To get around this, the people championing greylisting suggest maintaining a whitelist of these popular, but ‘non standard’ mail servers, allowing them to bypass the greylist process entirely and accepting the messages the first time around. The other problem is for companies that send mail through mxlogic and other similar services, the mail is sent from the first available server, potentially causing delayed because they were being sent by a different mxlogic box each time.
The problem with this under 10.6 is there is no gui or interface to inform you that greylisting is enabled (it gets turned on when you enable spam filtering), and so it just takes forever for messages to hit your inbox. You can start managing the whitelist / greylist system, or you can just turn it off:
cp /etc/postfix/main.cf /etc/postfix/main.cf.bak
vi /etc/postfix/main.cf
change line 667 from:
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated permit_mynetworks reject_unauth_destination check_policy_service unix:private/policy permit
To the following (removing check_policy_service unix:private/policy):
smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_sasl_authenticated permit_mynetworks reject_unauth_destination permit
You can then run postfix with the reload verb to reload the config files, as follows:
postfix reload
Have you struggled with Open Directory backups? Do you open up Server Admin and click on the Archive button when an alarm in your calendar tells you to do so? Well, we’re gonna’ help you out then. We’re going to automate backing up your Open Directory. We’re going to invoke the backups through launchd and we’re going to keep them for an amount of time you determine and automatically prune the old ones. We’re going to let you choose the location to store them and the password to unlock them. And we’re going to let you do all this through a graphical package called the 318 Auto Archiver.
Originally written for our own staff we now open it up to you as well.