The BFC Computing Weblog: Category BFC Computing

Leopard is Still a Turkey

Bill McGonigle — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:48:00 -0400

I’ve been writing a short note here after each minor release of Mac OS X 10.5, noting the major problems with it, and 10.5.5 is unfortunately no different. Today I applied it to my main machine’s Leopard install and tried two fairly simple operations:

delete a partition with Disk Utility
install Software Updates

The first totally messed up my drive’s partition table, resizing a supposedly untouched partition from 96 to 26 GB, rendering it unusable. The second, applying a half dozen software updates failed on the first attempt, and on the second attempt rendered the system unusable (LoginWindow would keep crashing and re-loading in an endless cycle).

So, I’m restoring my machine from backup now, and will stick with 10.4 (Tiger) until Leopard is as stable as Tiger.

Maybe 10.5.6 will be better, but as of now I’m still recommending clients stay on 10.4.11. A year into Leopard now, and it still has fundamental problems - that Apple has 10.6 (Snow Leopard) planned as a no-new-features release specifically to address architectural problems is a sure sign the issues run deep.

Cost of Home vs. Business Shipping

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 02:01:00 -0400

I just ordered a new hard drive from PC Connection and when I went to check out I got quite a surprise.

I realize that for a while companies have been charging more for shipping to residential addresses than business, but PC Connection has taken this to a whole new level. My home address was first on the account as the account pre-dates my office, so when I went to buy the drive it was pre-selected and shipping was charged thusly:

Whoa. I switched it to my business address and:

got free shipping instead. Much better.

Package Cleanup - Leaves and Orphans

Bill McGonigle — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 14:12:00 -0400

On an RPM-based system, yum-utils provides a utility called ‘package-cleanup’. It has two useful options:

–orphans shows RPM packages that do not belong to any currently-configured repositories, and:

–leaves shows RPM packages for which there are no dependencies; that is removing them won’t trigger the removal of other packages. By default it’s concerned with libraries, but –all removes that restriction.

So, ideally you’d like to run:

package-cleanup –orphans –leaves –all

to get a list of all the packages you might want to consider for cleanup, say before or after an upgrade. But package-cleanup doesn’t support that.

So, here’s a little perl script, called leavesorphans.pl on my system that will run package-cleanup twice and print for you the intersection of the two sets:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
use warnings FATAL=>'all';

use Data::Dumper;

my @orphans = `package-cleanup --orphans`;
my @leaves = `package-cleanup --leaves --all`;

my (%orphans,%leaves);
foreach my $orphan (@orphans) {
    $orphans{$orphan} = 1;
}
foreach my $leaf (@leaves) {
    $leaves{$leaf} = 1;
}

my (@matches);
foreach my $orphan (keys %orphans) {
    foreach my $leaf (keys %leaves) {
        if ($orphan eq $leaf) {
            push (@matches,$orphan);
            delete $leaves{$leaf};
        }
    }
}


foreach my $match (@matches) {
    if ($match !~  m/Setting up yum/) {
        print $match;
    }
}

I recently ran it and found a few packages that were lingering on my system since Fedora Core 4, just wasting system resources. If all of your proper packages belong to a repository you can simply pipe the output of the command to xargs rpm -e. I’m not quite that slick, so I manually reviewed the list and kept the packages I had installed by hand.

BFC Computing Launches McCain-Palin 2008 News Website

Bill McGonigle — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 00:19:00 -0400

LEBANON, NH, September 1, 2008 – BFC Computing, a computer consulting firm based in Lebanon, NH, has launched McCainPalin2008.us, a website dedicated to news about the McCain-Palin Presidential Campaign. The site is updated with the latest headlines and videos gathered from thousands of news sources around the globe. McCainPalin2008.us provides a single location for news readers to find updates on the presidential campaign. Rather than having to sift through other news sites to find information that may or may not be relevant, McCainPalin2008.us gathers all of that information into one place.

Bill McGonigle, owner of BFC Computing, says, “McCainPalin2008.us is based on a technology we’ve been developing called NewsMaker, a tool for rapid deployment of specialized news websites. We recognized the likelihood of this ticket in July and began work on the site then. We realize many folks are political news junkies who want to focus on specific topics, and for them we hope this site is helpful and enjoyable. Expect improvements through Inauguration Day.”

For up-to-the-minute coverage of the McCain-Palin campaign, visit http://McCainPalin2008.us . BFC Computing works with clients to develop computing solutions that exceed their expectations. Open Source allows BFC Computing to deliver solutions that are ideally customized to clients needs, protects against obsolescence, and delivers top-notch security. For more information on BFC Computing and its services, visit http://bfccomputing.com or call (603) 448-4440.

PICT Abandoned by Apple

Bill McGonigle — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 19:30:00 -0400

I was cleaning up my hard drive today and found some screenshots I took of websites on 9/11, in Apple PICT format. Less than 7 years later, those PICT’s aren’t viewable on OSX in the Preview application (the standard image viewer). Seeing as this OS came out in 2005, it was likely abandoned then. At the time I was running the latest version of Mac OS 9, judging by the screenshots.

So, less than 4 years of support for that presumably very common file format.

I’ve converted the pictures to PNG (Using Photoshop 7, which can parse them), which as an industry standard open format ought to be recoverable for some time to come.

This has been reason #687 to avoid proprietary file formats.

Dan Grover - Speedy Recovery!

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 02:12:00 -0400

Our friend and sometimes subcontractor Dan Grover had surgery today, and we wish him a speedy recovery.

Dan posted a pre-surgery photo today, and finally it makes sense how he’s so efficient at his work:

All the best, Dan.

Barracuda Moves Against Trend Micro Bogus Patent

Bill McGonigle — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:44:00 -0400

After reading about Barracuda moving to invalidate a bogus patent Trend Micro filed for on virus-scanning at an e-mail gateway (many of my clients depend on this technology) in January, I sent Barracuda the following note:

-----Original Message-----
From: Bill McGonigle [mailto:bill@bfccomputing.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 12:24 PM
To: legal@barracuda.com
Subject: possible SMTP prior art - TFS

From:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.mail.sendmail/
browse_frm/thread/3cee3dc93ea81690/a8cd75d669fbd6b7?lnk=st&q=smtp+virus+scan#a8cd75d669fbd6b7

Its pretty functional - gateways between any/all MS/MAIL,
WP-OFFICE, CC:MAIL, SMTP, UUCP, MCI-MAIL. It does uuencode
and MIME attachments (configurable per address or domain
wildcard) and international characters. It can also virus
scan attachments on the way through the gateway, and access
can be controlled on a user by user basis!

(message dated July 25th, 1995).

It looks like it's still around in some form from foxT:
   http://www.tfstech.com/

Good luck,
-Bill

I never heard back more than a quick “thanks!” from Dean Drako, CEO of Barracuda, but today, I read they’ve moved ahead with this strategy and Goran Fransson, developer on TFS, is a new open source ally.

Dean writes of Goran, “We greatly appreciate the time that Goran Fransson took in coming forward to share this very important piece of prior art,” Drako says. “We believe that his testimony is instrumental in our case against what we believe is an unjust patent claim by Trend Micro against Barracuda Networks and the open source ClamAV project. In our view, Goran is an open source hero.”

Full disclosure: I’ve sold completely open solutions, based on postfix/MailScanner/clamav/sqlgrey against Barracuda’a blackbox appliances, but I’m glad they’re fighting against Trend Micro’s abuse of the system.

FOSSVT: Great Success

Bill McGonigle — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 01:36:00 -0400

Last week I attended and presented at FOSSVT, a conference focused on Open Source in Education. Organized by the National Center for Open Source in Education, FOSSVT, at Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, VT, was attended by over a hundred educators and technology specialists.

Executive Director Bryant Patten did yeoman’s work organizing the inaugural event, arguably the most successful Open Source event in Northern New England in recent memory. Kudos to Bryant.

I presented “Taking Control of Your Network Using FLOSS Software”, a talk about why it’s important to have a well-regulated network, and a whirlwind tour of a bunch of Free (Libré) Open Source Software (FLOSS) tools that could be useful for educators and technologists looking to take control of a school network. We covered some concepts, troubleshooting techniques, and resources available for further study.

As promised here are the slides . (3.3MB PDF)

Murphy Strikes

Bill McGonigle — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 12:17:00 -0400

Sure enough, after three years of trouble-free server operation, the day after we deactivate a RAID mirror to make room for drive expansion, the drive dies.

If you sent us important mail between 3/26 at 10:00EDT and 3/27 at 02:00EDT, please resend.

If there’s a silver lining here, we’ll be trying to build a replacement server that all of: [1U, powerful, quiet]. It used to be a pick-two situation, but around here we’re into “pick all three”. We think it can be done.

Weaning Oneself off Commercial Software

Bill McGonigle — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:12:00 -0400

I recently bought a new hard drive for my MacBook Pro and used the extra space to install Fedora 8. However, I found myself not booting into it too often as I have some apps on OSX which are too tied into my workflow.

So, I’ve decided to take the opposite approach for now. I’ve partitioned my drive into 4 parts - one each for Leopard, Tiger, and Fedora, and one for my data directories (/Local under OSX, /home under Linux).

This only helps share data between OS’s, though - what I really need is application compatibility. So, I’m slowly migrating my data to other applications that are cross-platform, and open-source. AppleMail->Thunderbird, iTunes->Amarok, iPhoto->DigiKam, etc. Additionally, I plan to integrate OpenSync with iSync to get my peripherals well supported. Once this is done, then I can run among my OS’s with indifference.

Both The Fink Project and MacPorts are essential tools for getting the open source software over to OSX. Kudos to both projects.

While Apple does make a good OS and great hardware, they’re still a member of the Business Software Alliance, which makes its living off terrorizing small businesses. Were they to quit the BSA I could probably justify the risk of them abandoning their software I depend upon, but combining that with the BSA it’s just too risky for me to bet my business on. Even though I use precious little other BSA software, simply accepting the EULA agreement for an OS update is enough to agree to their invasive audits, a risk I’m keen to remove. Did you know having a license and box and media for purchased software isn’t enough? You need to be able to produce a receipt for all your purchases or you’ll be getting a fine or lawsuit if you’re audited.