A friend (hi, dwc) mentioned to me a few weeks (months?) ago that screen can be used as a serial terminal (like minicom or cu(1) or tip(1)). Up until today, I hadn’t had a chance to try it — I’d been using minicom from MacPorts.

Today, using my nifty osx-pl2303 driver for my Tripp-Lite U209-000-R USB-to-serial adapter and screen, I was able to get a serial console to a server in my office. Specifically, I typed:
screen /dev/cu.PL2303-0000101D 38400
When I was done, I typed: ^a^k to kill the terminal session. Since screen(1) is part of the base OS X install.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about different tools I use. One new tool I started using is QuickSilver. It’s free.

Spotlight is a great search tool. I used to use it to launch applications too, but got annoyed that the process wasn’t something like: Command+Space, “terminal”, Enter. Most times, I’d have to down arrow once or twice and if Spotlight was still searching, the order would change and my cursor wouldn’t be on whatever I wanted to launch.

Enter QuickSilver…
(more…)

I just bought a Mac Book Pro! Straight from China.

I’ve been using a Mac as my main computer for about 3 1/2 years and I’ve been very happy with it. I started out with a very slow PowerBook 15 666 MHz. I then moved up to a 1.5 GHz after about a year. For years I had been looking for “Linux” with a nice desktop. By “Linux”, I mean *nix (preferably OpenBSD). But hardware support (NICs) or software support (WPA) prevented me from using OpenBSD on my laptop. OS X fit my needs pretty well. The GUI is very nice and easy to work with. Most things just work. But the PowerBook was slow and there were some things I couldn’t do…
(more…)

Today I started trying to load OpenBSD on my Intel Mac Mini.

A couple weeks ago, I loaded Apple’s Boot Camp to dual boot with Windows XP. It was neat. But I don’t really care to run Windows on my Mac.

Now that Boot Camp is on my computer, though, I figured I could probably get OpenBSD installed. I tried installing from my OpenBSD 3.9 CD first. But it wouldn’t boot past USB device scanning. I downloaded a a 3.9 snapshot from April 29, 2006, and OpenBSD installed. But…

(more…)

OS X has a very cool feature built into to its resolver: /etc/resolver. It allows you to specify different DNS servers for different domains. After creating the /etc/resolver directory, I can create a /etc/resolver/erdelynet.com file with “nameserver 192.168.25.10″ in it. Now, my Mac will use 192.168.25.10 for resolving erdelynet.com and whatever my ISP assigned me for everythying else.

When is this useful? erdelynet.com runs a MySQL server. My firewall blocks attempts from the Internet to port 3306. But suppose I want to just run a MySQL admin tool from my PowerBook and don’t want to mess around with SSH tunnels.

With OpenVPN & /etc/resolver/erdelynet.com, I can seemless move from external user to internal user with two clicks.

(more…)