Finally I installed Tiger. I had the idea to wait until the first update is released, but as there where no complaints about compatibility with my standard apps I did it. One annoying thing I noticed was QuickTime 7 engrosses OpenOffice’s».sxw«-files and assignes them as MPEG-Movies. Also – as many others already wrote – all standard assignments for the default appliocations are gone. The update itself went smoothly and had no negative side effects (so far).
Since I do not use Apple Mail the only application where I have to deal with the new toolbar is NetNewsWire. I guess we all will get used to the new design.
Update: Since OO apparently does not work under Tiger, the mapping of ».sxw«-files to QuickTime Player makes sense ;-)
Witch – Application and window switcher for Mac OS X
Nice goodie for OS X users: »Witch« is a replacement app for the built-in Exposé application switcher and displays a list of all available windows for any open application. Makes it easier to cycle through open documents.
NewsFire 0.2
A new release of NewsFire is available. Version 0.2 now features an icon – but also problems with German Umlauts in the Feed-List.
SSH login attempts
Do you also wonder about ongoing login attempts via ssh? We had a lot on our servers in the last few days. There seems to be some new sort of multithreaded SSH bruteforcer who does this kind of annoying logins and scans. Read a thread in this forum, on SANS or myNetWatchman. The script seems to test many accounts now.
SuSE Linux 9.1 vs. Debian Sarge (updated)
We use Linux for a long time as an operating system for our servers. In the last eight years we always used SuSE Linux, since the 5.1 release. Even my desktop runs on SuSE Linux 9. Yesterday I decided to install Debian for no particular reason, maybe just out of curiosity.
I removed SuSE Linux 9.1 and installed Debian Sarge on our latest server (a dual Xeon) using the netinstall CD-ROM image. Of course it’s a testing release but the Debian team is testing for a long time now and I think it’s quite good.
My first impression on Sarge (compared to my bad Debian Woody experience) is very positive. The installation of the base system was easy and only took about 10 Minutes including re-partitioning of the disk array. The further installation process was easy, too. I will set up the system (as a server) the next days and compare this to the SuSE distribution. So far Debian Sarge seems to be very promising.
Update 1: So far everything worked very well. I set up the core mail services, SMTP / POP / IMAP with LDAP and SSL support, in about the same time as I did on SuSE Linux. There are at least as much helpful websites for mail service setup on Debian as I found for SuSE Linux. I noticed that the Debian core system in my configuration needs fewer space than SuSE Linux did.
Update 2: Things went very well! Our first Debian server (Sarge) has been very stable in all tests – and is now a production system and our mail exchanger. Migration will go on.
Update 3: Adding anti-virus and anti-SPAM services took some time but now all is up and running. There are good tutorials out there that provide all the information you need. Try this or this or this.
Postfix vs. sendmail (updated)
Currently I’m stuck installing the Postfix MTA (full featured with TLS / SSL, SASL and so on) on a mail server. I could do this job using sendmail in no time (I’m used to sendmail) but I decided to give Postfix a chance.
Of course I have books and a lot of links to manuals, how-to-, readme- and whatever helpful documents, but: it doesnt work. Maybe it’s the SuSE 9.1 Linux distribution I use, maybe it’s the CyrusSASL version (2.1.18) I have. I don’t know.
If you ever had success in getting Postfix 2.0.19 with CyrusSASL, SSL / TLS, PAM and so on running on a SuSE Linux 9.1 and you know a good source of information – drop me a note.
Update 1: It seems that in SuSE Linux Postfix is always searching for the saslauthd socket in the root-jail path – which is /var/spool/postfix/var/run/sasl2/ – even if you do NOT start Postfix chrooted. Hmm. What to say, took me quite some time to figure that out.
Update 2: Do not test your setup using Microsoft Entourage 10.x (Entourage 2004 works fine)! I finally resolved all problems. It seems to be a bug in Entourage that does not try to authenticate if the connections has been established via TLS / SSL. So you will always get a »relaying denied« message.
Update 3: Read »7.39 Why doesn’t Entourage work at all?« to learn that Entourage also has some known problems with the IMAP protocoll.
TYPO3 QuickStart for Mac OS X
For all Mac-users interested in TYPO3 I built an installer [tar gzipped DiskImage, 57 MB]. You can use it on Apple Mac OS X 10.2 and 10.3. It will install PHP, MySQL, ImageMagick, phpMyAdmin and of course TYPO3. Also visit http://typo3.org/1274.html.
Panther in the wild
Proved once again: Mac users (call us addicts) are a special form of users ;-) See http://www.macminute.com/2003/10/24/panther.
Apple switched
As far as I could find out on my Panther installation, Apple moved from the Sendmail to the Oostifx MTA in OS X 10.3. http://www.apple.com/macosx/
SuSE relaunched their sites
I don’t know when, but German Linux distributor SuSE relaunched its website. Looks really »professional«, but with the major changes they made, some things are missing. You find no support link on the top level, but you have to choose a product first. You can’t click on the headlines, even if they have the same color as the links… hmmmm…
Then there is this country selector with a map you can’t cklick at (of course you should use the pull-down, but why do they show the map – I know the geographical position of Germany). Also the map is colored and makes you belive you made selection allready. See http://www.suse.com/.