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Ever since I upgraded to Snow Leopard my MacBook took for ever to go into sleep when closing the lid. This was very frustrated as being a time optimist I usually work until I really need to leave and then I don’t want to spend 20 seconds before being able to put the computer into my computer bag. Anyway, looking in to the problem I found that OS X provides several sleep (hibernate) modes where some are considered more safe than others and therefore require more time.

In short when closing the lid the MacBook can either:

- Sleep and keep the RAM memory powered on
- Hibernate and write memory contents to disk and power down completely

Writing memory to disk is considered safer as even if your battery runs out of juice memory contents are still preserved and the OS can bring you back to where you were. This of course comes with a time penalty. The following article explains everything in more detail and also provides information on how to change between different sleep and hibernation modes:
http://www.macworld.com/article/53471/2006/10/sleepmode.html

I changed my settings from hibernation to sleep and went from 22 seconds to 1 second of wait when closing the lid.

Posted by patrik in Snow Leopard | No Comments

UPDATE 2009-10-22: Truecrypt 6.3 has been released, no need for this anymore
UPDATE 2009-09-18-2: Removed ref. to Fink as it requires to be built from source on Snow Leopard
UPDATE 2009-09-18: Added a missing requirement: pkg-config. See “installing pkg-config”

Unfortunately licensing issues prevent me from publishing my pre-compiled versions of TrueCrypt. So the next best thing I can do until there’s a new version of TrueCrypt that supports Snow Leopard, is to publish a “simple” do it your self guide.

In order to compile TrueCrypt for Mac OS X Snow Leopard you need the following:

1. XCode (it’s under the Optional folder on the Snow Leopard Install DVD)
2. macFUSE
3. TrueCrypt and wxWidgets source code
4. Header files from the RSA Security Inc. PKCS #11 Cryptographic Token Interface (Cryptoki) 2.20.
5. pkg-config
6. A patch that modifies the source code so it compiles under Snow Leopard.

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Posted by patrik in Security | 33 Comments

I just came across a really strange and *annoying* problem on one of our servers. A while ago I swapped my PC for a Macbook. Up until now I hadn’t noticed that all my files created on our common Samba server could not be modified by others. Once a colleague pointed this out I started investigating the smb.conf file to figure out what was happening.

However, in the configuration file all looked fine and dandy: create mode, directory mode and inherit permissions were all still set. To make really sure I added some of the force options as well. Still, all folders were created with 0755 (drwxr-xr-x) permissions (I had it setup and expected 0750). I thought I was going nuts until I found some other articles outlining the exact same problems and pointing their finger at Mac OS X.

http://www.mail-archive.com/debian-bugs-dist@lists.debian.org/msg657971.html
http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2009-June/148518.html

Apparently the servers incorrect setting of ACLs on the directories was due to the umask value on Mac OS X. Going through the article, I found that the following suggested settings fixed the problem for me.

unix extensions = no
force directory security mode = 0770

Once setting unix extensions to no, I had to disconnect and re-connect to the server in order to access my files and from then all directories were created with the correct permissions.

Posted by patrik in Howto | No Comments

Just had the time to install VirtualBox 2.2.0 on my Mac and I am looking forward to testing the new host-only mode which made it into this release. This is something I have been using for quite a while in order to setup a number of systems on isolated networks by using loopback tun-devices. The new host-only mode should make this so much easier without the hassle of setting up dhcp etc. on the host system.

Some other cool features also made it into the release such as:

• OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export
• OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests

The complete Changelog is here http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog

Posted by patrik in Virtualization | No Comments

So, I recently got myself a MacBook. So far I have been impressed with lot’s of things! And then there some stuff that I obviously have been less impressed with. One of these things has been the migration from the Linux version to the Mac OS X of VirtualBox 2.1.4. Maybe I was naive to start with, thinking that hey VirtualBox exists on Linux and it also exists on Mac, then it should be a matter of copying the files over and I should be up and running! Well, well, well it wasn’t quite that simple. Looking back, I could probably have made things a lot easyer by shutting down all machines instead of moving them in their saved state.

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Posted by patrik in Virtualization | No Comments