thunderkeys.net

Posts

Feb 8, 2015
Using Lion and Requiem to remove FairPlay DRM
I prefer to buy my movies from Apple’s iTunes Store. They are instantly available across all my Apple devices and allows me to get high quality versions without having to deal with the Blu-ray “bag of hurt”.
Jan 13, 2015
OS X 10.10 and toggleAirport.sh
Previously, I posted about toggleAirport.sh which disables Wi-Fi while connect to Ethernet. The version compare logic in it broke with the release of OS X Yosemite (10.10), so I hacked it up to work on any OS X 10.x release - which should fix it until they release OS XI :)

I’ve updated the gist with the corrected script.
May 28, 2014
My must-have Mac apps
Recently, a friend converted over to the Mac from a PC and wanted to know what everyone’s “must-have” Mac apps were. As I recently obtained a new work MacBook Pro, the list was pretty fresh in mind as I set them all up.
May 12, 2014
pdfconvert.me standalone install
I’ve just released an open-source (under MIT license), stand-alone version of my service, pdfconvert.me. It can be found on GitHub.

I hope this will be of use to those who would like a self-hosted version for security or privacy reasons.
May 4, 2014
Wordpress is dead, long live Octopress
For many years, this blog (such as it is) ran on Blosxom, which was ok but not great. Back in January of this year, I figured I would give something new a try. I rebooted the site using Wordpress. I imagined posting from Editorial on my iPad, but that never really happened.

A recent episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast had me thinking about my own site more, and figured another change was in order.

So, Wordpress is dead, long live Octopress! It seemed to be the most common choice amongst other Linode users in a Twitter poll. It also statically generates the site and can be done from anywhere and then pushed to my server, which is nice.

As a bonus, this lets me purge MySQL off my server. Good riddance.
Jan 31, 2014
OS X 10.9 and toggleAirport.sh
A while back, I was searching for a solution to automatically disable Wi-Fi interfaces on Macs when an Ethernet device was active. This was the solution I found that worked:

http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20100927161027611
Jan 27, 2014
OS X 10.9 Mavericks and packet loss
After upgrading to OS X 10.9 (“Mavericks”), I started getting packet loss on our corporate network. This is apparently a bug in Mavericks relating to ARP, Unicast and GLBP:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5483424

A simple temporary workaround appears to work:
```
sudo sysctl -w net.link.ether.inet.arp_unicast_lim=0
```
For a permanent fix, place it in /etc/sysctl.conf:
```
$ grep unicast /etc/sysctl.conf
net.link.ether.inet.arp_unicast_lim=0
```
This is supposedly fixed in OS X 10.9.2.

Update 2014-03-16: seems to be better in 10.9.2, but not gone - I still need the above workaround on my system.
Jan 5, 2014
It's 2014...
… and I’ve decided that it’s time to bite the bullet and just move this site over to Wordpress - which may or may not improve me posting here :)
Dec 20, 2013
Citrix and SHA-2
Recently at work, we had to install some new SSL certificates. All seemed to well, except for the Citrix Secure Gateway - when some clients (such as Macs) tried to connect, they got something like:
```
Citrix Receiver for Mac SSL Error 61: You have not chosen to trust "Foobar", the issuer of the server's security certificate.
```
This was obnoxious to track down. You need to upgrade to Citrix Receiver 11.7 for Mac or later, which adds support for SHA-2 certificates.

Oh, and there’s still no support for SHA-2 on iOS or Android. Meh.

Update 2014-06-16 - Citrix Receiver 5.9 for iOS and Citrix Receiver 3.5 for Android finally added support for SHA-2 certificates.
Nov 30, 2013
What year is this again?
People setting up new FTP servers on non-standard ports (say, 5001 instead of 21)… here’s how to get around it with ip_conntrack_ftp:

In /etc/modprobe.d/conntrack.conf:
```
options nf_conntrack_ftp ports=21,5001
```
Jul 11, 2013
Bypassing relayhost in postfix based on sender
In main.cf:
```
relayhost = your.relay.here
smtpd_sender_restrictions = check_sender_access hash:/etc/postfix/sender_access
```
In /etc/postfix/sender_access:
```
dontrelaymebro@domain.com FILTER smtp:
```
Then postmap /etc/postfix/sender_access and you’re good to go.
Jun 7, 2013
Nessus Parser
Found this very useful script for taking a NessusV2 file and turning into omething our system users might have a prayer of reading. However, I wanted to be able to filter results based on hostname regex, so this diff adds that.
May 30, 2013
Duplicate line breaks with RT and Microsoft Outlook
Multiple line breaks on emails sent from Outlook 2007/2010 to Request Tracker (RT) May this be useful to someone else bashing their head against the wall with Outlook and RT. Diff is against RT 4.0.13, apply in lib/RT/.

See also my mailing list post about it.
Mar 19, 2013
Wordpress prompting for FTP credentials
Wordpress is stupid. When uploading plugins, it’ll default to trying to upload via FTP… placing this in your wordpress config.php ile will shut it up and make it do the right thing.
```
define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
```
Please don’t make your wordpress docroot writeable by the webserver user like some blogs suggest… only the wp-content and wp-uploads directories need that.
Aug 17, 2011
RT and In-Reply-To parsing
At work, we use Request Tracker for handling trouble tickets. By and large, people submit tickets via email, which usually works great. There are cases where someone will email the ticketing system and Cc other people. Those other people then Reply All and end up generating a new ticket. There’s a contribution on the Request Tracker Wikia to look at the In-Reply-To header and merge it into the correct ticket, but has the following problems:
1. They want to patch it directly against lib/RT/Interface/Email.pm, which means the changes will be lost if you upgrade
2. It contains an SQL injection attack vulnerability.
I cleaned it up and made it as an Email_Local.pm (based off RT 4.0.x) you can drop into lib/RT/Interface, you can find that here.

The RT authors suggest doing this as a mail plugin that modifies $SystemTicket, but that’s a project for another day.
May 9, 2011
Blog reboot
Most of the (pretty ancient) content that was here has been taken down. I may bring back some of it after converting interesting or useful articles to Markdown.

Most microblog “status update” type content is now on Twitter and/or Facebook, but I might start putting more technical or in-depth posts here again.
Jul 7, 2007
Current Reading
Recently there was an interview with Peter Walsh on unclutterer. It prompted me to purchase his new book, It’s All Too Much: An Easy Plan for Living a Richer Life with Less Stuff. I’ve found it to be a great read - not only does it talk about how to get rid of clutter but also tackles the reasons why it gets there in the first place, how to prevent it in the future and the “hidden” costs of keeping it around.

Definitely worth a read if you’re like me and feel overwhelmed by your “stuff” sometimes (ok, most of the time).