You can, however, use the installer DMG from the Juniper appliance itself when you have administrative access to it. If not, ask your company’s administrator.

Just mount the DMG and launch the .pkg installation file. It installs and runs just fine on Lion

However, three little tools needed some “help” to make them install: Xmarks, Dropbox and MenuMeters.

Xmarks

Xmarks is my favorite bookmark syncing tool as its cross platform and multi browser compatible. So I’ve all my bookmarks on my Macs and my Windows machine in sync. The Safari OS X version has a OS version check in its install routine which we need to modify. Here is how I did it:

Open /Developer/Applications/Utilities/PackageMaker (part of Xcode). Select File, Open and choose “Xmarks for Safari Installer.pkg” from your mounted Xmarks dmg. Remove the < 10.7 requirement. and press “Build and Run”. You can copy your just created .pkg to other Lion machines if you want to.

Dropbox

Update: Dropbox now works out of the box.

You don’t need Xcode to make Dropbox run. Just drag Dropbox.app from your mounted dmg to your Applications folder. Then use a text editor to edit /Applications/Dropbox.app/Contents/Info.plist and search for

<key>CFBundleVersion</key>
<string>1.0.20</string>

Change it to

<key>CFBundleVersion</key>
<string>2.0</string>

and start Dropbox. It will install now.

MenuMeters

Update: MenuMeters 1.5 has been released which works out of the box.

I couldn’t live without my hard disk activity indicator. Installation will fail if you choose to install it in your personal preference panes folder. However, it will install when you select to install it “for all users”.

You may think you don’t have to deal with disk defragmentation on OS X as OS X does it all for you. In most cases you are right, as OS X automatically tries to avoid fragmentation on files < 20MB. However, larger files are sometimes heavily affected. I noticed it when playing one of Valve’s Steam games like Portal or Half-Life 2. These titles use large game cache files (*.gcf) and everytime I started one of these games I heard my harddrive scratching which is not very common on an iMac.

How to find fragmented files?

The best way to find fragmented files on a Mac is a little command line tool called HFSdebug by Amit Singh. Just download and extract it. Open Terminal and type

cd Downloads/HFSDebug\ Lite\ 4.33/
sudo ./hfsdebug-lite -f -t 50

If you get a newer version your folder name may be different. This command starts hfsdebug, looks for fragmented  files ( -f ) and outputs the top 50 ( -t 50 ). If you want to see more or less files, just adjust the number. Now, lets look on our result:

# Top 50 Files with the Most Extents on the Volume
rank    extents   blk/extents       cnid path
1           923       5520.09    2546068 Macintosh HD:/Users/kai/Desktop/BDs/largefile1.iso
2           477      18376.86    2546070 Macintosh HD:/Users/kai/Desktop/BDs/largefile2.iso
3           238      16187.50    2546072 Macintosh HD:/Users/kai/Desktop/BDs/largefile3.iso
4           215        217.70    2733653 Macintosh HD:/Applications/Aperture.app/Contents/Resources/PointOfInterest.db
5           176        146.77    4008048 Macintosh HD:/Library/Application Support/VMware Fusion/isoimages/linux.iso
6           171        255.51    4059145 Macintosh HD:/Users/kai/Library/Caches/com.apple.Safari/Cache.db
[...]

Ever thought you have files on your disks that are fragmented in 1000 or even more parts? So is OS X stupid? It isn’t, look at the last sentence:

Out of 363749 non-zero data forks total, 361897 (99.491 %) have no fragmentation.
Out of 41259 non-zero resource forks total, 41257 (99.995 %) have no fragmentation.

Over 99% are not fragmented without ever using a defragmentation tool. Thats great!

Defragment files

The easy way to defragment your files is to buy a tool like iDefrag. For 25€ this will fix your 0.5% fragmentation “problem” But as long as I don’t notice fragmentation I don’t care about it.

But as mentioned I don’t want to hear my harddisk when playing games so I decided to just defragment these game cache files. And this is simple: Just move the fragmented file to a different volume and move it back. OS X then looks for free continuous space on your drive and puts the file in it. To do this with Valve’s Steam games, type this into Terminal:

cp -Rpv ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam /Volumes/YOURDRIVENAME
rm -rf ~/Library/Application\ Support/Steam
cp -Rpv /Volumes/YOURDRIVENAME/Steam ~/Library/Application\ Support/

The first command copies the Steam folder with the game cache file to my external, Mac formatted (thats important!) drive. The second one deletes the Steam folder on my local drive and the last one copies the Steam folder back to its old location.

Important: Don’t do step 2 and 3 when step 1 hasn’t succeeded! Always use a Mac formatted HFS+ volume to copy your data to! If you don’t have one, create a HFS+ formatted sparse image and mount it.

When finished, run hfsdebug again. In my case no Steam files were in the top 50 and I can’t hear the drive. Its also faster than before. Good luck!

What I’ve found is a Firefox plugin called “Keychain Services Integration“. With this plugin Firefox uses OS X’s keychain as password store and Safari can use all stored passwords automatically. Existing Firefox passwords will be imported into keychain after a Firefox restart.

Umgehen kann man das Problem, wenn man selbst im europäischen Umland kauft. So kann man es z.B. online direkt im Apple Store Frankreich oder UK kaufen. Dort kann man mit sich mit seinem deutschen iTunes-Account anmelden und ist dann auch mit der deutschen Adresse Rechnungsempfänger. Der einzige Haken ist, dass man eine Adresse im jeweiligen Land haben muss, an die dann das iPhone geschickt wird. Aber irgendjemand im Bekanntenkreis kann sicher aushelfen…

Update:

In Großbritannien kann man das Adressenproblem sehr elegant umgehen. Borderlinx bietet einen Weiterleitungsdienst an, der alle eingehen Sendungen direkt an eine angegebene Adresse in Deutschland weiterleitet. Die Gebühr rechnet sich, da das iPhone durch den Pfund / Euro Umrechnungskurs dort eh sehr günstig zu beziehen ist. Ich selbst konnte diesen Weg mit zwei Geräten verifizieren (Ende August ’10)! Bedenken sollte man aber bei Geräten aus Großbritannien, dass ein Netzteil mit UK-Stecker beiliegt.

Update 2:

Nun kann man ein Simlock-freies iPhone auch in Deutschland einfach direkt im AppleStore oder bei O2 kaufen.

What we had

• Mediawiki wiki system
• customizable but uncomfortable
• slow, because we had to login, go to the correct page, edit this page and then save it.

What we want

• a system with a comfortable and fast input method
• cross platform compatible
• secure
• easy to use

Solution

After talking about the existing tools we came to a private and customized wordpress setup. Sounds strange? Read on

WordPress offers an API which is used by many third party apps. This allows us to use a desktop app to publish a new entry. I decided to use “Deepest Sender”, which is a small blogging plugin for Firefox. We use Firefox on Linux, OS X and Windows so that’s a good choice. Another cool app is the WordPress iPhone app. Imagine you need to document your server inventory in your data center: Open the app, create a new post with a picture of your servers taken with your iPhone and press send. Now, how cool is that?

In WordPress we can make use of categories. A few examples we implemented are “Password”, “License” and “Change Management”. So I can open my Firefox plugin with a hotkey, set the category “Password”, paste the password and press send. Done. WordPress now publishes this post with my name and date. In the category browser we can click on “Password” and see all published passwords on one page automatically. So there is no need to create pages by hand – but you can if you want.

On the startpage you get a listing of the newest entries. That’s your perfect starting point after vacation.

You can subscribe to WordPress with your RSS feed reader. Now I’m informed by a desktop notification when someone posts a new entry. There’s no need to write mails about that anymore.

Interested? Here is what you need:

• WordPress setup. You can use my how-to.
• A simple theme that concentrates on just your documentation: http://bueltge.de/documentations-theme-fuer-wordpress/469/
• “Force User Login” plugin because you don’t want your documentation seen by others.
• “Quick Post Widget” is an extension that allows you to post a new entry without going to the backend of your wordpress setup. Very handy when you decide not to use a desktop app.
• “Search highlight plugin” highlights your searched keywords.
• A good apache setup. We only allowed our admin V-LAN to access WordPress. Secure your setup as it might hold sensitive information and WordPress was not always a solid product regarding security. Also, https is a must have in your network.

Some Tips

• When using https (thats what you want) with a self signed certificate you might have problems with third party apps like the iPhone app. We used our Active Directory CA to sign the certificate so we had to import our root certificate into the iPhone. To do so, go to your CA (sth. like https://domaincontroller.company.domain/certsrv) with your mobile browser and download the root certificate from there. The iPhone then asks to install the root certificate. I’m sure other phones work equally. If you are outside your LAN you can configure a VPN connection on your mobile phone.
• Active Directory binding of wordpress. We used http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/active-directory-authentication/ which worked fine but had problems with third party apps. We are back to local users now but you might have a look at it.

Please let me know if this was useful or if you have any additions that could be useful for us. Have fun!

By following these steps you’ll get a bootable USB stick running FreeDOS capable of running DELL’s flash tool (Windows required):

1. Download ODIN, which is a FreeDOS distribution: http://odin.fdos.org/odin2005/odin2880.img
2. Download WinImage and extract the files from the image if you are on Windows. If you are on a Mac, just double-click the image.
3. To create a bootable USB stick we need a Windows tool called HP’s USB Disk Storage Format Tool. I used it within a virtual machine running Windows 7.
4. Start the Format Tool and insert your USB stick, then format it and set it to “create a DOS startup disk”. Make sure you format it as FAT and not FAT32. If the FAT option is not available, your stick is too big – try a <= 1GB stick.
5. Now you have a bootable stick which is NOT compatible with your newer DELL system. Download http://fdos.org/kernel/latest/ke2039_86f16.zip and extract kernel.sys to your USB stick by overwriting the existing file.
6. Now copy the contents of the extracted odin2880.img to your USB stick by hand as our tool just copied a few of them. Make sure you don’t overwrite command.com and kernel.sys.
7. Copy your BIOS file as well. In my case its 200_1016.exe.
8. Start your DELL system with your stick (hold F12 during startup and select USB HDD)
9. In the FreeDOS menu select “286″ and NOT one the 386 entries.
10. Type the name of the update tool at the command prompt.

If you get weird error messages before you see the FreeDOS menu, turn off your system and unplug the SATA cables from your harddrives, then try again.

I use this storage as a backup solution of my home file server. As a benefit I can mount this storage from anywhere and access my files faster than using a VPN to my home server.

Preparations on your HiDrive

Activate rsync support for your volume. Go to Settings, Account and select Account settings from the dropdown menu of your user. Make sure the rsync protocol is turned on.

Upload your ssh public key so this little script can be used password-less. Your public key is normally located in ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub on your Linux box. You need the public key of the user you start the script with. You find the option to upload our public key in the same dropdown menu you used for enabling rsync.

The bash / rsync script

We will create the backup script in /root/hidrive_bck.sh but you can save it wherever you want. Edit the script using

nano -w /root/hidrive_bck.sh

# HiDrive Config

HIDRIVE="rsync.hidrive.strato.com"
HIDRIVEUSER="your_user"
TARGET="/users/"$HIDRIVEUSER"/backup/"
SUBJECT="Backup_failed!"
MAILTO="your@email.com"
ERROR="/etc/hidrivebck/error.txt"
INCLUDE="/etc/hidrivebck/include"
EXCLUDE="/etc/hidrivebck/exclude"

RSYNC=/usr/bin/rsync
RSYNC_OPTIONS="-arz --delete-after --ignore-errors -e ssh"
CAT=/bin/cat
MAIL=/usr/bin/mail
CHECK_REMOTE=`ping -c1 $HIDRIVE | grep packet | awk '{print $4}'`
SOURCE="/path/to/your/files/"

#

if [ $CHECK_REMOTE == 1 ]; then
  $RSYNC $RSYNC_OPTIONS $SOURCE $HIDRIVEUSER@$HIDRIVE:$TARGET --files-from=$INCLUDE --exclude-from=$EXCLUDE
else
  $MAIL $MAILTO -s $SUBJECT < $ERROR
fi

You need to edit your HiDrive user name, your email address and your source directory. If you use a Linux distribution other than Debian / Ubuntu make sure you enter the correct path to the used commands.

Now create /etc/hidrivebck and create your config files:

mkdir /etc/hidrivebck
nano -w /etc/hidrivebck/include

/dir1
/dir2
/dir3

The include file lists all directories you want to include in your backup starting in the path you specified with the SOURCE parameter.

nano -w /etc/hidrivebck/exclude

/largedir

The exclude file contains all directories you don’t want to backup. Directories containing large media files for example.

nano -w /etc/hidrivebck/error.txt

Backup to HiDrive failed!

That’s the text mailed to you in case of an error. You need a working mailsetup for this. Now we’re almost done. Make your script executable and fire it up:

chmod +x /root/hidrive_bck.sh
/root/hidrive_bck.sh

You may have to enter your password even if you’ve uploaded your public key. It seems Strato doesn’t actitvate uploaded public keys instantly.

The first run may need a lot of time but due to the efficiency of rsync all further backups will be fast enough. You can use this backup script with cron for a fully automated backup.