MacBook Wireless Borked Again, Still, etc.

A while back I had regular issues with the wireless adapter on my MacBook after I had upgraded to OSX Mountain Lion, but after the removal of Little Snitch (I still ran the beta version) it seemed that times were a changing... Seemed that is.

This morning I was fiddling about with my photo website, and needed to see the results in several different browsers. One of them being Google Chrome.
Trying to launch the Chrome app, it crashed immediately. Reopening didn't help. So I tried to download a newer version, since I hadn't updated mine since the upgrade to Mountain Lion. The result; It still crashed. Even after removing all Chrome (and Google) references on the disk, it still crashed.

So, it became time to consult the book of knowledge, and see what the Internets had to say about my little ordeal.

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Ziggo Internet, Juniper Firewalls and DHCP

At the house I have currently two ISP delivering broadband. Well, broadband isn't the correct word, since the the one of them is only a mere 256kbps (I think). The other is a 'whopping' 20Mbps.
The 20Mb connection is provided by XS4ALL, and the 256kbps is for free (if you have a phone subscription with Ziggo). The 256kbp is the minimum they provide to transport the phone calls, but if you're a masochist you can also browse the internet over that connection.

So, two ISP @ home. Combine that with a Juniper SRX firewall, and a dual ISP setup is born. The theory of that setup is that I connect both ISP's to the firewall, and use the 20Mb line as a default internet connection, but when that one dies, I automatically get switched to the backup line (256kbps).

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Unable To Turn On Wireless In OS X Mountain Lion

Last night I was minding my own business on the couch, when the wireless connection on my MacBook (UniBody)  decided to call it a day. According to the symptoms (no bars visible in the WiFi icon in the menu bar, no visible wireless networks in the vicinity), the WiFi adapter was turned off. Turning the WiFi back on was not possible though.

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Reset 'Open With' Dialog in Finder

After the upgrade of several programs I found that these programs had multiple entries in the 'Open With' dialog in OS X Finder. The following command (executed in the Terminal app) rebuilds the LaunchService database, and removes the duplicate entries.

Note that the following command is 1 (one) line of code, that you need to copy & past in the terminal window.

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Frameworks/LaunchServices.framework/Support/lsregister -kill -r -domain local -domain system -domain user

As far as I can tell, it works on OS X Mountain Lion and every earlier version (at least till 10.6).

Mozilla's Firefox Invalid, Yet Valid Certificate

In my line of work I get to work with a lot of security devices which run self-signed certificates. Those certificates are most of the time generated when the device / appliance is installed, or configured for the very first time. When you connect to one of those devices with a web browser, you tend to see the warnings displayed by the browser that the connection is not to be trusted.

In Firefox, you can add an exception in the browser. When you've done that, the next time you go to the website, the browsers treats the website as trusted.

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Courier IMAPd and Mail.app warnings

After installing an ISPConfig deployment, everything seemed to work properly, but every now-and-then I got this weird error that there was something wrong with the mail server configuration. The Apple Mail.app showed a exclamation mark with the following message:

The server returned the error: The attempt to read data from the server server.domain.ext failed.

Some research showed that the Apple mail clients tend to open several connections for IMAP, and the default setting of the Courier IMAPd server is to allow (only) 4 connections from the same IP address.

Modifying the Courier config file (/usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd) and allowing e.g. 20 connections from 1 IP address solved this problem.

<ORIGINAL CONFIG>
##NAME: MAXPERIP:0
#
#  Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

MAXPERIP=4

<MODIFIED CONFIG>
##NAME: MAXPERIP:0
#
#  Maximum number of connections to accept from the same IP address

MAXPERIP=20

 If your company / household holds several imap mail clients you may need to increase the counter even more (65536 is the maximum amount of connections for ANY IP address).

If you have SSL enabled on the Courier IMAPd server you also need to add the MAXPERIP variable to the imap-ssl config file (/usr/lib/courier-imap/etc/imapd-ssl).

Finally, you need to restart the Courier IMAPd services (/etc/init.d/courier-imap restart)

Changing SSL Certificates in a ISPConfig v3 Configuration

When you install a Perfect Server based on Centos and ISPConfig v3.x, the system / 'installer' creates for the components self-signed certificates. All these certificates will generate different warnings in your browser, mail clients etc. So time to eliminate those warnings.

First I needed to find out where all those certificates are located, and what there formats are. In my case, there are three services that use SSL/TLS in some form;

1. Postfix SMTP service
2. Courier IMAP service
3. http / Apache2 webservice

Checking the configuration files will reveal their locations.

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Getting ISPConfig to Work on Centos

This is not a manual describing the installation (pre-requisites) of ISPConfig software on a Centos platform. An excellent manual can be found online. It's just that I ran into a problem when I tried to connect an e-mail client to the (IMAP) mailserver (controled by ISPConfig). All the appropriate ports / listeners were up and running, so it had to be a configuration issue.

Googling around didn't solve my problem. My collegue, Xander (@xmoments / xmoments.nl), cam eto the rescue with the solution;

yum install cyrus-sasl-plain-2.1.23-13.el6.x86_64

Software that handles cleartext passwords between mail processes. After the installation, the mail went flying across the Interwebs.

Screen Capture Can't Be Saved

After upgrading my iMac to OS X Lion (10.7) everything works (or at least seems to work), until I tried to do a screen capture with the built-in tools.

Things that worked:

• Capturing the entire desktop to file
• Capturing a selection (using the cross-hair) to file
• Capturing the entire desktop to the clipboard
• Capturing a selection (using the cross-hair) to the clipboard

Things that didn't work:

• Capturing entire windows to file or the clipboard (SHIFT-COMMAND-4 + SPACE / SHIFT-COMMAND-3 + SPACE)

All I got was a weird notification box with the message:

Screen capture can't be saved

The console application also showed an error message:

12/16/11 1:40:08.762  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: screencapture could not capture window 3c

Lurking around the Interwebs, I found this seem to occur after an upgrade of the OS, but real solutions are hard to come by.

This is what I did to solve my problem:

• Remove the screencapture PLIST (preferences) file (~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.screencapture.plist)
• Copy a com.apple.screencapture.plist file from a working OS X Lion environment and place it in the correct location on the troubled OS X installation.

That seemed to result in two com.apple.screencapture.plist files (one with an additional extension of .locked). I removed the .locked file, rebooted the iMac, and screen capture worked again.

I must mention that I didn't see the .locked file initially. Could be that it existed before. In which case I probably did more than was required to get things fixed....

Update on Thursday, February 2, 2012 at 20:29 by Willem

Turned out that the .plist problem wasn't the cause of my problems, since I ran into the problem again today.

For some reason the capturing of Windows (SHIFT-COMMAND-4 -> SPACE) borked again. So I tried the steps I descibed above, but to no luck. looking into the Console app of OS X I found the following error messages;

2/2/12 4:20:57.153  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: No images found for wid 53
2/2/12 4:20:57.153  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: screencapture could not capture window 35
2/2/12 4:21:25.511  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: No images found for wid 32
2/2/12 4:21:25.511  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: screencapture could not capture window 20
2/2/12 4:21:45.773  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: No images found for wid 282
2/2/12 4:21:45.773  com.apple.SystemUIServer.agent: screencapture could not capture window 11a

Through sheer luck, I bumped into the solution; while I was trying to solve this mystery, I needed more desktop real-estate. So I switched on my second monitor (connected through DisplayPort). After a couple of minutes I tried the capture again, and it worked. Up till that point, I only have been playing with the plist files from my laptop or server and copying them to my iMac..... **FLASH**

Looks like that when the screen settings are set to Mirroring, and the external monitor is switched off, you run into this weird behavior. Rebooting with no monitor attached (switching it off doesn't seem to do the trick) also solves the problem, but introduces the one where you're missing screen real-estate....

Upgrading Splunk on Ubuntu Linux

Just a small post with the instructions on upgrading Splunk on Ubuntu Linux.

First download the Splunk update. The Splunk website also gives you the wget command, which you can use directly on the Linux commandline.

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