For imaging(reinstalling/updating/blah blah!) more than fifty ppc iMacs and G5 Mac Towers in less than a day, I started using Deploy Studio instead of NetRestore.

However on booting a client from the NetBoot server, i got the following sign on ppc client machine

After reading some notes on NetBoot here, I found this reason:

The mach.macos.mkext file is a kernel extensions cache — a file containing all the important kernel extensions for basic network booting. Its fairly uncommon to run into problems in this stage of the Netboot process, however, there are a couple specific issues that can cause kernel panics at this point. Possible problems would be:

Not having a mach.macosx and mach.macosx.mkext file in your Netboot set

And when checked mach.macosx.mkext was actually missing from the nbi’s dmg file. So I generated one using following code

kextcache -a ppc -m /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/DeployStudioRuntime-091207-145110.nbi/ppc/mach.macosx.mkext -N -L /Volumes/DeployStudioRuntime/System/Library/Extensions/

And my netboot imaging operation was back in business. Ahhh…. Freshly minted macs by the time I walk in tomorrow morning.

While bringing up firewalls for my test server, I thought of doing a little check on my machine. The logs raised both my eyebrows. Dear Google told me, I was not the only one.

Leopard introduced application based firewall, while the old ipfw still exists with just one default rule (Accept everything from everything!)

65535 allow ip from any to any

[Read more →]

I work with Ruby on Leopard and and I need RMagick.

If you are a programmer and don’t know what RMagick is, you should know how code can melt your picture into art in Ruby:).

[Read more →]

mpg123 is a real time MPEG 1.0/2.0/2.5 audio player for layers 1,2 and 3.

I was playing with Ruby scripts and needed a command line mp3 player which was not a resource hog.

Steps I took for my OS X (Should work on Linux/Unix box):

Download the latest version from the website.

Untar the archive

tar -xvf mpg123-1.4.3.tar

Compile and install the player

./configure --prefix=/usr/local/mpg123
make
make install

Add the path to .bash_profile

echo 'export PATH=/usr/local/mpg123/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

Load the new path

source ~/.bash_profile

Enjoy playing music from command-line!

 mpg123 ~/Music/Bagho_Bagh_Gippy_Grewal.mp3