By Robin Rowe

Trouble with Windows shares on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 2/14/2011 – Upgrading to Snow Leopard results in problems accessing Windows shares, giving the dreaded “Connection Failed” message.  A lot of users have encountered this problem and suggested many workarounds. Here’s what worked for us.

1. In Finder, if you don’t see the Windows or Linux SAMBA machine you want to access from your Mac under SHARED, you may need to look at solving that problem first. You may have a network or SAMBA configuration issue or not have showing SHARED in the Finder sidebar turned on in your Mac configuration.
2. Click on your Windows share, if it says “Connection Failed”, you have the problem this article addresses.
3. In Network settings on your Mac under Advanced, set your WINS workgroup to “Workgroup” and set IPV6 to “OFF”. You might need to reboot.
4. Try your Windows share again. If it still doesn’t work, try {Go}{Connect to Server} and enter your Windows server name manually. If your Windows box is named Mercury, that would be: “smb://mercury”. Enter any login credentials your Windows share requires.

That should do it. Your share should appear under SHARED in the Finder sidebar. Works with Windows and Linux SAMBA shares.

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 2/14/2011 – WordPress is popular open source content publishing software used by many publishers including Gosh!TV. The official WordPress annual conference, called WordCamp San Francisco, will be held August 12-14, 2011, at the Mission Bay Conference Center. This year the conference is expanding from one day to be three days. Friday will be programming aimed at publishers, Saturday is for bloggers and Sunday is for developers. The final schedule may include events such as a contributor summit, design group meetup, and WordCamp organizers brunch. Calls for speakers, sponsors, and volunteers for WordCamp San Francisco will be posted at the WordCamp website.

By Robin Rowe

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 9/23/2010 - Greyfix is a lightweight open source Postfix plug-in that relies on the Berkeley Database to bounce about 90% of SPAM without a significant server load and no false-positives. At the enterprise level it causes mail from first-time senders to be postponed. The default is hours although 10 minutes is sufficient. Most spammers will move on, not bother to resend postponed mail. Changes to the settings are made in the C code. There’s no settings file. The software is small, reliable and uses fast C code.

Greyfix Installation on Linux CentOS

yum search berkeley
yum install db4-devel
./configure
make
sudo make install

Add to /etc/postfix/master.cf (different on Solaris)

greyfix    unix  -       n       n       –       –       spawn
user=nobody argv=/usr/local/sbin/greyfix -/ 24

Add to /etc/postfix/main.cf (not Solaris)

smtpd_recipient_restrictions = permit_mynetworks,
reject_unauth_destination,
check_policy_service unix:private/greyfix

# /usr/sbin/postfix reload
# tail /var/log/maillog

By Robin Rowe

Drupal powers the Obama White House site whitehouse.gov

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 12/22/2009 – Drupal is a popular content publishing program that the White House uses since Obama took office. The standard Drupal installation uses MySQL. Many prefer Postgres because they find it more robust and faster with multiple connections. Drupal supports Postgres (and Sqlite, too). Let’s install on CentOS.

Installing Postgres

1. # yum install postgresql postgresql-server php-pgsql php-gd
2. # ln -s /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_log /var/log/pg_log
3. Edit /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_hba.conf  to enable password-based connections:
   #local   all         all                           ident sameuser

   local   all         all                              md5

   # IPv4 local connections:

   #host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32          ident sameuser

   host    all         all         127.0.0.1/32        md5
4. # /sbin/chkconfig postgresql on
5. # /sbin/service postgresql start
6. # /sbin/service httpd restart
7. # su – postgres
8. $ psql -d template1 -U postgres
9. /l
10. \q
11. $ createuser drupal –pwprompt –encrypted
12. Answer n to all questions
13. $ createdb my_blog_name –owner=drupal
14. $ psql -l
15. $ exit

Postgres only has UTF8 encoding, that specifying UNICODE as recommended by Drupal will create a UTF8 table anyway. Since UTF8 is the default encoding, it’s not necessary to specify it in createdb. If Drupal says Postgres is not installed, restart apache. If you install any php modules, you’ll have to restart apache for Drupal to detect them. If that doesn’t help, check /etc/php.d. More Postgres notes.

Testing PHP with Postgres

If you need to check that PHP sees Postgres, create and browse this file looking for a pgsql section:

http://www.my_site.com/drupal-6.14/phpinfo.php

<?

phpinfo();

?>

If you don’t get a connection, try this test code:

http://www.my_site.copg_connect.php

<?php

$connection = pg_connect(‘user=drupal password=my_password dbname=goshtv’) or die(‘Could not connect: ‘ . pg_last_error($connection));

echo “Connected!”;

?>

Installing Drupal

1. $ cd /var/www/html/
2. $ wget http://drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-x.x.tar.gz
3. $ tar xvfz drupal-x.x.tar.gz
4. $ rm drupal-x.x.tar.gz
5. # chown -R apache drupal-x.x
6. # chgrp  -R apache drupal-x.x
7. # mv drupal-x.x my_blog_name
8. # cd my_blog_name/sites/default/
9. # cp default.settings.php settings.php
10. # chown apache settings.php
11. # chgrp apache settings.php sites/default/

Configuring Drupal from the Web

1. http://www.my_site.com/my_blog_name/
2. http://www.goshtv.net/drupal-6.14/

Setting cron

• # vi /etc/crontab
  45 * * * * /usr/bin/wget -O – -q -t 1 http://www.goshtv.net/drupal-6.14/crontab.php

The web page you’re reading was published using WordPress. Here it is in Drupal:

http://www.goshtv.net/drupal-6.14/

More configuration is necessary with Drupal to create a rich media site like whitehouse.gov. Unlike WordPress, Drupal won’t embed images without installing plug-ins. However, WordPress is MySQL only, doesn’t support Postgres. All database CMS systems are slow and require caching to perform well. WordPress has SuperCache. Drupal has Boost which may be faster as it’s static pages.

By Robin Rowe

Using RText because Scite isn't available yet for the Mac

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 12/10/2009 – In this quick tutorial (or “gouge”) we’ll look at how to set up Mac OS X to build free open source Linux software such as CinePaint. Mac OS X offers a free graphical compiler app called Xcode. We’ll download that but not use it as a graphical programming environment. Instead, we’ll do everything the Linux way so that we maintain total compatibility of code across Linux and Mac OS X.

Installing GNU Make in a terminal in Mac OS X

Snow Leopard 10.6, the current version of Mac OS X, only runs on Intel-based Macs. We’re developing on a G5 PowerPC desktop running Tiger 10.4.  It makes little difference what version of Mac OS X we’re using because we’re avoiding relying on anything specific to the Mac when building POSIX code. We’ll build code from a terminal window using the usual Linux commands.

We’ll make the same source code to build on Mac OS X or Linux. Each of these UNIX-based systems are highly compatible at the platform level known as POSIX. The same C/C++ POSIX-compatible code can be built on all systems. Windows can build Linux-based POSIX programs by using a small open source compatibility library called libunistd.

Mac OS X Open Source Set-up Gouge

1. Download and install the appropriate version of Xcode for your version of Mac OS X.

2. In Finder, go to Applications, Utilities and launch Terminal. All the commands shown below are run in terminals.

3. Because there’s a bug in Tiger make 3.78 that can cause builds to fail mysteriously with a memory error message, we’ll also download and install the latest version of GNU make. In a terminal:

1. make –version
2. which make
3. ./configure –help

Using make –version informs us we have the buggy 3.79 version. Using which informs us that make is installed in /usr/bin and configure –help informs us our replacement make will go in /usr/local/bin. We won’t overwrite the default 3.79 make by using configure –prefix=/usr/bin. Doing that is not the UNIX way and won’t work anyway because the installer will bail after detecting a collision with /usr/bin/info (we tried).

Then we’ll use the cd command to navigate to whatever folder we put the downloaded GNU make tarball.

1. cd /Volumes/Seagate-1.4TB/code
2. tar xvfj make-3.81.tar.bz2
3. cd make-3.81
4. ./configure
5. make
6. sudo make install

The basic tar-configure-make-install process is standard for GNU and is sufficient for most Linux-based code. The other commands above are going the extra mile, aren’t needed once we have our PATH configured. We use tar xvfj to uncompress the bzipped source tarball. When we encounter gzipped tarballs, we’ll use  tar  xvfz instead.

Let’s test we’ve got the version of make we want:

1. /usr/local/bin/make –version
2. make –version
3. export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
4. make –version

We modified the PATH in this session so that our replacement make is preferred over the default. We’ll make the PATH permanent by adding this line to our ~/.profile file:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

To source and test the profile:

. ~/.profile; echo $PATH

4. Install a text editor. Using vi that’s built in is great for quick tasks in a terminal. That’s actually vim, the improved vi, the same program commonly encountered in Linux. An easy-to-read graphical text editor is a good idea for more complicated text editing. We can’t use the popular Linux editor Scite because it has no Mac version due to being dependent on GTK2. We’ll explore building Scite on the Mac in a separate article. For now, install the Java-based editor RText.

Note: The screenshots in this story were created using SnapNDrag on the Mac and edited in CinePaint on Linux.