John Beales

Today I needed to test and fix mac-specific bugs in a website that is written in ASP.NET, but I generally use a Mac. When I work on the ASP.NET site I boot into Vista using Boot Camp, and the rest of the time I spend happily in OS X. I needed a solution to run both at the same time, and on the same computer, (this is the only mac I have, but my development environment for the .NET site is on my Boot Camp partition). It was time to see if Virtualization has gotten any better. It has.

There are two reasons that virtualization is better: VMWare Fusion 3.0 was released, and I doubled up my RAM, (now at 4GB). With these two changes, and Aero turned off on the Windows side, Vista runs ok under VMWare Fusion on my ageing Macbook Pro. Now to see changes made in Vista from OS X.

The simplest way I found to make this happen was to use some of the DHCP features DD-WRT on my router to assign a static IP address to my virtual machine and to map a URL to that IP. I’ll do this in steps:

1. Before starting your VM in VMWare, go to the settings for the VM > Network and choose “Bridged” then open the advanced section and click the button to generate a MAC address. Copy the generated MAC address.
2. To to Services > Services in your DD-WRT web interface and in the DHCP Server box assign a static IP to the Mac address you just copied
3. In the DNSMasq box enter the following:address=/the-url-you-want-to-map-to-the-vm/THE.IP.YOU.JUST.SET entering, of course, the real values.
4. Hit Apply and Save at the bottom of the page
5. Start up your VM
6. Make sure that Windows Firewall is set up to let HTTP connections through
7. Type the URL you created in your browser in OS X and you should get the web page served by Windows

Now, there should be a way to make this work without the router, using NAT network mode for the VM and some hosts file edits in OS X. I’m going to try to figure out how, but for now I just need to get some bugs fixed in the .NET app. If anyone has any ideas how to make this happen without involving a router let me know, (or blog about it and leave a note in the comments).

Last Monday I wrote about restoring access to an outdated subversion repository after the hard drive in the computer that was being used as a subversion server died. That was my second hard drive failure of 2009, but at the time I thought it was the third. It turns out that what I had thought was my second failure, the failure of the external drive that I use for backup and random storage, was in fact a case failure. The drive is fine, and it is once again functional in a doctored case.

The drive in question is a 500GB Trekstor Datastation maxi m.u that I got at a boxing day sale at Future Shop a couple of years ago. As many Canadians know, when something from Future Shop dies you’re pretty much on your own to fix it, so that’s what I did. When the drive stopped working I googled it and discovered that a lot of people have had problems with the power supply to the drive. Some have been able to fix the problem with new power adapters, so I tried using an all-in-one adapter that I had, but the drive behaved as it had with its own adapter. Ever hopeful, I opened up the case and brought the drive to the in-laws’ place to test it, and when inserted into a computer it worked, so all I had to do was replace or repair my case and I would have my external hard drive back again.

I looked online at new cases, but it seemed like a waste to get a whole new case when the only thing that was broken was a small circuit board, so I found a stand-alone SATA to USB converter with no case and ordered that. When it arrived I tested it and it worked, so today I set about putting the drive back in the case, but with the new adapter. First, I removed the old electronics from the case. However, the holes that were in the back panel were not large enough for the ends of the cables of the new adapter.

None of the new cables will fit through these holes!

Out came the Dremel and most of the back panel was cut out to make room for cables & electronics. Once I had made the cut, cleaned up, re-mounted the drive, and re-attached the back plate, I had a good hole through which I could attach my shiny new adapter and keep the drive itself protected.

That's better. I can reach through there.

My only complaint is that the USB cable on the adapter is a bit short, so I may have to get a hub or something to pretend it’s an extension able. For the moment I have just re-arranged my desk slightly.

The drive, in the case, with the new adapter attached.

* A note on image quality: My camera went missing a while ago, so the best I can do right now is the iSight built in to my laptop. Sorry!

Last week the hard drive on my Subversion server failed and I had to rely on my backups to bring up a new server.  My most recent backup was not 100% current, so I ended up with a Subversion repository at revision 935, but a working copy at revision 953.  This is the story of how to reconcile the working copy with the backup so that your latest work is once again in your repository, on a Mac.

First, I looked for a way to simply import my working copy, along with any version info that it might have, but that doesn’t seem to exist.  Then, I tried just committing a new revision to the repository, (it had the same URL as the one on the failed hard drive), but that lead to subversion errors.  It turns out, that if your working copy has a revision number that is higher than that in the repository, you need to check out a new working copy, then copy changes from your old working copy into your new one, the commit your changes to the new working copy.  It sounds easy enough, but there are a couple of gotchas to watch out for, like those pesky .svn folders, so here is a recipe for merging a working copy with an outdated repository, so that the repository is brought up to date:

1. In your existing working copy, (I’ll call this the “old working copy” from now on), make sure that you’ve done an svn add for any files that are not yet under version control but you want to make the transfer.
2. Check out a new working copy from the outdated repository, (I’ll call this the “new working copy”).
3. On the old working copy, do an svn export.  This gets you all of your most recent files, but without any .svn folders in the mix.
4. In Terminal copy the exported files into the new working copy by running the command cp -R exported_folder/* new-working-copy-folder
5. [optional] Do an svn infosvn status on the new working copy.  It should show that you need to check in all of the changes you made since the repository was last updated, (or since your last backup).
6. Commit the changes in your new working copy.   You are finished, (you might want to archive the old working copy at this point in case something didn’t work right).

Your new repository should now have the latest work in it from your working copy.  You will have lost the revision history between your latest backup and whatever you had in your working copy, but you won’t have lost it all, and you will once again be up and running and ready to code, (or write, or whatever).

Of course, you could avoid this whole hassle by making sure your backups are always up to date.

After upgrading to Snow Leopard today I tried to access my localhost versions of the websites I have under development and was met by this great message, (impatient? skip to the step-by-step solution):

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access / on this server.

Great. I couldn’t even access http://john-mbp/ – my computer’s name, and the URL that the System Preferences’ Web Sharing pane tells me I can access. However, all is not lost.

Part 1: Get the Virtualhosts Online

The first place I looked was my httpd-vhosts.conf file, located in /var/apache2/extra, (this has not changed since 10.5), and as I suspected it had been reset to the Apache defaults, (thanks Apple). I suspected this might happen though, and had made a backup of the file, (actually, I backed up my whole hard drive, then made a separate, easier to find, copy of the file). Replacing the new httpd-vhosts.conf with the old one and doing an sudo apachectl graceful got the virtualhosts responding to requests again.

Part 2: Establish a MySQL Connection

While my virtualhosts were up and running at this point they did not have a MySQL connection. Maybe this is because my MySQL installation is from MacPorts so the socket is in a different place, or maybe not. Either way it had to be fixed.

Upon running a phpinfo(); I discovered a couple of things. First, the included version of PHP is now 5.3.0 and second, PHP was not loading any php.ini file, so I went on a php.ini hunt and found 2 files: php.ini.default and php.ini.default-5.2-previous, both located in /etc. Copying php.ini.default to /etc/php.ini and doing a sudo apachectl graceful brought my MySQL connections back online, leaving one final problem.

Part 3: Getting rid of the timezone warnings

Since I usually code with an error reporting level of E_ALL, and PHP 5.3 doesn’t seem to like not having a timezone set in the php.ini file, (it’s not set by default, at least not in Snow Leopard), I was getting a bunch of warnings whenever I used the date(); function in PHP, so, I needed to set a default timezone in php.ini. If you don’t already know the PHP name for your timezone, go to the PHP timezones page and find it, then open php.ini, (sudo vi /etc/php.ini the sudo is important), and search for “timez” to find the timezone section of the file. Now, on the line that says “;date.timezone = ” add the name of your timezone after the equals sign and remove the semicolon from the beginning of the line. Once you’ve done that, save the file, (it’s set as read-only for some reason so in vi you need to do :w! to make it save), then quit your text editor and do one more sudo apachectl graceful and you should be good to go.

Step by Step

1. before installing, back up your computer
2. before installing, make a copy of /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf and put it somewhere safe
3. install Snow Leopard
4. replace the new /etc/apache2/extra/httpd-vhosts.conf with the old one you saved in step 2. If you don’t have a backup you’ll have to re-enter your virtualhosts in the new httpd-vhosts.conf file which isn’t the end of the world
5. in Terminal type sudo apachectl graceful and enter your password if prompted to restart apache with the new configuration. Your virtualhosts should now be online
6. rename or copy /etc/php.ini.default to /etc/php.ini (sudo cp /etc/php.ini.default /etc/php.ini)
7. Find the name of your PHP timezone, (look on the PHP timezones page). Write it down.
8. Edit the new php.ini file to have the correct timezone.
   1. open the new php.ini file (sudo vi /etc/php.ini)
   2. find the timezone section, (type /timez and press enter).
   3. move your cursor to the line that says “;date.timezone = ” using the arrow keys
   4. press the i key to edit the text
   5. add the name of your PHP timezone after the equals sign
   6. remove the semicolon from the beginning of the line
   7. press the escape key to stop editing the text
   8. type :w! to save the file
   9. type :q to quit the text editor
9. One final sudo apachectl graceful and you should be back up and running.

Impatient? Skip to the process and go right to the solution.

I’m writing this using my shiny new OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard installation. So far it’s pretty good. I haven’t tried any heavy lifting so I don’t know if it’s really that much faster.

This is the first in a series of posts on how to get things working in Snow Leopard that got eaten during the installation. First up: MacPorts.

I ran into some issues with MySQL, (more on that later), and since my MySQL install is a MacPort I thought I would do an update to make sure things were working properly. However, this is what happened when I typed sudo port list installed:

dlopen(/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib, 10): no suitable image found. Did find:
/opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib: no matching architecture in universal wrapper
while executing
"load /opt/local/share/macports/Tcl/pextlib1.0/Pextlib.dylib"
("package ifneeded Pextlib 1.0" script)
invoked from within
"package require Pextlib 1.0"
(file "/opt/local/bin/port" line 40)

So, I tried sudo port selfupdate and ran into the same problem. Whatever port command I tried I got the same response, clearly I needed to take some sort of action. After a quick look at the MacPorts website I figured I should update my Xcode Tools to the Snow Leopard version, so I did that, (there’s an installer in the Optional Installs folder on the Snow Leopard disk) and tried sudo port list installed again, and got the same response as before.

Some quick Googling & reading resulted in no quick answer, so I figured that since I don’t really have anything irreplaceable in my MySQL databases I would download the Snow Leopard DMG from the MacPorts download page, install, and see what happened. That’s the solution! Just download the Snow Leopard DMG and re-install. All of your ports will still be there, and mine seem to be working so far.