stressfree - osx

Fixing a stalled OSX software update

David — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 22:47:47 +0000

When I recently run Software Update on my MacBook Air I found it would stall at about the 10% mark during the "Checking for new software" phase. Below is a screenshot of what I mean by this:

A check of Activity Monitor showed that the problem was not caused by any network issue, in fact Software Update was not even trying to connect to the Internet. Fortunately this Apple support discussion page lead to the answer.

The problem appears to be caused by a corrupted, user-level software update cache file. To resolve delete the Cache.db file from your Library/Caches/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate directory. Once trashed repeat the software update process and all should be back to normal.

The discussion thread also discussed an interesting command line tool for performing OSX software updates. To perform a software update from the command line execute the following command (your password is required for sudo privileges):

sudo softwareupdate -i -a

This will run a fully automatic software update process, and once complete prompt you to restart the computer if required. Whilst a niche tool, it is a handy command to know about when performing remote OSX administration:

Loose some OSX fat with Xslimmer

David — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:05:20 +0000

These days disk space is not a huge problem, but on a MacBook Air it can get a little tight once all your applications and media libraries are installed. This dilemma is not helped by OSX 10.5 Leopard's installation bloat. Not only is multiple language support installed by default, but most applications come with both x86 and PowerPC binary files. So if like me you only understand English, removing superfluous languages and binaries will free gigabytes.

Now whilst it is possible to do this task manually it is hardly fun or a good use of one's time. Fortunately there are a few tools out there that can do the job for you, my favourite being Xslimmer. Whilst this application does cost a handful of dollars (US$12.95) it has a great interface and keeps a 'blacklist' of applications that experience issues when they are placed on a diet, for example Skype. Plus if it helps remember that for this money you are reclaiming storage space, so it could be argued $13 is a very small price to pay when your laptop's hard drive cannot be replaced and external USB drives look ugly.

Xslimmer in action (click to enlarge)

Using Xslimmer is very easy, simply open it and run the Genie command to automatically locate all your applications. Once found Xslimmer will analyse each program to determine what excess fat can be trimmed. This usually results in a 25%-50% reduction in application size. This soon adds up to gigabytes of space on a typical OSX installation. Once analysis is complete you can choose to backup all unnecessary files or just delete them entirely. After this decision is made Xslimmer quietly gets on with the job, which for me resulted in 2.5 gigabytes of storage being freed (approximately US$5.20 per gigabyte).

The only thing to keep in mind is that as software updates and new applications are installed new fat will be introduced to the system. This means if you want to keep your system nice and lean re-runnig Xslimmer every few months is a good idea.

apple
osx

Perian - the ultimate Quicktime add-on

David — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 00:44:21 +0000

With recent releases of Quicktime and OSX Leopard Apple has removed the need for most people to purchase the professional version of Quicktime to do simple things like play video in full screen. This is a great development but it still doesn't address the fact that as a video player Quicktime is limited in the number of video codecs it supports out of the box. Fortunately Perian is a fantastic Quicktime extension which handles the installation and updating of a range of third-party codecs (including DivX) through one very simple interface. A great tool that when combined with the Flip4Mac Player provides gives Quicktime the ability to play almost anything you can throw at it.

Automounting Samba shares in Leopard

David — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 08:52:51 +0000

Edit 15th November 2007: After a few weeks of use I have found the automount technique described here is a little unreliable not only from the perspective of keeping the mount point active but also for maintaining the correct file permissions. This maybe addressed in future OSX 10.5 updates but for the time being using user-level mounts via Finder or Go -> Connect to Server is more reliable. To automatically mount a volume save the mount point as a Favorite (Go -> Connect to Server -> Add favorite) and then drag this favorite (stored in ~/Library/Favorites) to the Login Items under Account Preferences.

Apple have pleased a number of people by laying to rest the NetInfo Manager in OSX 10.5 'Leopard'. Many of the functions performed by this Registry-like tool have been incorporated into the far tidier Directory Utility tool. Unfortunately whilst this tool includes the ability to define automounted NFS shares the same capability is not provided for Samba. This is a pain because if you have a couple of Samba servers on the network that need to be connected all the time, a good example being a network share for iTunes music.

Fortunately all is not lost as we can still edit the automount configuration files directly so that our Samba shares are always accessible. To start with open up the Terminal application as an administrative user and then use sudo to create a bash shell.

sudo bash (enter)

You will be prompted to enter your administrator password at this point.

We will now create a file entitled auto.smb in the /etc/ directory to hold our server details.

pico /etc/auto.smb (enter)

In this file enter the following line (add more lines for extra servers/shares)

$Sharename -fstype=smbfs ://$Username:$Password@$Server/$Share

Where:

$Sharename = the name you want to give the mount point
$Username = the user to connect to the server as
$Password = password of the user
$Server = the name of the server (dns/wins entry)
$Share = the name of the share on the server

As this file stores the username and password to the server in plain text set the permissions of the file so that only the root user can read it.

chmod 600 /etc/auto.smb (enter)

Now edit the /etc/auto_master file and append the auto.smb record at the end of the file. The auto_master file controls all the automounts for the system, leave everything about this file alone except for the extra line at the end.

pico /etc/auto_master (enter)

#
# Automounter master map
#
+auto_master # Use directory service
/net -hosts -nobrowse,nosuid
/home auto_home -nobrowse
/Network/Servers -fstab
/- -static
/Users/Resources auto.smb

This will tell the automounter to mount the shares defined in the /etc/auto.smb file under the /Users/Resources directory. So for example if auto.smb defined a Music share we would end up with /Users/Resources/Music. Note: You do not have to use /Users/Resources.

With the configuration files in place it is now time to tell the automounter to refresh the settings. Exectute the following command:

automount -vc (enter)

If all goes well you should see the following output from this command:

automount: /net updated
automount: /home updated
automount: /Users/Resources updated
automount: no unmounts

Now you should be able to open the Finder and see a /Users/Resources directory that lists (and magically takes you to) all the network shares you have defined in the auto.smb file.

Hopefully this is only a temporary fix and Apple includes the option to mount Samba as well as NFS shares in Directory Utility. Technically it is not hard to do and the end result would be far tidier.

Keep your OSX apps updated with AppFresh

David — Sun, 09 Sep 2007 10:18:16 +0000

AppFresh is a very useful and user-friendly software update tool for OSX. Although Apple includes a very capable Software Update utility within OSX it is only made available to Apple applications. This leaves the thousands of other applications built for the operating system out in the proverbial cold. As a consequence unlike Linux with its powerful apt, rpm, yum and yast tools, keeping all of your OSX software up to date is a manual affair. To ease the burden of users many OSX applications now include their own update checking routines which is handy but hardly a great solution as it often means being interrupted during your working day with the message that you need to update the application right now.

AppFresh is a breath of fresh air when it comes to software updating in OSX. Currently it is in active development and a preview version is available for free. AppFresh leverages the iusethis.com database to determine whether your system's applications are up to date. This is a brilliant solution to the problem of determining software availability as it places the burden of data collection on the user-base and not a single party.

The AppFresh user-interface once the initial scan has been completed (click to enlarge)

Due to AppFresh's integration with the iusethis.com web-service you must first sign up for a free account before any magic will happen. Fortunately this is an easy task and only takes a minute. Once this account is created the software scans your computer for applications and checks for their update status. When completed you are presented with a stylish list that details how things shape up on your system. It is then possible to update specific programs or go for broke and update everything. There is an option to let AppFresh handle the update process completely (from download to install), but personally the idea of letting a third-party application run riot on my desktop is a little too much. Maybe one day I will trust AppFresh enough to undertake such automated tasks, but for the foreseeable future I will control this side of things just to be on the safe side.

Perhaps the biggest threat to AppFresh is its licensing. No doubt once the application matures the authors will require some payment for their hard work. It is often at this point when the once 'free' tool gets deleted off my hard-drive as the licensing cost is set too high. I have three Mac's and if the fee is more than US$10 per machine it gets very hard to justify such a tool simply because many applications bundle their own updater. Consequently whilst being able to quickly know the software status of your machine(s) is a nicety, it is hardly a necessity, especially on a desktop that does not suffer the unremitting security attacks other platforms must endure.

If you do use OSX I recommend downloading and checking out AppFresh. Whilst its long term future on my hard drive will not be confirmed until their licensing details materialise, I can say for the time being I am really enjoying having it around.

Is this the end of iLife as we know it?

David — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 09:23:34 +0000

iLife is Apple's general purpose package for working with digital photos, video, audio and the Web. It usually receives an update every year around January/February but this year has been different. MacWorld came and went without a peep, leading to the general feeling that iLife would be released at the same time as OSX Leopard. But a few things have happened which suggests to me that iLife as we know it will cease to exist and its component applications will be absorbed into OSX Leopard:

Feature Parity with Windows Vista

The first reason lies in OSX's need to maintain feature parity, if not superiority, over Windows Vista. Whilst Apple have been quite vocal about Microsoft's feature copying in the past it would seem that Vista has digital media functionality currently lacking within OSX. This functionality ranges from the ability to manipulate digital photographs directly within the Windows Explorer through to the far more capable Movie Maker shipped on the Vista DVD. In contrast OSX needs the optional iLife package to provide this capability and as a consequence the degree to which OSX's default interface has been tailored to handle digital media is limited.

Functionality already present within developer builds of Leopard

A hint of forthcoming Leopard/iLife intergration has been illustrated in the latest developer build of Leopard. This build includes a 'Media' link in the Finder for displaying resources managed by iMovie, iPhoto and GarageBand. This kind of functionality is currently present within applications such as Pages and Keynote when iLife is installed but the fact it has made an appearance within the operating system suggests this tool-set will be far more ubiquitous in the future.

What else can Apple do to iLife?

The other problem that Apple must be facing is the looming question of what else to do to iLife to justify an upgrade. Numerous application iterations has seen its functionality reach a level where not a lot can be added without risk of eroding the lower end of Apple's professional application market. Where else can Apple go with iLife except for deep integration into Leopard alongside a healthy dose of Core Animation? By bringing together iLife's current capabilities, Core Animation's aesthetics and OSX's renowned ease of use Apple would create the 'complete package' discussed in the MacWorld keynote. Such a strategy would certainly provide them with some significant ammunition to fire in their war of words against Windows Vista.

Will it happen? Maybe not, but at least a number of other people are of the same opinion as myself which can't be a bad thing. I guess time (and Steve Jobs) will tell...

apple
osx

Parallels update brings Windows CAD to the OSX desktop

David — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 08:24:20 +0000

Parallels released an update today for their Parallels Desktop for Mac virtualisation software which introduced 'coherence' mode and seriously improved video drivers capable of supporting DirectX. To give the new features a test drive I installed Autodesk Design Review, Revit 9.1 (trial version) and Bentley View on the virtual instance of Windows XP and had a play. All performed very well even with minimal RAM allocated for testing purposes. Quite possibly the only let down was that before you could start using the software the virtual machine first had to load Windows.

The screencast above illustrates the boot process, coherence mode, Design Review and Revit in action. The screencast was taken at a fairly low frame rate and YouTube just makes it all that worse. Please take my word for it that performance on a 1.83 Intel Core Duo iMac was fairly snappy even with only 256meg of RAM assigned to the VM. In a production environment you would certainly want to allocate at least 512meg of RAM to Parallels which would mean needing between 1.5/2gig of RAM in the Mac.

Whilst I would hardly recommend to architects that they should use their primary productivity application in a virtualised window, from the perspective of those Mac users who need to occasionally use a piece of Windows only software this level of functionality and performance from Parallels is perfect. Sure it is not nearly as quick as running natively, but then you don't have instant access to all of OSX's niceties that you begin to miss once forced to work on a Windows desktop for a little while.

Using OSX's automounter for transparent access to remote media

David — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 00:59:26 +0000

The one thing that really annoys me about OSX is its network share tool-set. With Windows you can map a network share to a drive letter, check a box that says 'Reconnect at login' and you are done. In OSX the process of reconnecting to a network share is not nearly as smooth as it should be.

The easy option: using Favourites

The simpliest way of achieving this task is to add the network share as a favourite. To do so go to Finder's menu and select Go -> Connect to Server. In the window enter the type and name of the network share (i.e. cifs://server/share) and press the + button to save it as a favourite. With the favourite saved open your account preferences from the Apple Menu -> System Preferences -> Accounts and go to the Login Items tab. Now open a Finder window and browse to your user directory -> Library -> Favorites and drag the relevant share icon onto the list of login items to have it mounted every time you login.

The problem of lost connections

There is one significant drawback with this technique in that if the connection to the share is lost for some reason (e.g. through sleep mode, server or network failure) OSX will not automatically reconnect to it. This becomes a real pain when trying to use a remote share as your primary iTunes music folder because when iTunes cannot find the share it restores your music directory to its default location. This leads to confusion, missing files and if you are not careful a destroyed music library.

The good news is the automount tool can come to your aid but the bad news is it is not straightforward to setup. Automount is common among the *NIX's (i.e. Linux, BSD, etc.) and works in the background to ensure your network shares are always available after restarts and network failures.

The drawback of automount

There is a significant drawback with automount in that shares mounted using it are accessible to all users of the machine unless you get fancy with permissions. If you are sharing a desktop with people you do not trust then automount is probably not the best option for you.

Configuring automount

Note: Configuring automount requires an account with administrative privileges so either log in as your desktop's administrator or become comfortable with su'ing to the relevant user.

1. Open a Terminal window and run the following command to become the root user:

sudo sh (enter)

You will be prompted for the administrators password at this point.

Edit the hostconfig file and ensure the AUTOMOUNT option is set to -YES-

pico /etc/hostconfig

By default the automounter is enabled so in theory no change should be necessary here. If it is set to NO change it to read YES and save the file.

2. Now determine where you want the automounter to mount your network shares. In my case I created a Folder named Media in /Users/Shared.

3 . Open NetInfo Manager from the Applications/Utilities folder.

4. In NetInfo Manager create entries in the mounts directory to hold information on the shares you want automounted. To do so click on the mounts directory and select Directory -> New Subdirectory to make a new entry.

With this entry in place edit its properties so that they read like the following:

name = Name of entry (i.e. server:/share)
dir = Path to mount point (i.e. /Users/Shared/Media/share
vfstype = url
opts = url==cifs://username:password@server/share

Remember to replace placehodlers like server, share, username and password with their actual values!

Note: To add new properties to the node select Directory -> New Property from the menu.

When you are finished you should have something like the following screenshot:

Setting up automount in NetInfo Manager (click to enlarge)

Save the changes to the directory and quit NetInfo Manager if you like.

5. Now it is time to restart the automount service. Go back to the Terminal window and type:

sudo killall -HUP automount

This will stop the current automount process and begin a new one using the settings you just defined.

You should now find that by browsing to /Users/Shared/Media/ in the Finder your share has been mounted and you can browse and modify the files within.

Conclusion

Okay so setting up automount is not as simple as one would hope but you do end up with a permanent connection to your network share which makes it ideal for commonly used group resources like Music and Video shares. Hopefully it is only a short term solution and in the forthcoming release of OSX Leopard Apple addresses some (if not all) of the networking shortcomings of the Finder.

A tantalising prospect: Leopard supports ZFS

David — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:54:12 +0000

Leopard is the next version of OSX due for release mid-next year. When first introduced to Mac developers a number of significant Leopard features were purposefully kept 'secret'. Perhaps one feature hinted at that is now beginning to appear in the latest development builds is support for the ZFS filesystem.

ZFS is a fantastic file-system developed by Sun Microsystems for use initially in their Solaris operating system. ZFS is arguably the most advanced, generally available file-system which supports massive disk sizes, unlimited file attributes, sophisticated volume management (including snapshots) and great RAID support. If these reports are true then it maybe an indication of how Leopard's Time Machine functionality maybe finally implemented. ZFS would provide a fast and efficient snapshot mechanism that would work far more efficiently compared to creating multiple standard backups or even incremental backups as what would be required using a conventional file-system.

Even if ZFS is not used in Time Machine it is still great to see such a file system will be available for OSX especially at the server level where the majority of ZFS features are targeted. Hopefully in the future we will see ZFS take the role of OSX's default operating system allowing the venerable HFS+ format to be finally retired.

apple
osx

OmniPlan comes to the project management party

David — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 22:09:07 +0000

For the longest time finding a decent project management tool for OSX has been difficult, if not impossible depending on the features you require. Unfortunately even in the Windows world finding an alternative to the powerful but very expensive Microsoft Project is challenging. This is primarily because Microsoft Project pretty much owns the project management space in terms of the functionality provided and the level of lock-in demanded. Consequently with Microsoft not porting their application to OSX and alternatives lacking when it comes to functionality, usability and interoperability there is large void when it comes to the applicability of OSX to certain businesses. Fortunately the Omni Group have set out to change this fact with their first release of OmniPlan.

The OmniPlan workspace (click to enlarge)

The Omni Group have a long history of making great OSX software, in fact they started out developing software for the NEXTSTEP operating system - the forerunner of OSX. Without their OmniGraffle diagram/vector drawing package my life would be a whole lot harder. Omni Group software consistently gets even die hard Windows users drooling because of its ease of use, looks and depth of functionality. The reason why the Omni Group make excellent OSX software is because their products are designed specifically for the graphical and interface conventions of OSX. As their software is not simply a port of a Windows version or designed from the outset to run on multiple platforms the applications always look fantastic, integrate extensively with other OSX services and run as smooth as silk. I have been playing with OmniPlan and at this early stage it looks like the Omni Group have managed to maintain their high standards when it comes to functionality, usability and aesthetics.

When it comes to functionality OmniPlan covers all the bases and applies the standard (i.e. Microsoft Project) functional idioms when managing your projects. Being a 1.0 release the depth of functionality is not there just yet and for mid to hard-core Microsoft Project users they will soon become aware of missing, essential functionality. However if you are like me and only need to use project management tools every so often to create the odd overly ambitious gantt chart you will find OmniPlan meets your needs well. Without consulting the manual it is easy to add tasks, dependencies, resources (i.e. people) and plot critical paths if you have a little knowledge of Microsoft Project (or similar tool). In fact if you have experience with other Omni Group applications like OmniGraffle or OmniOutliner you will feel right at home as the same user-interface conventions and keyboard shortcuts are carried across into OmniPlan.

OmniPlan by default saves to its own proprietary format but for those working with Microsoft Project users you will be happy to hear that OmniPlan reads and writes Project XML and Project Exchange files. A note of caution though, I did not have any files to test the real-world compatibility of the formats and from past experience your mileage may vary when it comes to swapping complex data between different platforms. For people working with text documents you will also be happy to see the option to export as a TIFF, JPEG or PDF file which means gantt charts can be easily embedded within all sorts of documents.

Resource management with OmniPlan (click to enlarge)

The thing that really stood out in using OmniPlan was its export to HTML functionality. This tool quickly generated a multi-page project website. The nice thing about this tool was that the templates are fully customisable using standard HTML and a little bit of specific OmniPlan markup. Unfortunately a drawback was that only one standard template ships with OmniPlan and no preview functionality is provided. It would be nice in future releases to see a set of professional, stylish templates and a preview interface similar to what is provided in Keynote so that project managers can quickly generate stylish web reports with a minimum of hassle. It would also be good to see OmniPlan support automatic upload or synchronisation with online services like .Mac and FTP/Network drives so that these exports can be effortlessly published to the Web or Intranet.

Quickly producing printed copies of project gantt charts and reports is also very easy so long as in the print dialog box you select OmniPlan from the print options drop-down list. Selecting this brings up a host of useful options such as the template to apply, the number of pages the report should span and what data should be included in the print job. Unfortunately if you forget (or fail to notice) this option and just press Print the results are not spectacular to say the least. This is a shame as generally speaking accepting the defaults and seeing what happens is standard human nature. It would be nice if either the OmniPlan print options were displayed by default when the print command is given or like Photoshop, there was some kind of Print with Preview command that let you see a dynamic preview before committing to the actual print job.

Apart from these gripes the 1.0 release of OmniPlan is very solid and holds a lot of potential for the future. Like all Omni Group products it is competitively priced at US$149.95 (a steal compared to Microsoft Project) and a free, fully functional demo is available for download. If the Omni Group's other products are any sort of example there will no doubt be versions 2.0 and 3.0 of OmniPlan that build upon the existing functionality of this first release and extend it further into the realm of Microsoft Project killer. Congratulations go to the Omni Group for getting this out the door (so to speak) and I, like many Mac business users will be looking forward to this products exciting evolution.

Remote for Airport Express & iTunes

David — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:45:24 +0000

I stream music and podcasts from the computers in the office into kitchen using an Airport Express unit. Whilst the Airport Express units are little pricey they are very versitile, the only problem being they do not come with any remote which results in a lot of trips backwards and forwards to adjust the volume and what is playing. I finally got sick of this and ordered an Keyspan Express Remote from TotallyMac.com. It turns out that the New Zealand office of TotallyMac.com is in Wellington and within a couple of hours of placing the order I had the remote in my hands (which was fantastic service).

The Keyspan remote setup in my kitchen with speakers in the background (click to enlarge)

Setting up the remote was a piece of cake as it plugs into the Airport Express via USB and sets itself up to work with iTunes automatically. The remote looks okay although it would have been much better if it had a more stylish look and feel similar to the Apple remote. However this is only a minor drawback considering the price and functionality delivered. If you own an Airport Express (or are thinking of getting one) I definitely recommend picking up one of these remotes in order to complete the experience.

osx
wireless

Another request for a small scale iServe alternative

David — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 11:21:24 +0000

I was interested to see a call by Tom of New Rowley for a home-orientated Mac server for storing all the digital music, video and photographs people are collecting. The product described by this post was very similar to the one I described as ideal for the small business sector a while back. It is nice to see that I am not completely crazy and that such a product would satisfy a couple of juicy markets. Whilst I do not think I would buy one for my house I am pretty sure an iServe for the home would be a lot better than the current crop of large external storage devices available for the average consumer.

Scalix and Apple Mail

David — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 06:36:01 +0000

OSX Mail is a typical Apple product, it has some great features that make it fantastic but it is let down by the tiny details. For example I've been battling with it's 'Synchronize IMAP Account' feature and its ability to almost crash my Scalix mail server. The feature is useful because it creates a local copy of an on-line IMAP account for SpotLight searching and general offline use. Unfortunately if this process is run after a long period of time offline it can cause the Scalix IMAP server to trip up and not allow further IMAP connections.

I've been on the Scalix forums trying to resolve this issue and it seems like the root cause is a hard-coded limit of 17 simultaneous IMAP connections within Scalix. Unfortunately OSX Mail creates multiple simultaneous connections when performing the synchronization process and just to make matters worse it takes its own sweet time in closing them. Consequently it does not take long for the 16 process limit to be reached, the Scalix IMAP server to trip over and the Mail client to be left out in the cold.

The most annoying thing about the problem is that unlike Thunderbird, OSX Mail offers no way to limit the number of simultaneous connections, thus getting around the issue. Fortunately it sounds like the server team will resolve this hard coded process limit bug, perhaps in time for Scalix 11, so the annoying issue maybe resolved once and for all.

osx
scalix

A few useful OSX Mail bundles to correct its shortcomings

David — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 10:03:55 +0000

Apple's Mail application by itself is not the most fully featured of email tools, it lacks proper calendar integration, column views and more technical things like always connected IMAP IDLE mode. Fortunately it makes up for these shortcomings in its interface, great search functionality and integration with the rest of OSX. But still its nice to have the functionality that is available within contemporary applications like Thunderbird and Outlook and that is where Bundles come in.

Bundles are Apple Mail-speak for functionality extensions similar to Firefox's. Unlike Thunderbird which has the ability to be extended but has so many inbuilt features its almost pointless, Mail has a wide array of Bundles that provide nearly all of the functionality missing within the base application.

Two of my 'must have' free Bundles are Letterbox and IMAP-IDLE which together add column views and idle support for IMAP respectively. The Growl notification framework is also worth installing if you would like visual notifications of incoming mail including sender details and a brief teaser. This is useful as it lets you can decide if it is necessary to read the complete message immediately or whether it can wait till later. Even better Growl is not limited to Mail with a host of plug-ins available for a variety of different applications.

Another very interesting but more costly (US$25-$30) Bundle worth exploring is MailTag 2.0 Beta. MailTag 2.0 adds searchable tagging functionality within email headers and a host of other features that integrate Mail with iCal. The original MailTag stored tag data in files separate to the email repository but with 2.0 this data is stored within the email header. This means if you are using an IMAP server the time and effort placed into tagging your data on one computer can be easily shared amongst multiple desktops. Many of the extra features that come with MailTags look as if they will make their way into the next release of Mail in OSX10.5 Leopard, but as it stands its tagging capabilities will be a unique feature for a long time to come.

Cacti: Simple system graphing for networks

David — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 04:25:37 +0000

Steve Wray put me on to Cacti the other day and I must say its pretty nice once you get over its slightly confusing interface. Cacti graphs statistics from network devices but unlike similar tools it does not try to do anything else. Think of it like bling for your network, good to look at, but maybe not that practical in a network emergency. But just like bling it is easy to put on and even better it is sure to impress your system admin friends, which in those hot and steamy server rooms we all want to do...

Installation is straightforward if you are running a typical LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) but it can also run on a number of platforms including Windows if you are desperate. Cacti uses the PHP-SNMP extension to talk to SNMP agents on the network, keeps configuration settings in MySQL and stores accumulated network information as RRD files that get processed by RRDTool. Users can be configured with different access rights and devices/graphs can be clustered together in trees for easy viewing.


Click to enlarge screenshots

Most monitoring tasks provide graph templates that simplify the job of creating SNMP queries and laying out the graph data. This makes setting up Cacti monitoring pretty straightforward, in fact the hardest thing can be configuring all the SNMP agents. For those that want to go off the beaten track a little the graphing and data collection system is completely customisable. This means any piece of data that can be gleamed via SNMP or from local script commands can be visually displayed and turned into a template for others to use.

DebianHelp has a comprehensive list of available Cacti graph/data templates. The most useful example I have found for building your own custom queries explains how to monitor system up-time using Cacti. In the process the howto goes through data source and graphing basics and is definitely worth working through if you want to do more with Cacti than what the default set of templates provide.

I have only hit two snags when setting up Cacti, one was getting Netware CPU monitoring to work and the other was with SNMP and Intel-based OSX.

Netware CPU Utilization

After quite a bit of experimentation I could not get the default Netware CPU utilization to work. For some reason the SNMP request was not going through, or maybe if it was the data was not being saved to disk (I couldn't figure out which). The workaround I found was to do the following:

1. Create a new data source using the SNMP - Generic OID Template

2. Set the server and name details and provide a path to where the RRD file will be saved, for example: <path_rra>/netware_server_cpu.rrd

3. Set the maximum value of the query to 100 as the SNMP request that will be performed will return a percentage value for CPU utilisation.

4. In the OID field enter: .1.3.6.1.4.1.23.2.27.3.16.1.4.1
This will query the first processor on the Netware server for its current utilization and it will return a single integer value that represents its utilisation in percentage terms.

Note: You can test this SNMP query out on the command line using snmpwalk, just enter:

snmpwalk -c <Community Name> -v 1 <Netware DNS Name> .1.3.6.1.4.1.23.2.27.3.16.1.4.1

5. Save the data source and then create a new Netware CPU Utilization graph using the previously saved generic SNMP query as a data source.

The results are not as accurate as what is available from Unix-based SNMP data sources as Netware does not return as much processor information via SNMP. However it will provide enough detail for you to at least understand roughly what your server is up to which after all is the point of the exercise.

Intel-based OSX

The other issue I ran into was getting an SNMP agent working on Intel-based OSX. It turns out that from OSX 10.4 running on Intel processors Apple has dropped support for /dev/mem and /dev/kmem which are used for querying the kernel on memory usage. SNMPD needs this information and even though all versions of OSX ship with SNMPD installed it will not run in its current state as SNMP is dependent on /dev/kmem.

Why Apple have made this move is a little uncertain but from my limited research it seemed to be tied into copyright protection concerns (OSX on non-Apple systems). There are a few workarounds and a bug has been submitted to Apple, but for now SNMP on Intel OSX is not really available unless you are willing to undertake some rather nasty hacks.