IP aliasing allows your server (or more accurately your interface card) to respond to more than one IP address.

I like to use a mixture of header based IP and real or aliased IP addresses, meaning that a number of URL's point (in DNS) to the same IP number, and other URL's have their own IP address.

eg
www.foobar.com -> 174.32.3.52
www.foobar2.com -> 174.32.3.52
www.foobar3.com -> 174.32.3.52

www.different.com -> 174.32.3.60

To do this, your interface device has to recognise and listen for the different IP numbers. This is done via IP aliasing.

Using the ifconfig command in OSX/BSD appears to be different from Linux.

Instructions for the syntax to do this is over on the Stepwise site.

Linux instructions for IP aliasing are available at Linux Documentation Project

You will also need to add listen directives to the apache config file - this is covered else where on this site.

Up until tonight, I'd been disappointed with the lack of drag-and-drop support on text selections in Cocoa apps. It seemed I could make it work most of the time in OmniWeb pages (but not in forms), but never in mail.app or Stickies. The OS 9 method, which was to select the text, then click-hold and drag, didn't work. The second click simply moved the insertion point when I started to drag.

Tonight, though, the mystery has been solved! To drag and drop text chunks in any Cocoa app (supposedly; I haven't tested them all!), simply change your behavior slightly. Highlight the text, click and hold the mouse button in the highlighted area for just under a second, then move it around at will! If you've held it long enough, you'll see the text darken slightly to indicate that you're now holding the text in "float" mode.

I kept thinking this was simply another piece of OS X that wasn't quite done yet ... looks like it's done, but the implementation has changed. Thanks to Russ H. on the X4U mailing list for pointing this one out! Stickies and mail are now much more convenient to use!

I stumbled across this one, and it's painfully simple.

To speed Finder menu scrolling in the Classic Environment, make certain that you turn OFF "Platinum Sounds" in the Classic's Appearance control panel.

You'll find Classic Finder menu scrolling nice and fast.

For those of you out there that like to do M*ing (Moo, Mud, Muck, Mush, Cold, etc) there is a Unix program called TinyFugue that, to my knowledge, is the leading client for these types of games. This installs just fine on OSX and runs great. (You can go to FreshMeat to find TinyFugue)

I have found that if you just drag the file 'tf' (the TinyFugue app) to the Toolbar and click on it absolutely nothing happens.

Here is how you can get it working. You can go and Get Info on the 'tf' file itself, then 'Show Application' and set it to 'A specific application' and have it fire up Terminal. You will need to set it to show 'All Applications' and you will get a warning that it is not known if this application will launch up this file, but it works great.

I do not know if this works with all terminal based apps, but it did work for TinyFugue.

~jamie

If, for some reason (can someone think of one?) you'd like to shut down your Mac from another machine, here's how you do it.

1. Connect to your Mac remotely via SSH or telnet.
   
2. Become root ('su' and enter your root password)
   
3. Type sync to clear the buffer (may not be necessary with the next command, but I'm cautious!)
   
4. Type halt to shut down the machine.

This will (obviously) end your telnet/SSH connection shortly after you type it ;-).

I just tried this from my PC to my Mac, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do ... my Mac shut down cleanly. No errors of any sort on restart, but I did lose my '3 day, 4:54' uptime! I'm not quite sure why one would want to do this, but it is possible.

After some frustration and concern about the small choice of folders that I could have in my finder toolbar, I eventually tried what should have been obvious. Yes, for those of us who hadn't worked this out (and I know I'm not the only one) you can just drag any folder, file or application into the finder toolbar.

You can even use this in a rather tricky manner and remove the home button from the toolbar and then drag your own home folder in, giving the button the (possibly customized) icon of your own home folder. The same goes for many of the other buttons (including using the sherlock app instead of the find button).

Read the rest of this article if you'd like to know more about customizing the customizable toolbar!

I believe I saw this one on the MacFixIt forums today. If you like some of the images that are loaded by the screensaver application, you can also use them as desktop pictures. Navigate in the GUI (use the terminal if you wish, but these are GUI instructions) to:

/System/Library/Screen Savers/

There are four screen savers with images (Abstract, Beach, Cosmos, and Forest). Control-click on any one of those four, and pick Show Package Contents. When the new window opens, navigate to Contents/Resources/Images, and you'll see a list of images (and their previews, if you switch to column view).

To use the images as desktop pictures, just copy the one(s) you are interested in to a destination in a new finder window. You can now tell Desktop Preferences to use these images as desktops!

[Editor's note: Although this probably has no side effects, always be cautious when messing around with system-created folders! The thought of having one desktop in both mode is certainly appealing!]

I was sick of having two different desktop folders in Mac OS 9 and OS X, so I decided to combine them into one. Here's how I did it

1. I fired up the terminal app and found out where everything lived:
   OS 9 desktop folder = /Desktop Folder/
   OS X desktop folder = /Users/username/Desktop
   
2. I deleted the folder from /Users/username/Desktop with an rm -R Desktop
   
3. I logged in as root and did a ln -s /Desktop Folder/ Users/username/Desktop

After logging out and logging back in, OS 9 and OS X now share the same desktop folder!

The finder's desktop preferences let you snap the desktop icons to a grid, yet somehow the icons always get randomly rearranged. The easy Classic-like fix is to turn on the 'arrange by' desktop view option (which I belive is currently hidden). I did this with prefedit (or any xmlproperty editor) in the following property:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder

Look in the DesktopViewOptions property for ArrangeBy which you can set to "dnam" for sort by name or "kind" for sort by kind. Save your changes...

Now log out and log back in and your desktop is sorted. I found a desktop sorted by kind with the trash can on the desktop and a couple of good aliases ("Home", "Print Center", MacOS 9 Apps, MacOS X Apps, etc...) makes the desktop suddenly look very much like Classic.
---
hope this helps

rlucia writes: "Now we have some patches to The FreeBSD Ports Collection to make it working on Darwin 1.3 (as shipped with Mac OS X). I also patched pkg_* from FreeBSD source tree to use with Darwin. The work is at early stage but I could compile and install (also deinstall) lots of packages."

Check it out at Darwin pkg, Darwin ports or compiled packages files.