While Bluetooth is well supported in Mac OS X and many handheld computing devices, it's not immediately obvious how you can configure Mac OS X to provide Internet Sharing to Bluetooth-enabled handheld devices.

This work builds on this hint, which enables internet sharing at startup. Now we'll show how to configure a Mac OS X 10.2 system to act as a Bluetooth Internet access point for Palm Powered handhelds (and, presumably, other devices) that can use the Bluetooth Serial Profile to establish a PPP connection.

[Editor's note: This is a somewhat long and involved hint, and I have not tested it (as I don't have any Bluetooth devices). If you try it, please post a comment with your experiences and any corrections to what are probably my editing errors!]

I have discovered a way to publish multiple simultaneous slideshows from one .Mac account. The tutorial is posted at here on the www.dotmac.info site. Linked from that tutorial is a Preference Pane I have written to enable users to subscribe to these previously hidden slideshows.

[Editor's note: I have not tested the hint nor the referenced Pref Pane.]

I have several users on one of my 10.2 boxes. They all want to publish their web pages, but don't like the idea of having to type http://mydomain.com/~user/. So what I did was create a symbolic link from their Sites folder to the web root, /Library/WebServer/Documents/.

I name the symbolic link as their short user name. When they want to access their personal web site, they only have to type http://mydomain.com/user/. For those of you wanting to know how to make the link, just open a Terminal and type:

 % ln -s /Users/username/Sites  /Library/WebServer/Documents/username

Replace 'username' with the user's short user name, obviously. That's all you need to do; the users can now access their sites without typing the tilde. My users like it, so I thought maybe one of you may find it useful.

This might be a no-brainer to most, plus not being that savvy with the Terminal, I probably take a more laborious route here and there. I've been using Brickhouse as my firewall for OS X since it also added easy support for internet connection sharing.

After upgrading to 10.2, in browsing around I gave Apple's firewall settings a look, but in order to do so had to first disable Brickhouse and restart. If another firewall is running, the settings for Apple's firewall are disabled and it displays an error message in the Firewall preference.

In playing around with the built-in firewall (opening up web serving and SSH), I realized it wasn't sufficient for what I wanted to do and re-enabled Brickhouse and started up again. I looked back at the built-in firewall preferences, saw that they were greyed out, error message about other firewall software running (just like before I explored Apple's firewall), and I was good to go. Unfortunately, after that, the other machine on my home network (a PBG3 connected via an Airport) was only able to utilize SSH and view web pages (only port 80, not any secure pages).

Well, even though the error message on Apple's Firewall led me to believe, at a quick glance anyway, that it was not active because other firewall software was running on my computer, it turned out that I needed to disable Brickhouse and reboot so I could click the "Stop" button on Apple's firewall. Once I did that, everything was fine again. So, even though Brickhouse was picking up most firewall settings, it seemed that the only traffic allowed on my LAN was what I had left open according to Apple's firewall settings, even though (I thought) it wasn't enabled.

What I thought was weird about this is that it seems like both firewalls were running. What is weirder is that even though with the built-in firewall's editor you cannot configure settings for a second ethernet interface, that was the interface being affected.

[Editor's note: Although not an earth-shattering hint, if you've played around with Apple's firewall and another package, this may help you resolve any problems you've had since doing so...]

For some reason in Mac OS X 10.2, the default file permissions when uploading files via ftp is set to 640. This results in the permission "-rw-r-----". That is, the file can be read and modified by the owner, read by those belonging to its group, but others can't even read it. Naturally, this causes problems when using ftp to upload files to a web server.

In previous systems it defaulted to the more sensible 644, or "-rw-r--r--", which is also the system-wide default. Apparently, ftpd does not follow the system's UMASK setting. To change this for all users on the machine you need to create a file in /etc/ called ftpd.conf. In this file, add one line saying:

  umask all 022

Save the file and restart the ftp server. This will make uploaded files readable by all.

In 10.1.5, by typing "ps -axwwwww | grep ppp" in the Terminal, you can see the password of the dial-up account (if you're already connected). I know of no method of hiding this in 10.1.5 ... but in 10.2 (Jaguar), the passwords are now hidden.

I decided to write a command line script to locate any hosts that are flooding my system with Nimda and CodeRed worm requests and add them to the "deny� list using the Macintosh OS X 10.2 IPFW utility, rather than relying on third party shareware GUI wrappers which do pretty much the same thing.

I just accessed my iDisk, and it has grown substantially in capacity. I bought the regular 100 MB real early (during the keynote when .Mac was presented), and now the iDisk is a full 1 GB (1024 MB). I don't know if this is a mistake on Apple's side or a bonus to early adopters. I haven't found any information on Apple's site, and they haven't sent out any messages about enlarging the iDisk (at least none that has reached me yet).

[Editor's note: Interesting. I also have the 100mb account, which I had upgraded about six months ago. In checking my iDisk capacity this morning, it reports a 1gb capacity in the Finder, but the iDisk panel in the Internet preferences pane still reports the 100mb limit. I don't think I'll start using the extra space until I hear something from Apple one way or the other!]

I had opened a text file in BBEdit Lite, and wanted to keep a clipping of a website address. Highlighting the address and dragging it to the desktop resulted in a 4K file with ".webloc" for its extension, and the icon for a web url file. Double clicking on the file took me directly to the site.

[Editor's note: This seemed to work in most applications I tested; Office v.X, however, creates "picture clipping" files (surprise?). Clipping behavior overall seems much better in 10.2 than it was previously; I had mixed success creating clippings of any kind from many applications in 10.1.]

The natd service, used in Internet Connection Sharing, has been greatly improved in 10.2, removing its two major drawbacks (kind of normal, as it is now officially supported):

• It correctly takes into account the change of the IP address on a PPP link, which makes this 10.1 hint unnecessary.
  
  
• It correctly translates UDP flows, which allows Quicktime streaming over RTSP, network time synchronization, and certainly many other usage, from the client Mac (tested with a 9.2.2 client).

[Editor's note: The other hint will remain online for those still running 10.1...]