I love this site. By incorporating many past hints, I've developed a simplistic "poor man's" way of getting remote access to a Mac that is behind a router on a dynamic DSL account. Let's say you want to have remote access to your Mac - secure telnet and FTP access for example. If you are like me, you have the following problems:

1. My DSL connection has a dynamic IP address
   
2. My Mac is connected to a router, which gives me a local IP address.
   
3. I'm too cheap to buy a domain-name or register for a Dynamic DNS service.

If you'd like the solution to these problems, read the rest of the article...

I have had difficulty with my ADSL connection using Telstra in Australia with 10.1. It worked fine on 10.0.4 and still on my WinTel box.

The link establishes correctly (ping etc. work) but mail and web traffic are terribly slow. I contacted Apple and they know the problem and are working on a proper fix. Their interim fix is to enter the following at the command line after you have connected.

sudo ifconfig ppp0 mtu 1492

It is also suggested that you may have to make the last number lower, I have set it to 1000. I believe this is the maximum packet size.

Where does the system keep the ppp configuration information so it can be modifed once and for all? Perhaps someone can further explain what is going on.

Gavin.

If you have to run an applet, and it crashes your browser (as most applets seem to do), you can sometimes work around it with the 'appletviewer' command.

Open up the Terminal. The appletviewer command takes the URL as an argumnet. For example:

appletviewer http://www.killradio.org/chat.html

...will run the killradio.org chatroom, which didn't run in my browsers. It runs in it's own small window, which is nice.

[Editor: This situation should be greatly improved in 10.1, as the Java support in browsers has been greatly improved.]

Is there a way to view the IE5 disk cache (or OmniWeb cache)? Most downloaded images and multimedia files are temporary stored in this cache while browsing the web, so I was wondering as to how I can view and extract files from this cache. Any help would greatly be appretiated.

Is there a way for me to let a script (or something similar) always check whether I'm online and to re-connect when I'm not? I have a dsl flat and would like my ftp and webserver to stay online. my isp tends to disconnect if after some idle time, and i'd rather not do a permanent ping which is good for "faking" user activity.

Looking forward to your hints
;-) maciana

Telstra, the ex-government telecommunications monopoly down under, has 100% of the ADSL market in Australia and is the leading cable supplier.

They are exceedingly ignorant about all things MacOS especially Mac OS X. The following non-Telstra FAQ has information about connecting MacOS X to Telstra ADSL, and has links to a freeware non-classic client for Telstra Cable (a boon for Australian OS X users)

http://whirlpool.net.au/faq-mac.cfm

Recently I started seeing lot of activity in my Apache logs. For those that don't know, they are at /private/var/log/httpd (access_log and error_log). The code was:

63.82.46.11 - - [07/Aug/2001:04:06:38 -0700] "GET /default.ida?
XXXXXXXXX...snipped...XXX%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3
%u7801%u9090%u6858%ucbd3%u7801%u9090%u9090%u8190%u00c3%u0003
%u8b00%u531b%u53ff%u0078%u0000%u00=a  HTTP/1.0" 404 27

[Editor's note: Carriage returns inserted, and repetitive "X" characters snipped, to aid readability; this will appear as one line in your log].

If you're seeing this then it's not a threat to your system. It's someone's machine running windows NT 4.0 with IIS 4.0 or 5.0 enabled, Windows 2000 servers, or betas of XP with the Code Red worm running on their box. This probably means they don't know about it and it doesn't hurt us except it bloats your access logs. The information on it can be found at
http://www.cert.org/incident_notes/IN-2001-08.html

I have a question. Is there a way to set a deny rule for this with ipfw. Anyone?
-j

Tip: How to easily keep your Powerbook from trying to connect to internet when on the road and off line.

Go to Network panel in System Prefs, Under the 'Locations' popup, select 'Edit Location'. Duplicate any existing location, and rename it something like 'Off-line'. Now go to the 'Configure' popup and select 'Advanced'. On this screen uncheck ALL of the connection types - and Save. Now you can switch easily at any time from the new 'Apple' menu's location sub-menu. When you select your new 'Off-line' location, your Powerbook will not keep trying to connect to internet.

[Editor's note: Although Mac OS X includes SSH2, there is a newer version with some improvements - the most notable of which is the removal of the connection delay that you get with the current version. Here's a how-to from a macosxhints reader for the newest version. I have not tested this myself as of yet, but I'd expect it to work as described]

Installing SSH2 on OSX is relatively simple. The step-by-step I got partly from the 2.4.0 version of SSH README and in great part from http://osx.u.nu. If you'd like the full step-by-step instructions, read the rest of this article...

I wrote a detailed account of how to set up Tomcat servlet container on MacOS X and how to integrate it with Apache. It includes instructions on building the elusive mod_jk.so.

http://www.worker-bee.com/misc_dev/install_tomcat.html

I hope it is useful to folks!

[Editor: I haven't installed Tomcat on my machine, but just glancing at the page of instructions linked here shows them to be easy to follow and clearly written. Probably well worth the visit if you want to get Tomcat and Apache working happily in X.]