I've read a dozen hints on related topics, but haven't seen anything that deals with precisely this issue. I have an iMac at work and a PowerBook at home. I wanted to keep the two machines in sync, but without lugging the PowerBook into the office. I also wanted to do this without opening the Terminal.

My criteria meant that the obvious (but not necessarily easy) solution, rsync, was ruled out. Folks suggested rsyncX, psync, and Unison, but I was most convinced by the arguments in favor of Chronosync. Chronosync costs money, but it does exactly what I need it to: it gives me all the power and flexibility of rsync, but with a nice, polished GUI.

But Chronosync has one significant limitation: it can only sync two volumes that one can mount locally. All the Chronosync documentation (which is quite thorough, by the way) presumes that you have two locally-mounted volumes, either over a LAN or through FireWire, etc. But, you'll recall I didn't want to haul the PowerBook into the office.

I thought I'd have to drop my 'no CLI' condition and turn to rsync, but then I read this hint on a related but different topic, and found the suggestion from jctull (scroll down a bit) about how to use SSH Tunnel Manager. Thus, the solution to my problem was to do the following:

1. Use Tunnel Manager 2.0 to create an ssh tunnel from the PowerBook at home to the iMac at the office.
2. Set up Tunnel Manager (following jctull's instructions in the above hint's comments) to forward port 10548 on the powerbook to port 548 (afp) on the iMac.
3. Connect to localhost:10548, which mounts the iMac drive as an AFP volume on my PowerBook.
4. Launch Chronosync, set up the sync, and go from there!

This all seems simple enough, and is a breeze to use now that it's set up. But I was rather surprised that no one had mapped out any sort of simple instructions to sync two machines not on a LAN without using the command line. My next step would be to automate this process with an AppleScript, but as you can likely tell from above, I'm not much of a programmer. Any suggestions greatly appreciated.

I run a closed WPA2 Airport network (not out of poor neighbourliness, but due to New Zealand's backward broadband situation, with very restrictive and expensive data caps.) This is normally not an issue, my laptop identifies the network and logs on automatically, as it should. To do that, I set the Airport configuration in Network Preferences to "By Default, Join Preferred Networks," and under the Options button, "Automatically add new networks to the preferred networks list."

After recent changes to my system, I could not get it to join the network automatically. Each time, I had to type in the name of the closed network, and the WPA2 password, in order to get access. This is both a nuisance and a slightly increased security risk, so I was keen to get back to the automatic login. Everything in the network settings was apparently as before, the network was at the top of the preferred list, and I began to wonder if a recent Airport or System update (I'm on Mac OS X 10.4.5) had broken the previous functionality.

What turned out to be the problem however, was that I had changed the Airport network while trying to get a USB wireless adapter working with it. The change in the network password to a 13 character one for improved compatibility was not updated in the preferred networks list in the Network Preference Panel. So the automatic connection was still operating on a previous password. Once I manually changed it to the new one, everything operated as before. A minor issue perhaps, but the sort of thing that can be quite infuriating until you track it down.

Two previous tips addressed this issue in terms of the Keychain. This tip identifies the password issue in Network Preferences, and provides the needed fix.

I have a single label domain name that is the same as the name of the Forest. Try finding any information about the problems of a single label domain. I'll just say that the problems are numerous, vexing, and undocumented.

I don't know how much of the following is critical for the connection to AD, but I've worked so long and hard to get this working that I don't want to turn them off and on to try to break it. And given other posts about unpredictable behavior, turning them off and on may not even tell me which ones are necessary.

Read on for the configuration...

With the recent security threats to OS X, I thought it would be a good idea to be able to automatically configure my firewall based on the applications I have open. If no application is using said port, it's closed. So with a little help from bash and AppleScript, I now have an application that automagically scans for open applications and configures the firewall accordingly. Enjoy!

The D-link DWL 122 seems to very buggy drivers on OS X: when you unplug it while your Mac is on, it often crashes with a kernel panic. How can you avoid that?

Go to your System Preferences, then Network, then click Show and choose Network Port Configurations from the pop-up menu. There you can find "Ethernet adapter (en1)." That is your wifi dongle; uncheck the "On" checkbox, then click "Apply Now." Now you can unplug your dongle without any fear :)

Remember to tick it back to On if you want to use your dongle again. This hint is useful for other wifi dongles using the same chipset and drivers (e.g.: NetGear ma111).

I was looking for an easy way to keep an eye on the status of some of my servers. Since I didn't have the patience to search for a solution which matched my needs, I wrote this little perl script. Download it, paste it in your favorite text editor, and save it somewhere on your path as is_tcp_port_listening.pl. Make it executable (chmod 755 is_tcp_port_listening.pl), and then it can be invoked with this command:

$ ./is_tcp_port_listening.pl 'hostname' 'portnumber'

The script simply tries to connect to a server on a TCP port. If the connection can be established, it will return the value 0, which means in a UNIX System that everything is okay. If it's not possible to connect in a definable time, it will stop its attempts and return the value 1. You can set the timeout by changing the following line in the source code:

my $timeout = 3;

This for example sets the timeout to three seconds, which might be a bit short if your server and/or your internet connection is slow.

After updating the firmware of my WLAN router (Fritz Box SL WLAN), my iBook (OS 10.3.9) stopped connecting automatically to my router, and also gave an annoying "error joining" message. This hint removed the error message, but automatic reconnect still failed.

Solution: when entering a WEP hex key in System Preferences > Network > Automatic Connect/Preferred Network, be sure to prepend 0x before the key itself (no spaces between 0x and the key).

I have a wireless network at home, and I also connect to several other networks at work. I do not use DHCP, so I have to manually select a network location each time I turn on my laptop. Using a few scripts I found here, I created this AppleScript that will automatically set the location based on the connected SSID.

It will also open shared drives, if they are defined in the script. If it doesn't find an SSID in the list, it will set the location to Automatic. With some extra work, it should be possible to also set the default printer.


I hope this is of some use to some people; I use it a few times each day in combination with SleepWatcher.

[robg adds: This previous hint does the same thing via a shell script, and this one works via bash and a launchd item.]

To stop OS X 10.4 from creating a default route to your VPN connection, open Internet Connect (in Applications). Choose Options from the Connect menu, then uncheck the "Send all traffic over VPN connection" option. Click OK, and you're done.

To make a custom route to the subnet on the other side of the VPN connection, read the rest of the hint...

Do you have a few computers networked at home with a wireless laptop, and only a dialup connection to share among them?

Well, I live only a few minutes from a large city, but still don't have access to high speed connectivity of any sort. I have two towers and one laptop at home, and was having issues with my wireless signal strength (I was just using a software base station). So I bought a D-link DI-624 wireless router to increase my network range. However, when I got it home and set it up, the default internet sharing preferences weren't working. I looked for ages (on a dialup connection, which took forever), but couldn't find any solutions that worked. After reading up about how internet sharing works and sleeping on it, I figured it out. It basically involves turning off the default DHCP server on the router, and using 192.168.2.xx IPs, which is what apple uses to share the connection.