The SMB Browse utility by Gordon Shukwit has helped me quite a bit. There is no more need to type mount_smbfs into the terminal.

You can get this small utility here.

If you have ever wanted to mount volumes from your linux box on your MacIntosh without the aid of an FTP client, then Netatalk is what you have been looking for.

I just discovered that Netatalk is now on Source Forge, and is actively being updated. You can download either a CVS version or the current stable version, as well as a module to control Netatalk from webmin.

The install onto my Linux box file server was quite painless and I was instantly able to mount all my Linux volumes on my OS X desktop (works equally well on OS 9).

Among other things, Netatalk allows OS X to keep the proper file types (with the ability to define custom file types) and I do not have to deal with invisible files from other file transfers from PC's or other Macs. You have the choice of either AppleTalk or AFP over TCP/IP, the latter being quite a bit faster with file transfers and easier to setup.

The modem scripts for Nokia phones (Nokia_IR and Nokia Infrared) supplied with 10.1 don't seem to work (I'm currently on 10.1.3 and this hasn't been corrected yet). However the OS 9 scripts seem to work (I'm on 9.2.2) so I simply replaced the "Nokia Infrared" script in "Library/Modem Scripts" with the one in "System Folder/Extensions/Modem Scripts".

Even though the scripts are marked as the same version, when compared in BBEdit, there are some differences, including one to the modem initialization string.

Although the following is officially a press release, it's not a product announcement, and it's directly related to using OS X, so I've chosen to publish it as a tip. Here's the blurb that Eric Zelenka, Apple's Product Line Manager for Server Software, just mailed out.

Apple is pleased to announce the release of a new document entitled Integrating Mac OS X with Active Directory. This document describes how you can use the information stored in Microsoft's Active Directory to authenticate Macintosh users and provide file services and home directories for them on Mac OS X Server. It is available for immediate download from the Mac OS X Server web site.

Read the rest of the article for a bit more information on OS X and directory services.

After I had ripped most of our CD collection to a spare drive on my Mac, my wife asked the next logical question - "So how can I listen to this down in the living room?" I didn't have a good answer for her until recently. On the advice of a friend, I checked out the Turtle Beach Audiotron.

So what's an Audiotron, you may be asking? The Audiotron is, in a nutshell, a networked MP3 player. The device has no hard drive, no fan, and it's designed to look like a standard piece of audio gear so it will fit right into your existing rack. It includes both analog and TOSlink fiber optic digital outputs. You plug in a 10-base-T cable, a power cord, and then connect the thing to your stereo system. Just like that, your entire MP3 collection is available through your stereo.

How is this related to OS X? Event though Turtle Beach disclaims any Mac support, the Audiotron works just fine with OS X (via a Samba server). After some initial snags, some help from a key web page had our Audiotron up and running without any further difficulties.

Brief editorial aside: I truly think this is the future of home audio, at least in some respects. With the Audiotron installed, we now have a catalog of 2,300+ songs (the machine can handle 30,000+, according to the specs) available at the touch of a few buttons. No more getting up to grab another CD for the player, forgetting where you put the CD you wanted to hear right now, etc. Just thousands of songs, always available as long as my Mac is up and running! I think the Audiotron (and SonicBlue's similar device) are just the tip of the iceberg in this product category.

Read the rest of the article for a summary of the steps required to get an Audiotron working with OS X...

Should anyone want to set up an OS X box for modem routing, than the following script might be of good use. It sets up all necessary services and daemons to get a clean route to ppp0 through the built-in firewall. It is designed as a usual unix daemon loader, hence usage:

homeroute start|Stop

Just download and run as root! Grab it here.

[Editor's note: I have neither looked at nor tried this script, so make sure you're comfortable with what it does before you run it. Nothing intended against the author of this particular script; it's just generally good advice!]

Since MacOS X does not come with a PPTP-client one has to use PPTP-GUI to connect to the provider.

However PPTP-GUI does not currently work when you do not have an internal modem in your Mac since it uses MacOS X's PPP stack which is only set up when a modem is detected.

There is a way around this by "hacking" the Alcatel modem (only works for the ethernet version as far as I know).

Instructions for this can be found here. Basically it makes it so that the ADSL modem will handle the PPTP stuff for you so you can just talk straight ethernet (no PPTP or PPPoE stuff) to it. It will then also do masquerading allowing you to connect multiple machines to it via a hub.

Although this isn't a straight MacOS X tip, it does solve some problems related to MacOS X.

I figured out how to keep AFP Volumes mounted always!!! It's actually quite simple.

Here's how to make the change:

Just go to your NetInfo Manager and click the lock button to unlock to make changes. Then under "Directory Browser" click on "config" in the second column, then click on "AppleFileServer". Below you will find a "Property" and "Value(s)" columns. Go to the "idle_disconnect_flag" property and you will see that it has a value like this:

GuestUsrDisconnect_ON ,RegtdUsrDisconnect_ON ,AdminUsrDisconnect_ON ,OpenFileDisconnect_ON

Notice how each flag has an "ON" at the end of it. You can change this to either "ON" or "OFF". I made mine so that if you are an admin on the machine your trying to mount, that it would keep the volume mounted ALWAYS by changing this value: "AdminUsrDisconnect_ON" to this "AdminUsrDisconnect_OFF". My iMac now has kept my G4's hard disk mounted for over 5 hours without disconnecting and life is wonderful.

IMPORTANT! First, for this work properly you must make this change on the Mac that you are trying to mount, not the client. Second, you must save your changes in NetInfo Manager and Restart/Log Off your computer.

I'm on a college campus and am using DAVE to interact with the non Mac users of the world. If I want to see who's on my server at any given time, all I need to do is a netstat, and it'll list all current connections. But I'm not always around to check on who's connected. So I wrote two scripts to do this for me. One script is run every 15 minutes and gets a list of currently connected computers and stores it to a file. The second script runs daily and takes the output of the first script, cleans it up a it, removes all duplicate listings, then stores it into a second file.

Read the rest of the article for the two scripts.

[Editor's note: The following tip has not been tested, and it makes some assumptions about your knowledge of the Terminal, so it may not be applicable to everyone. Still, I thought it was interesting enough to post...]

There is probably an easier way to do this (maybe an applescript app?), but I wanted to have my iDisk mount when the computer starts up. I wanted this in case the machine reboots at home since I serve a few things to my iDisk. iDisk uses the mount_webdav program to do its thing, but it is not clear what all the stuff means in a ps listing.

For example, when I mount an iDisk using the Finder, I see

  mount_webdav -a10 http://idisk.mac.com/xyz /Volumes/xyz

(xyz = iDisk user name). The -a10 is a file descriptor where keychain data comes from. The http://... is the URL to the idisk, and the /Volumes/xyz is the directory where it will be mounted. If you then use terminal and omit the -a10 you get one or more dialog boxes asking for a username/password.

To make this automatic, you need to manually create the mount directory, then you need to feed mount_webdav your username and password in the form it wants. The format of the username/password is a pair of 4 byte length - characters structure. For example, if my username is xyz, and password is mypass, I must send:

^@^@^@^Cxyz^@^@^@^Fmypass

^@ is control-at, or a null - zero decimal, ^C is control-c or 3 decimal, etc. (in emacs, doing control-q control-c inserts a control-c, control-q control-space inserts a null). Once you have this in a file or coming out of a program, you can just do:

cat mypass | mount_webdav -a0 http://idisk.mac.com/xyz /Volumes/xyz

to mount the idisk since 0 is stdin.

Create a shell script so that /Volumes/xyz is created, then using dropscript, you have an app that will mount the iDisk. But DropScript is designed to take a parameter, so assign any document to open with the generated dropscript-idisk and add that to the Login startup tasks. That document will run the script, and the iDisk will mount.