Office Cafe

MacBook Internet Connection Sharing

A great feature of Mac OS X is the ease of sharing your Internet connection. For example, you are in a hotel with your family or coworkers, and you have Internet access, but more than one of you wants or needs to be connected at the same time. With your MacBook, MacBook Pro, or MacBook Air (with optional USB-Network connector), you can share your connection safely and securely!

First, open System Preferences: Click on Apple -> System Preferences… 

Second: Click on Sharing

Next, you will see the sharing preferences. In the list on the left side, find Internet Sharing, but don’t click on the box to enable it just yet.

Now click on the button labeled AirPort Options…

Here, you want to name your network (I don’t suggest any self-identifying names here… something very generic is best: my_network, private_net, etc.). Spaces are okay when sharing with all Macs. Just to be sure you can share with everybody in your group, you can replace spaces with underscores as shown in the above examples.

Put a checkmark in the box to Enable encryption.

Choose a password, confirm it and choose your preferred WEP key length. See the explanation in the box to help you make your choices. Your choices will depend on the other computers in the network that you are creating.

Click OK

You will get this warning:

Click Start

In a moment or two, the icon in the menu bar will change to look like this:

When you are done sharing, just turn it off:

1) Go to System Preferences again

2) Click on Sharing

3) Click on the Internet Sharing checkmark box to “uncheck” it.

That’s all there is to it.

Note: in another post sometime, I will explain how easy it is to use an AirPort Express for this purpose. It is an even better solution because you can leave it plugged in and enabled, even when you want to shut your laptop down or take it with you. Your family can stay behind and surf or check email without you. The AirPort Express is inexpensive, easy to carry and very easy to set up. I usually bring it along. However, in a pinch, this above solution, which is built right into Mac OS X, has saved us so much time and frustration. Everybody was happy to be on their Social Networking sites and Instant Messaging to their heart’s content.

Info Select with Crossover Mac (Update)

I have been using Info Select on my MacBook Air since April 2008. It is great to have years and years worth of life’s little details at my fingertips. For the step-by-step details of my installation (which was painless), please see my post on the topic:

Info Select Installation on MacBook Air

Since writing that tutorial, Crossover Mac has been updated. With a healthy fear of the unknown, I updated my MacBook Air with the latest version (Version 7.0.2). Here’s how it all went:

Third Place Success Formula

Who says that you can’t have great personal service in the mall? I know that around the world, people are working to make their “third place” the very best that it can be. And who would figure that one could find a sense of community amid the constantly hurried pace of the mall? One guy that is really making it happen for The Gardens Mall in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida is Jeremy, at the Starbucks near Macy’s. (The Gardens Mall has three Starbucks Cafes, each with its own vibe).

One visit and you will see a man dedicated to making the customer feel welcome, the employees feel valued, and coffee drinks served to perfection. (Yes, they do serve coffee, in addition to a healthy dose of “third place” spirit)!

There are many places that talk about community and making a great “third place,” but when one stands out, I thought you might like to know about it.

Many people from all around the country (and the world) visit The Gardens Mall. If you are one of them, please visit Jeremy and let him know that you appreciate a place with such a good atmosphere. One visit and you will know why I think that Jeremy has found the Third Place Success Formula!

Courier-IMAP Trouble Connecting Multiple Computers

Having your own mail server can be a great experience. If you are hosting your own mail server with Courier-IMAP, you might have trouble connecting with more than one computer at the same time. I had that trouble and found the solution in the configuration file.

With my Mail application running on my desktop machine, my laptop would not connect to the server. It looked like there were SSL problems on my laptop, but it turned out not to be so. Later, I noticed that if my laptop was already connected to the mail server, my desktop machine could not connect. The message from Mail was a little misleading. It appeared that there was a problem connecting to the server because of a problem with the SSL certificate or some other SSL issue.

After a little digging around in the Courier-IMAP configuration file, I found a line that limited the maximum number of connections from the same IP address.

In a FreeBSD server, that configuration file is:

/usr/local/etc/courier-imap/imapd

I solved the problem by changing the configuration file for Courier-IMAP. Since my desktop and my laptop share the same IP, I had to tell the IMAPD configuration file that I wanted more connections from the same IP address.

The default setting was:

MAXPERIP=4

I changed it to:

MAXPERIP=8

I am not sure how many connections each computer made, but when I went from one computer to two, the default setting of 4 didn’t work. So, I doubled it, restarted the mail server and connected from two computers simultaneously.

My problem disappeared. So if you are having trouble connecting with more than one computer, try changing the MAXPERIP number to something higher. And realize that if you are connecting from a network that shares a single IP address, multiple computers will need multiple connections from the same IP address, and this needs to be managed in the imapd configuration file.

EDIT: I subsequently decided to change the number of connections to 16:

MAXPERIP=16

By observing the netstat (with this command: systat -netstat), the first computer logged in with 4 connections, the second with 5 connections. It all depends on the e-mail client and how many connections it opens simultaneously. I have not yet tried more than two clients, but I set it at 16 while I am the only one using this e-mail address from a single IP.

If you have multiple people checking e-mail from behind a single firewall (a single IP address), you may want to change this setting to something more like 5 * [number of users]. For example, 10 users could easily use up 50 connections.

To restart courier-imap on a FreeBSD 7 machine, use these two commands:

/usr/local/etc/rc.d/courier-imap-imapd restart
/usr/local/etc/rc.d/courier-imap-imapd-ssl restart

That’s it. No more trouble with multiple computers checking into your courier-imap mail server. These examples are from FreeBSD 7, with courier-imap installed from the ports collection.

I am still thankful for the great work done by Bryan J. Hong: Building a Server With FreeBSD 7.

MacBook Air with USB727 from Verizon Wireless

When it comes to working in the cafe (or in the hotel room, or in any public place), it’s great to have my MacBook Air and to be able to get online at any time, with or without WiFi available. I have found that with a few caveats, the USB727 works great!

Caution: Handle with Care. When online, put the laptop on the edge of the desk or table. Every time I set the laptop down in the middle of the table or desk, (where the USB727 touches the table beneath it), the card loses contact with the computer just long enough to throw me offline. Do that about 2 times and you’re questioning your sanity!

To solve the Handle With Care issue, use a USB extender cable (mine is unnecessarily long, but it works just fine). Unexpected Benefit of using USB extender cable: antenna positioning is much easier! If you are near a window, put the USB727 in the window, and you can move the laptop to any convenient location nearby.

Note: Battery Time Reduced. Battery time is reduced by maybe an hour or so when online. To me, it’s worth it. But I wanted to mention it. You ARE transmitting, and transmitting takes power. Hence, shorter battery life (than even WiFi).

You can get the latest software from Verizon Wireless: VZAccess Download Site (http://vzam.net/).

I installed Verizon’s VZAccess Manager software to get the drivers for the USB727 on my MacBook, then promptly stopped using it. I use Mac OS X’s network connection software (built into Mac OS X) to connect.

Connect by selecting System Preferences > Network (leave everything blank), click on the Connect button.

Verizon’s coverage is great in my travels, and it’s a nice backup to my iPhone! Yes… I use AT&T and Verizon. It’s really a good combo for those out-of-the-way areas and those locations where AT&T isn’t located at all.

I hope this helps anybody considering the MacBook Air / USB727 combination. I’m glad to have both in my laptop briefcase!

Switching Mom and Dad to Mac

This was a banner week! Mom and Dad decided to replace their WindowsXP machine with an iMac. Yes, they are grandparents and yes, they decided that they could learn a new operating system. Their needs are normal: e-mail, web browsing, and looking at pictures of their (nearly grown) grandchildren.

The setup was easy (except for Bellsouth’s e-mail). The e-mail setup would have been a little easier if we had the correct passwords. (The ones they had written down were not correct). After a little help from AT&T (which now owns the Bellsouth assets), we were able to get them to check their e-mail.

Sending e-mail, however is a bit of a trick with AT&T/Bellsouth accounts. After scouring the web for a few minutes and working out when to put the full e-mail address instead of just the username portion (the part before the @ symbol), we finally got mail outgoing. Once you know where to put what, Mac OS X’s Mail 3 Application works just great, even with AT&T/Bellsouth.

I got e-mails from both Mom and Dad, so I know everything is working. My mom thinks she may have deleted a bunch of her mail, but I assured her that they were simply in the trash, and could be gotten back if she moved them back to her inbox before the week was out (Mail defaults to emptying messages from the trash after a week).

The best part of switching them to Mac, was … drumroll please … I can now help them over iChat! I can request to take over their screen, move the mouse and help them do whatever they wanted to accomplish, all the while maintaining an audio chat while I help them.

Well, actually, that’s not the best part of switching them to Mac. The best part is that I don’t have to worry about them getting viruses, keyloggers, shopping “helpers”, spyware, and other malware that is often found on Windows machines. I know, they are not non-existent, but my experience (and those of my teenagers on their own MacBooks) has been that viruses are MUCH harder to get.

The part they seem to like best is video chatting. It is so easy with iChat. With our oldest going to college away from home next year, they are looking forward to “seeing” her, even when she is in school.

I rest easier knowing that helping them accomplish anything on the Mac is only a mouse-click away. Not that I mind helping them in person, it’s just that sometimes a small matter can be cleared up in just a few minutes over iChat. And we can get caught up with the latest happenings, all at the same time!

Congratulations Mom and Dad!

Back to the Original Server

A few days back, I decided to move OfficeCafe to another server so I could rebuild this one. It’s done. I had about a half hour of down time while I made the old server stop listening for connections, powered up the new server, and made WordPress talk to MySQL again.

Again, Bryan J. Hong’s book, Building A Server With FreeBSD 7, came in real handy. I had rebuilt this server so that my standard directory structures could be implemented.

The main problem I had was that WordPress could not access the MySQL database. Checking back in the book, I realized that I had missed a step on page 215. I needed to create the wordpress.conf file and restart Apache. MySQL also needed to be restarted:

# /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server restart

That did the trick. We’re back and running. The preparation for the move back involved backing up the database(s), copying them to the new server, and restoring them.

There are a lot of details involved in moving a WordPress blog from one server to another (and back)! I don’t recommend making a habit of it. But in the process, I realized that having a backup of the database and the root directory of the blog is a great thing to do. If I need to move it to another server, I should be able to pick up the main files and drop them into place and keep going!

The Third Place

Over at Coffee Shop Journal, Marla talks about one of my favorite topics. I love to be in the Coffee Shop, just bumping into the people. If you frequent one or two shops with any regularity, you will get to know the people around you. Sometimes you don’t get a chance to know their names, but even so, you nod or smile to acknowledge that they exist. Even that can be a comfort to some lonely soul.

Her blog post is a fun read. She names a few regular characters and a few that just pass through. Take a minute and read it.

And oh, The Third Place? Well there is already a lot on the topic, but if home is the First Place, work is the Second Place, the Third Place is where you hang out: church, the coffee shop, the mall, the park, the bookstore, etc. See Marla’s blog. She describes it in several posts.

Alone But Not Lonely

Today I spent a little time at Starbucks. I had been doing errands and one errand took me to the same plaza as one of the oldest Starbucks in the county. I stopped in to sit and think for a while. I was alone, but thanks to friends who were already there, I was not lonely. Our conversations were brief, but just long enough to connect and get caught up.

It is good to sit and think. An idea popped into my head and fortunately for me, the iPhone works great in this situation. I wanted a quick answer to a technical question, and within a few minutes I was reading a post from someone who had already gone down the road I was about to go down myself.

It is a good time to think about business and family, too. Goals and new ideas can be brought to mind by just looking around the room. This time someone thoughtfully left today’s newspaper on the small round coffee table next to me. I don’t know what new ideas may come from the headlines I scanned or the article that I read. Sometimes that doesn’t come for a couple of days. But just the act of being there usually makes the stop about more than just the coffee.

I do not discount the value of just relaxing. But today I needed mental stimulus. And I found it. I remembered a small project that I had in mind. I needed a part for the next step. And I realized that I had one more stop on the errand trail today.

Office Cafe Server Move

Sometimes I insist on doing things the hard way. I needed to reinstall my server’s operating system. That is, I needed to update the FreeBSD installation on one particular machine. Just to make things interesting, I also updated to the latest version of WordPress at the same time. So to accomplish the reinstallation, I first moved my entire WordPress blog to another physical server. We’ll see, but I may never move it back! For now, everything is back to normal. Now that everything is working, I will go back to the original server and rebuild the entire server. Why do I need to do everything over again? Since the time I built that server, I have standardized my installations and that machine was no longer conforming to the new standard.

Yes, I am hosting my own web server (servers actually). I am doing this mainly for the instructional value. (It also keeps my brain thinking along some very technical lines. I suppose I could just settle for Sudoku, but there is something very therapeutic about hosting your own web server)!

And to make sure that the job would be complicated, I configured FreeBSD and Apache to serve up Name-Based as well as IP-Based Virtual Hosts simultaneously. What that means is that this server is hosting multiple domains on at least two distinct IP addresses from the same physical machine. Crazy? For sure! Why do it? Let’s just say that there is a lot of educational value in digging into the details.

Bryan J. Hong’s book, Building A Server With FreeBSD 7, sure came in handy. Although he doesn’t cover the Virtual Hosts in any detail, lots of information about the topic is available at the Apache web site.

There are a lot of moving parts to servers. The details are pretty intense. Fortunately, Hong keeps things pretty simple and nearly complete. Check it out.

Anyway, moving the installation from one server to another server was not simple, but neither was it impossible. The fact that you can even see these words is proof enough for me that I got a few things right along the way. It was also fun to make it all happen.

I suggest trying this yourself, just for the fun of it (and if you are into technical things like Unix, virtual servers, intrusion detection, honeypots, bringing new life to old hardware, etc.)!