Office Cafe

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).

[Edit: The same procedures should be followed for Version 7.1]

Here’s how to do it:

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 highly recommend this book: “Building a Server With FreeBSD 7″ by Bryan J. Hong. I have two posts related to it:

• Installing FreeBSD
• Errata: Building a Server With FreeBSD 7

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!

How to Install Info Select 8 on your Mac

Ever since switching from Windows to Mac, the one application that I tried the hardest to replace was Info Select from Micro Logic. I used Info Select for many years and have amassed a huge amount of well-organized notes that just didn’t work in any Mac OS X program with the ease that it works in Info Select. That’s not for lack of trying, either. Since May of 2005, I examined the likes of DEVONnote, iNotePad, LittleSecrets, Mori, Notae, TopXNotes, VoodooPad, NoteTaker, OmniOutliner, Yojimbo, NoteBook (by Circus Ponies), and others. Many of these are fine programs. But I was looking to replace certain features of Info Select, such as automatic outlining, automatic encryption on exit, free-form notes, placement of the notes on the workspace, etc. The software I tried each had many of the features, but I didn’t find one that worked the way I had grown accustomed to working.

Those of you who use Info Select know exactly what I am talking about. Once all of your notes are organized, you would rather not do that again!

For me, the real power of Info Select is its lightning-quick search capability. I can find my most obscure notes with just 4 or 5 keystrokes. It is simply amazing.

Although I was willing to go to many lengths to keep Info Select, I really did not want to install Windows on my Mac, just for this one application. A few months ago, I tried (unsuccessfully) to install Info Select with CodeWeavers’ CrossOver Mac. I just couldn’t make it work. I fiddled with it for a few days, but Info Select just wouldn’t load. I kept getting errors: necessary files not found, etc.

Today, I decided to give CrossOver Mac another chance. I downloaded the latest version (6.2.1) and installed it on my MacBook Air.

UPDATE: CrossOver Mac has been updated. See my Update Post.

Success! Wow! Back in business!

Here’s exactly how I did it: More »