Hardware VPN - the cost effective solution

I've been periodically looking into various solutions for doing remote maintenance for my mother through firewalls, etc. It fiinally occurred to me that I might just as well implement a hardware VPN solution.

I've no idea if this D-Link DI-824VUP device is any good (ie reliable). It is impressive, however, that it includes VPN services, stateful packet inspection, 802.11g wireless, a print server and a microwave oven in a single package -- for about $120. A simpler device without wireless is about $60. So for $200 I could permanently link my mother's network to my own.

Why would I do this - besides doing maintenance remotely? So she can install a Squeezebox client to my music server ...

Update 1/5/06: From a comment below I found this summary of windows remote control options. I should also mention one I rather fancy - FogCreek CoPilot. The same comment also included a great link to Gibson's podcasts on security. I'm a Gibson fan, and the podcast list also includes transcripts. I may work these into my morning commute -- the very first podcasts I've bothered with.

I must say, I'm glad I enabled anonymous posts!

PS. In editing this post I accidentally made it transiently vanish. Sorry.

Configuring VPN services in Mac OS X server

Maclive.net: Setup Mac OS X VPN Server for Mac & XP Clients

Copying DVDs: DVD2One

Shrek won't play on my aging iBook. It starts skipping about half-way through. Looks like my the original drive (read CD or DVD, burn nothing) has trouble with dual-layer DVDs. I also know it won't read a Tiger DVD (also dual-layer).

This is a problem when entertaining the kids on long flights.

I used Mac The Ripper (author site is gone, versiontracker still has it) to copy the DVD to my iMac drive, then tried DVD2one.com to create a compressed version that could be burned to a single layer DVD-R. It sort of worked; after burning the drive didn't show up in the Finder (10.4) and I had to eject using Disk Utility. I was able to insert and play however -- but it looks quite ugly. Too bad!

I'll have to decide whether to put a new drive in the G3 or (more sensibly) buy something newer. Alas the days of playing DVDs on a laptop may be numbered; the movie houses hate us doing that. I refuse to carry yet another device, so we may have to make do with old movie and I may need to learn more about the dark side.

Bundled Tiger applications: can't be installed on a different machine

Hypothetically, suppose you use iPhoto 5 on an iMac, and you want to take your photos to mother for the holidays with your iBook. Alas, the iBook runs iPhoto 4.02. You might suppose you could get the iPhoto app from the Tiger DVD that came with the iMac, perhaps using Pacifist...

Wrong.

Mac Mini (Part 10)

Mike Cohen

If you buy a Mac Mini to get a copy of iLife or Tiger to install on another machine, you'll be disappointed. There's no separate iLife disk - it's included on the system restore DVD, which won't let you install it on another machine...

Hypothetically, this is correct. Pacifist will open the 'Bundled Applications' package, but iPhoto and other iLife apps appear with 'zero bytes'. They're hidden away somewhere obscure -- beyond my ken.

So, hypothetically speaking, no cheating allowed.

BTW, the OS X Tiger DVD wouldn't even mount on my iBook. It's a dual layer DVD, I'm not sure 10.3.x supports it anywhere, but certainly not on my aging iBook ...

AppleScript - going the way of the Newton?

Apple's main page for scripting iPhoto has a missing image icon at the top and leads with this text:

Scriptable Applications: iPhoto

iPhoto version 2 offers easy control and automation via AppleScript.

iPhoto is currently at version 5. AppleScript is not long for this world.

Bluetooth problem with managed user in OS X

Weird. I disable Bluetooth on my iMac. Don't need it. Lately the kids session (managed user) was running very slowly. Bluetooth (blued process) was sucking resources. Turns out it was enabled in that session, even though that user can't alter network prefs. The menubar icon showed bluetooth was on. I disabled it.

Session is now useable, but still a bit sluggish. Odd. I suspect a glitch; I don't think Apple thoroughly tested how things work with a limited-privilege user.

Spotless: Beat the Spotlight beast for a mere $8 US

Spotless is a $8 OS X utility that lets one delete spotlight (oh wretched implementation) indices and disable spotlight indexing.

In theory Spotlight has a mechanism for excluding drives from indexing. In practice it doesn't work. OS X is perpetually trying to index an external backup drive -- no matter how often I tell it not to. Spotless claims to have disabled that indexing and to have deleted the files.

Unless 10.4.4 finally fixes that blasted bug, and assuming my problems with that drive resolves, I'll happily register spotless.

Oh wretched Apple that three bug-fix releases of the 10.4 have not fixed this problem.