Normally I don’t re-post Twitter articles here but this one on the New York magazine was wistful, fair, balanced, and gave a good representation of what it’s like to work here.

The reporter was in the office on the very day the US Airways flight crashed into the Hudson, and he recorded our (completely boring) reactions to the event.

Sure, the Twitter guys still have no idea how to make money off their fabulous invention. But for now they are living in a dreamworld of infinite possibilities, maybe the last one on Earth.

How Tweet it Is – New York Magazine

How do we find the user in question so we can thump them on the head to make them stop?

This is a basic exercise in information gathering. For the most part, we’ll have the user’s IP address, and we’re a mac shop with many users running iTunes. If the user is sharing their library, you can use iTunes as a covert means of determining a user’s name, as iTunes will use the local computer’s name as the library name.

Telnet to the machines DAAP port, and issue:

John-adamss-macbook-pro:~ jna$ telnet x.x.x.x 3689
Trying x.x.x.x...
Connected to x.x.x.x.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET /server-info HTTP/1.1
Host: x.x.x.x
Client-DAAP-Version: 3.7
User-Agent: iTunes/8.0.2 (Macintosh; N; Intel)
Accept-Language: en-us, en;q=0.50

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Tue, 13 Jan 2009 21:26:38 GMT
DAAP-Server: iTunes/8.0.2 (Mac OS X)
Content-Type: application/x-dmap-tagged
Content-Length: 280

msrvmstt?mproaproaeSVaeFPatedmsedmsmlmsmOk?[minmUSER NAME’s LibrarymslrmstmsalmsasmsupmspimsexmsbrmsqymsixmsrsmsdcmstcImmsto???

Other options for this include attempting to sign on to the server with Apple-K if AFP on TCP port 548 is active (which will reveal the computer’s name) and using nmap with service detection to glean information about the host.

I turned to CAIDA, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis, which has long been a provider of excellent network performance tools. Their research focuses on developing tools to measure the Internet in many amazing ways, such as this map of interconnections between the all Autonomous Systems (AS) of the Internet. 

There’s many tools available, but the unofficial standard for bandwidth measurement is iperf. It’s a simple tool to show the maximum possible bandwidth between two points. One machine runs a server, using ‘iperf -s’. The client connects to the server (using iperf -c server) and as much data as can be sent in a single interval is sent. 

Between two of my machines running OS X 10.5.5, I get great results:

retina:/tmp jna$ ./iperf -c hackintosh -i 1
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to hackintosh, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:   129 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.1.1.15 port 52150 connected with 10.1.1.20 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 1.0 sec    107 MBytes    894 Mbits/sec
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  1.0- 2.0 sec    109 MBytes    912 Mbits/sec
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  2.0- 3.0 sec    107 MBytes    901 Mbits/sec

The situation is not so wonderful between my laptop, An Intel Macbook Pro, on 802.11N wireless via a Netgear WNR3500.

dhcp-102:iperf-2.0.4 jna$ src/iperf -i 1 -c hackintosh
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to hackintosh, TCP port 5001
TCP window size:   129 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  3] local 10.1.1.102 port 49518 connected with 10.1.1.20 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  0.0- 1.0 sec  2.45 MBytes  20.6 Mbits/sec
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  1.0- 2.0 sec  2.59 MBytes  21.8 Mbits/sec
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  3]  2.0- 3.0 sec  2.36 MBytes  19.8 Mbits/sec

I don’t believe wireless sales materials anymore (when did I ever?) regarding the maximum speed of these devices. I have five bars on Apple’s wireless icon here, the Macbook Pro supports 802.11N, and I can’t get more than 21.8 Mbits/sec to local machines here. On my Comcast cable, my maximum download speed is around 13 Mbits/sec, so I probably have the best speed possible for downloading from the Internet, but moving files across the local LAN via wireless is a different story. It’s much slower and I’ll go directly to the gigabit, hard wired connection for movies and music.

Interestingly enough, 21.8 Mbits/s is well within 802.11g’s allocation of 25 Mbits/s per client. My 802.11N configuration is no better than 802.11g, even though Apple’s Network Utility reports a link speed of 130Mbits/second and that I have the 802.11 a/b/g/n Network adapter installed.

I’m unsure as to why the network configuration disagrees with the achieved bandwidth, though. It’ll be something I research in the next few days.

I’d also like to take a moment here and condemn Belkin’s entire line of wireless devices. They use a piece of Javascript with breaks the RFC standards in so many ways. If you attempt to configure these devices using CIDR, such as “10.1.1.0/24″, which is what my home network is, their devices force you to a netmask of “255.0.0.0″ because the javascript in the setup form sees 10.0.0.0/8 as a class A network. Classless notation in network allocation is the standard these days, and Class A, B, and C notation is a thing of the past.

This broke my network for hours until I was frustrated enough to bring the device back to Best Buy and purchase the WGR3500. At least I didn’t have to deal with an online return!

I made a backup of the existing filesystem (25 minutes for about 70GB) and began an install of iAktos v4. I’m not going to tell you where to find the ISO of the DVD, but I’m sure you know where to look. 

I’d like to add some notes to my previous post, which are mostly lessons learned from this installation.

1) Be smart. Keep the OS, your Applications, and Users partition apart. 

When you install your apps,  they’ll go someplace other than the boot disk, and when your hackintosh installation explodes you’ll be able to recover your files and apps easily (well, mostly… you’ll need backups of Preferences, the Library directories, and the Applications support folders to make them go.) 

2) Understand that making one of these work is a slow, incremental process that takes a fair amount of patience. 

3) Know the rules about the way Mac OS X handles extensions. kexts aren’t loaded until the extensions cache (/System/Library/Extensions.kext) and intermediate cache (/System/Library/Extensions.*) gets removed and rebuilt. removal has to happen prior to reboot. Rebuilding can happen on startup or shutdown, depending if you have a proper restart or not.

Now, Where was I? Right! What happened during the iAktos install?

I couldn’t get keyboard or mouse to work until I’d disabled USB Legacy Storage Support. We’ll need to re-enable this on reboot, post-installation, so that my USB hard disks work.

I ran Disk Utility, erased the partition (which was MBR) and reformatted as GPT. This is the “GUID partition table” option in the advanced section of Disk Utility’s Partition tab. 

I installed SS3 compatible Kernels for my Gigabyte GA-965 and allowed the installation to finish. 

On reboot, I had no network. I fixed it by using the instructions here. It’s a simple edit, removal of kext cache, and reboot.

Next, I had working sound via the Realtek 883 Sound card, but I reinstalled the driver anyway (oops). LINE IN is dead. Oh well. 

So now we’ve got: USB disks, SATA disks, Sound, Network, Dual-head, but limited video (no QE or CI yet.) The fix for QE/CI is in my post here. Basically, you use 10.5.2 drivers on your 10.5.4 install.

I still need to resolve my IDE problems (AppleVIA?) but aside from that, we’re up! Hey, we didn’t need that CD-ROM, right?

Leopard is on the left, 10.48 AHCI is on the right. Leopard reports this machine as “Mac Pro”, and the 10.4.8 system reported it as a Developer Workstation. Also, before you complain that one system has more RAM than the other, neither of these systems were running much in the way of applications at the time of this test.

( Click for Xbench Stats )

This is commodity PC hardware, running Tiger. I haven’t been able to upgrade the machine for months because of kernel issues, so I figured it was time to go to Leopard. I’m going to post some notes here in case you’d like to repeat my efforts and build yourself a Mac. Note that this is in complete violation of Apple’s licensing of OS X, and you do this at your own risk to your hardware and sanity. (At one point during this installation, I shorted out some fan cables to my system’s speaker, and caused a fire. Be careful!)

My Machine’s specs:

Gigabyte GA-965-S3 Motherboard

Intel E6400 2.4Ghz Core2 CPU

4GB Corsair PC6400 DDR2 Twin2X Memory (both bought in matched pairs)

2 x 250GB Western Digital SATA Drives

NVidia 7800GTX Graphics card

I also have a pile of accessories attached on a long USB extension cable:
Nostromo n52 gaming pad

Wacom Intous 6×8 Tablet

Microsoft Natural Keyboard and Microsoft Intellipoint Mouse

Installation was pretty straightforward once I discovered that you absolutely need to install this onto a blank drive with newly formed partitions. You cannot install over a 10.4 installation or a failed 10.5 installation. The EFI hack causes hardware to be incorrectly recogonized unless the partition is completely virgin.

What to do:

1. Find a copy of Kalyway’s 10.5.1 OS X DVD. I’m not telling you how to find this but I’m sure you know where to look.
2. Boot into the Kalyway disk. This will only work if your DVD ROM drive is plugged into SATA or if it’s on the PATA bus. For this mobo, you must have the HD plugged into the Orange (non-jmicron) SATA ports. The BIOS must be set to AHCI mode. Booting the DVD will take a long time because the OS loads a crappy DVD driver. Oh well. Just wait.
3. Format the disk. You want MBR mode, not GUI, and the standard partition format (not Apple, Not GUID.)
4. Install OS X with Customizations. In the installer, select:
   • Vanilla Kernels – check both including the ACPI Fix.
   • EFI in MBR
   • ALC 883 Sound
   • No Network Drivers
   • Pick the right video driver (I have a Nvidia 7800GTX, so I use Natit.)
5. At the end of the install, reboot the machine. Do not remove the DVD! No matter how long it takes for the machine to reboot, leave it alone. If you screw with it before it reboots, you will break something and have to start over. If you get the message “Installation failed”, you probably forgot to configure AHCI or you selected EFI in guid. GUID doesn’t seem to work for this board. If someone gets it working, tell me.
6. Go through the registration process.
7. At this point, you should have leopard running on your screen. You may or may not have network working – the Marvell Ethernet connector is very picky on this build and sometimes doesn’t work.
8. Many things work better under 10.5.2! To install 10.5.2, do not use system update! Download “kalway 10.5.2 combo updater” from your favorite torrent site. Install it. Reboot. Test everything. Now download “kalyway 10.5.2 kernels”. Choose the 2nd option which reads “patched by modbin”. Install that. Reboot. Test.
   • Generally this fix corrects the issue where it takes a long time to boot. Extended boot times are caused because your system is booting the 9.1.0 kernel under 10.5.2. The updater will update you to 10.5.2 with 9.2.0 kernel.

If you see these messages in /var/log/system.log:

Mar 2 14:32:08 xx-xx-mac-pro kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000000,00000000 PwrSavingsEED – Failed to get ACPI device
Mar 2 14:32:08 xx-xx-mac-pro kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000008,000002bd sktwsi – AppleYukon: error – TWSI: transfer does not completeor:
Mar 2 11:31:44 hackintosh kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000010,00000272 skgesirq – AppleYukon: error – PCI express protocol violation error
Mar 2 11:31:44 hackintosh kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000010,00000264 skgesirq – AppleYukon: error – unexpected IRQ Status error
Mar 2 11:31:44 hackintosh kernel[0]: AppleYukon: 00000000,00000000 skgehw – cppSkDrvEvent – SK_DRV_ADAP_FAIL

…You are running the new 10.5 AppleYukon2,kext, which breaks on this motherboard. This causes ethernet to randomly die under load. Go remove AppleYukon.kext and replace it with AppleYukon.kext from either the JaS disk or by finding another copy online. These files live in /System/Library/Extensions/IONetworkingFamily.kext/Plugins

Other notes:

Nostromo N52: use the 10.4 driver, it works great in leopard

Wacom – Driver version 6.05 is 10.5 compatible

I also migrated my home directory and all old applications over using the Leopard Migration Assistant. This took 10 hours but worked brilliantly (my home directory was 186 GB!)

Enjoy Leopard!

Major issues and caveats I experienced

• No more NetInfo – All of the scripts that I wrote to use ‘niutil’ now use dscl, the directory services editor. This is more of Apple’s push to get people off of NetInfo and onto a pure LDAP solution. The Leopard installer migrates most of this for you, but can’t deal with duplicate user accounts.
• Postfix users now listed as _postfix instead of just postfix – This broke my postfix installer and dovecot install. My existing user had UID 27, so _postfix and postfix had the same UID. oops!
• Ruby/Rails now in the OS – Yay! This is great, but watch out for existing installed gems, which might get cooked as part of the process. Prior to your upgrade to 10.5, go into your existing rails apps and run “rake rails::freeze::gems”, or pay the price.

Postfix and Dovecot problems:

• Both experienced a problem where users would disappear after awhile. (Dovecot: “AUTH FAIL” and in Postfix: “Local recipient unknown”)
  • Restarting them would fix this problem for an indeterminate amount of time
  • Recompiling from source against the 10.5 SDK barely fixed the problem
  • Replacing my build, deleting the OSX default install, running ‘port install dovecot; port install postfix +pcre +tls +sasl’, and then migrating all of my configuration files to /opt/local/etc/postfix fixed everything!
  • It also helps if any user IDs that you add to Directory Services also exist in /etc/passwd  and any new groups in /etc/group Apple says  in their comments that the files are not consulted unless the system is in single user mode, but that’s completely not true. Some programs are linked to old code which will still consult the flat files, like mailman and certain python libs.
• Ownership of the mailqueue needs fixing after the 10.5 install
• postfix check still fails with strange errors, like claiming that basic Unix commands (ps,ls…) don’t exit. PATH issue?

Apache

• Need to add “AcceptMutex flock”, otherwise Apache loses control of the mutex and cannot accept any further connections on children. Crashes occur randomly when a child doesn’t release the lock in time. This is certainly an issue with mutexes on 10.5

Aside from these issues, all is well. The Mini’s second job in life is to sit below our 46″ LCD TV, and play movies. Having some of Leopard’s features for that (like an improved Front Row) really helps.

Off I go to check /var/log/mail.log for the 10000th time today…