Fix “IPv6 addrconf: prefix with wrong length” messages in Linux

Posted on January 24, 2012 by martijn

Glancing trough the system-logging of one of my Internet VPS nodes, I noticed that the Kernel Ring Buffer (dmesg) was quite noisy with IPv6 Router Advertisement messages as:

"IPv6 addrconf: prefix with wrong length 48"

Some research learned me that this isn’t a harmful error – more a cosmetic one. It’s root cause are IPv6 RA’s from a device on the network that is advertising something indifferent than your host is configured to.

If you maintain a more static configured IPv6 setup, and your IPv6 setup is working as designed for you network,  you can safely choose to disable those detections. Here’s how to disable IPv6 to accept Router Advertisements and IPv6 Auto-configuration at runtime:

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Migrate Apple Time Capsules

Posted on January 14, 2012 by martijn

Just replaced my Apple Time Capsule with a newer one. Here’s what I found to be the best approach in moving data and time-machine backups to the new unit.

Hook-up your Mac to an ethernet-port of the old time-capsule. You can use Network Utility or ifconfig to verify gigabit connectivity. This is something you do not want to do over the wireless network.
Second step is connecting a switch-port of the old time-capsule to a switch-port of the new unit. You can use both a straight or crossed networkcable.

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Apple FileVault 2 on older Mac’s with SSD

Posted on October 20, 2011 by martijn

Apple’s FileVault2 is a valuable addition to OS X Lion. It offers full disk-encryption which I find to be something mandatory on notebooks these days.

On ‘newer’ Apple MacBooks, say since the Intel i5 and i7 architecture, FileVault 2 has barely no impact on disk I/O performance. OS X Daily has a fairly excessive benchmark report in which this is pointed out. I use a mid-2011 MacBook Air with an Intel i7 CPU, which benchmarks 200+ MB/s on both write and read with FileVault 2 turned on. Quite impressive speeds.

BlackMagic Disk Speed Test – a free Mac App Store app.

On ‘older’ types of MacBooks, say Intel Core 2 Duo architecture, FileVault 2 has a bigger impact on disk I/O performance.

In my case, I’ve enabled FileVault 2 on a late-2008 MacBook Pro (Intel Core 2 Duo CPU) with an OCZ Vertex 2 SSD disk. Without disk-encryption this SSD reaches over 200MB/s in both read and write speeds in OS X Lion. With FileVault2 enabled both speeds are seriously affected. Write speeds is impacted by 50% and Read speed with about 25%.

Still, very acceptable speeds. But definitely a factor when considering to use FileVault 2 on older types of MacBooks.

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TotalTerminal

Posted on August 2, 2011 by martijn

A small gem for OS X! TotalTerminal brings terminal access trough a hot-key. TotalTerminal is a plugin for Terminal.app. It provides a persistent “Visor Window”  which slides up or down when you press a hot-key.

Website: http://totalterminal.binaryage.com/

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PL2303 Serial-USB on OSX Lion

Posted on July 24, 2011 by martijn

Here’s a way to get you PL2303-based Serial-USB adapter working with OS X Lion (10.7). Based on the osx-pl2303 project on github, I’ve built a kernel extension that works with OS X Lion. You can grab the kext file here or from the link below.

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Short URL’s

Posted on June 13, 2011 by martijn

Just wrote a simple URL shortener in PHP. It generates shortened URL’s in the format “http://xbsd.nl/aBcD”, in which the aBcD part is a random four character string.

You can give it a go over at http://www.xbsd.nl/url/. No spam or malicious URL’s or whatsoever – just plain and simple short URL’s – promised ;-) .

Feel free to drop me any {suggestions,feature requests,bugs,other}.

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SparkleShare .. promising

Posted on March 1, 2011 by martijn

Back in the days, before cloud-based services like Dropbox or iDisk, I used to be a big-time user of iFolder. Desktop file-sync for all kinds of platforms with central versioned storage complete in your own control. Too bad current iFolder development is as dead as can be since 2006.

The downside on the current cloud-based storage services is that the central storage in maintained and in control of a third party, to which you trust your data to be safe.

SparkleShare is a promising new FOSS project that brings new life to iFolder concepts. A friendly desktop client for all common platforms allowing you to store and version files to a SSH or Git based backend.

SparkleShare is currently available as an open beta version of the client software for Mac and Linux.

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MobileMe calendar in Evolution

Posted on December 30, 2010 by martijn

Now that the new MobileMe Calendar is based on the iCalendar and CalDAV standards it becomes a lot easier to access your MobileMe Calendar trough third-party (non-Apple) calendaring tools.
For now, we’ll show how to setup the calendar in  Evolution, a common e-mail and calendar client on Linux and Unix desktops. Using the same steps you should be able to setup your MobileMe calendar in any CalDAV compliant tool with SSL support.

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Stacklet, Images for Xen, KVM, VMWare and More

Posted on October 7, 2010 by martijn

Stacklet provides ready to run Linux images and templates for popular virtualization technologies like VMware, KVM and XEN.

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Apple AFP filesharing on FreeBSD

Posted on September 28, 2010 by martijn

On a Mac and have some FreeBSD file-servers around the house of office? Open your file-servers up to easy and fast access via OS X Finder. How? The method is Apple’s native Apple Filing Protocol (AFP), with a bit of help of Apple  Bonjour (mDNSResponder) for automatic discovery and presentation of shared resources on the network.

The installation and config of the two Ports ‘netatalk’ and ‘howl’ is all there is to it.

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