Author: ryan

Categories
Apple macOS

AirPort Utility 6.x “Flash on Activity”

The other day I updated the AirPort Extremes in my house, resetting them to their default settings. When I had everything up and running again, I noticed they no longer flashed with activity. I searched through the AirPort Utility 6.x (6.3.2) installed on Mavericks and could not find this setting. I searched DuckDuckGo and found a lot of other people longing for this option, too. Since you cannot install (can you?) AirPort Utility 5.x onto Mavericks, I ended up installing 5.x onto my Windows 7 VM. There I was able to find the setting, make the change, and was happy again.

But what if you don’t have a Windows VM? What if all you have is Mavericks? Well, I have an easy enough solution for you. In AirPort Utility 6.x, export your AirPort configuration file and save it to your desktop. Open this file with a text editor (such as Sublime or vim) and search for “leAC” (lower case L).

<key>leAC</key>
<integer>1</integer>

Change this to:

<key>leAC</key>
<integer>2</integer>

Save the file, go back into AirPort Utility 6.x and import this configuration file. Don’t change anything else in your file, just the 1 into a 2. This tells your AirPort that you’d like it to “Flash on Activity”. Let the AirPort restart and take note and the wonder that is a flashing green LED.

2014-10-06 Update

It seems this trick does not work on the latest Airport Extremes with 802.11ac. Even with the above set, the LED on the front of this device does not flash.

Categories
Linode

Linode So Far

I’ve been using Linode now for a few months, and I basically could not be more pleased with the service. Linode recently moved to newer and faster CPUs, as well as moving over to 100% SSDs. I never thought my Linode was slow before, but it certainly seems faster now. I’ve not run any benchmarks myself, but there are those that have, and the improvements are not small. It’s just been rock solid thus far.

I moved some old websites running Perl code over to the new Linode instance. To my surprise, I rediscovered that this code is about 10 years old. I’m amazed it still works. And that’s the beauty of my Linode, or more specifically, Debian running on my Linode. I simply installed Perl and a handful of perlmods, and the sites sprang back to life. I don’t ever remember Linux being this easy to use.

And so I have nothing but great things to say about Linode. While there have been a few outages I’m not pleased with, Linode posted regular status updates and was honest about what was happening. Otherwise, response times are down by 25% over the Mac mini server I moved from … and immensely faster for the sites I moved from DreamHost.

If you’re looking for a VPS, Linode should be your final stop!

Categories
Linode

Switching to Linode

After testing out Linode for the past week, I took some time this evening to migrate the bulk of my sites to my linode (what Linode calls their VPS instances). Using Linode this past week has been amazingly painless. Their management portal, while basic in appearance, has been adequately powerful for my needs. Creating an VPS instance, a linode, is super easy. Best of all is their help section, dubbed the Library. I was able to follow the basic steps to set up my linode with a new user account, locked it down, set up LAMP and had my first website up and running within probably 15 – 30 minutes of signup up.

So, over the next few days (or maybe weeks), I’ll try and detail:

  • how easy Linode is to use, and why you should (perhaps) use it too
  • how I set up Apache to handle multiple sites using HTTPS via SNI
  • setting up SFTP for other users, but only allow them to access their website documents
  • anything I come across along the way
Categories
Development macOS

Upgrade MySQL 5.5 to 5.6 on OS X Mavericks

I needed to upgrade MySQL from 5.5.x to 5.6.x on my OS X server running OS X Mavericks (10.9) and I found a site that basically made it super painless. Nothing jumped out on my from Google regarding Mavericks, so this is really for that random person like me who was unsure how it should work.

First, go download the 64-bit DMG of MySQL from here. Don’t worry that it says 10.7, it will work just fine with 10.9.

Then go here and read this page … I’ll wait, but don’t follow all the steps until you read my next part.

While performing the steps above, you’ll reach a step that reads:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_upgrade

At this step, instead of the above, try this instead:

/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysql_upgrade -u root -p

This will prompt you for your root password, but it will also allow the upgrade script to actually run. Otherwise, the directions were perfect and you should really have no problem. If for some reason you don’t have root access to MySQL … you’ll probably want to ask someone who does.

Categories
macOS

iStat Server and opening port 5109 on OS X Mavericks

After upgrading to OS X Mavericks (10.9), iStat on my iPhone was no longer able to connect to iStat Server on Mavericks. I had vaguely recalled seeing the OS X Server installer tell me that ipfw should be disabled, so I disabled it. I didn’t really think of it at the time, but I had a firewall rule set to allow TCP port 5109 be opened for iStat Server … because simply adding it via the Firewall settings is System Preferences did absolutely nothing … for some reason.

So I recalled the installer mentioning pf and told me to use pfctl. That took me on a journey the OS X man page regarding pfctl and about an hour later I finally figured out how to make it all work … and here it is:

sudo vim /etc/pf.conf

Add this line to the config file (after the com.apple anchor is fine) where en0 is your ethernet adapter and port 5109 is the port you’re using in iStat Server:

pass in on en0 proto tcp from any to any port 5109

This allows TCP data on port 5109 to pass into your machine via en0. This allows it from any IP address, but you could have changed the first mention of “any” to an IP address in order to only allow from a single IP address.

If you aren’t using a wired connection, you can change en0 to en1, or if you’re uncertain which adapter you’re using, run the following command to see which is active on your setup, noting which has a status of “active”:

ifconfig

This should yield something like the following. Note how en0 is “active”.

en0: flags=[redacted]
	options=[redacted]
	ether [redacted]
	inet6 [redacted]
	inet [redacted]
	nd6 options=[redacted]
	media: [redacted]
	status: active
en1: flags=[redacted]
	ether [redacted]
	nd6 options=[redacted]
	media: [redacted]
	status: inactive

Save the config file and run the following to reload the config file, and verify using verbose:

sudo pfctl -vnf pf.conf

I also ran this, just in case:

sudo pfctl -Rf pf.conf

That’s all I needed and I was able to make my way into my machine. But, it wasn’t until I turned off SSL that I was actually able to connect to iStat Server. I’m hoping SSL is remedied soon! SSL now works once again!

Categories
Development macOS

XAMPP to MAMP

Tonight I decided to move from XAMPP to MAMP.

About a year (or so) ago my team transitioned from PC to Mac and when we went looking for an easy, self-contained Apache install, XAMPP was the answer.  Now we have OS X 10.7 Lion and well, I’m annoyed that XAMPP for OS X has not been updated since early March, 2010.  That’s right, over a year ago.

The reason I even began looking for a XAMPP alternative was that after upgrading to Lion, XAMPP just seemed to load pages slower than before, specifically on sites using databases that weren’t local to my machine.  Enter MAMP 2.0.  Newly released (literally yesterday) and plenty of people online giving it a thumbs up, I decided to give it a shot.

Because XAMPP for Mac (the Windows version has been updated much more recently) is over a year old, pretty much all the included applications are out of date as well.  XAMPP was on Apache 2.2.14 and although it wasn’t a necessity to have the latest Apache, it just seemed like I should be able to get it.

MAMP comes with 2.2.17 included (as of this writing, the current version of Apache is 2.2.19), which is at least newer than XAMPP.  Honestly, not a huge deal, right?

I guess what made me keep MAMP in the end is at least a decent GUI (non-Pro version) with some useful preferences (auto start servers) as well as phpMyAdmin built in.  Yes, I had phpMyAdmin installed with XAMPP (though it did not come with XAMPP), MAMP’s GUI makes it easy enough to get to these built in features that I actually find myself using them.

For reference, about 95% of my XAMPP Apache conf files made it into MAMP’s, save for SSL.  There are plenty of help online about MAMP and SSL, but basically you create your own certificate and uncomment a line in the main Apache conf file.

MAMP, a solution to a problem that didn’t really exist, but a solution nonetheless.

Categories
Misc

Hello world!

Every site needs one of these, right?

<?php echo "Hello World!"; ?>