vamp: dm

Domain Registry of America == BAD BAD BAD

Dave Minor — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:01:00 -0500

WARNING: Do not talk with or reply to Domain Registry of America.

So, since the late 90s when I got into this business, Domain Registry of America has been sending U.S. Postal mail spam to me and all my customers trying to coax them into transferring their domain names. They are a scam and I counsel my clients to register their domain names through my account so that they know there is only one source for their internet costs.

These people really piss me off.

I just got a phone call from them. Wanting to “verify contact information” for a domain. If they had contacted this customer directly, he probably would have give all the information to them. I quizzed him on who the company was. When I asked “are you a registrar?”, he answered, “yes, this is an application process—is the address still …”

The conversation did not proceed much further as you can imagine, but I fear that they will hijack more domains now that they are cold calling people. Beware.

Remote Control of OS X (Tiger) Desktop via VNC

Dave Minor — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 15:25:00 -0600

I’ve been asked to post the method that I use to easily log onto remote macs to facilitate support on some of my client’s machines. This is not rocket science, just my howto that I pieced together from several sources long forgotten (sorry). It’s very possible that this procedure will continue to work on Leopard, all of the machines I deal with are still running Tiger at this point. I think this worked with Jaguar too, but I can’t recall.

The basic idea is to log onto the remote machine via SSH, start a VNC server, then connect from the local machine and use SSH port forwarding tricks to keep yourself from leaving VNC ports open and forwarded on the remote router.

Remote Machine Setup

must have an administrator’s account
must have a static IP address on the LAN
install OSXvnc which is now called something else. I am running version 1.4. I’m not sure if this will work with the new server
create a ~/bin directory
in ~/bin, I have two files:

dminor$ cat bin/startvnc 
#!/bin/sh
sudo /Applications/OSXvnc.app/OSXvnc-server -rfbport 5900 \
> ~/Library/Logs/OSXvnc-server.log 2>&1 &

echo "VNC has started" 

dminor$ cat bin/stopvnc 
#!/bin/sh

sudo killall OSXvnc-server
echo "VNC has stopped"

locally, run bin/startvnc and bin/stopvnc to make sure they are working properly and that they are firing off the osxvnc server
in ~/.bash_profile, just under my path, I put source ~/bin/startvnc and as the last line of the file, trap '$HOME/bin/stopvnc' 0
now when you start a terminal sesssion (locally or SSH), the vnc server will start.
verify in Sharing Pref Pane that the Remote Login service is checked and that you can SSH into the box.

Remote Network Setup

You’ll need to have port forwarding on the network’s router to the remote machine on port 22. As you’ll see below, there is no need to have VNC ports forwarded on the router.

Ease of Access via Hostname

It sure makes it a lot easier if you can SSH to a hostname that stays constant instead of having to determine the dynamic IP address of the remote machine each time. For dynamic IPs, I use dyndns.org to maintain a good hostname. For static IPs, I just setup an A record in the DNS zone file. Actually, if it’s a dynamic, I usually setup a CNAME record pointing to the dyndns hostname. And this works great on a local network too with bonjour.

Local Machine Setup

On your local machine, you need SSH and a VNC client. On OSX, I use Chicken of the VNC.

In my ~/.ssh/config file, I’ve setup entries for each remote machine like:

Host jkmini
  HostName jkwork.clients-domain.com
  Port 22
  Compression yes
  LocalForward 5901 127.0.0.1:5901

Now when I SSH jkmini, I get a terminal and vnc starts automatically. Here’s a sample session on the local network:

[dminor@ginger: ~]$ ssh sarahs-imac.local
Last login: Fri Dec 21 15:54:35 2007 from ginger.local
Welcome to Darwin!
VNC has started

[dminor@Sarahs-iMac: ~]$ ps aux | grep vnc
root     21718   0.0  0.2   196736   2680  p2  S     3:55PM   0:00.17 /Applications/OSXvnc.app/OSXvnc-server -rfbport 5900
dminor   21721   0.0  0.0    27812      4  p2  R+    3:55PM   0:00.00 grep vnc

[dminor@Sarahs-iMac: ~]$ logout
VNC has stopped
Connection to sarahs-imac.local closed.

In the case of a controlling a local machine (as above), I’d simply fire up Chicken of the VNC and connect to the hostname.local on the proper port (5900 here) and gain access.

On a remote session over SSH, you’ll see that we setup local port forwarding on the SSH session, so locally, port 5901 is being redirected to 5901 on the remote machine over SSH. I fire up Chicken and connect to localhost:5901.

Multiple Remote Machines That Share a LAN

I’ve also configured multiple machines behind the same router (therefore a shared public IP). I can attach to two machines on the same LAN at the same time over SSH with no problems. I may post that additional writeup one day.

I hope this is helpful and not too confusing.

Instructions written by the Marketing Department

Dave Minor — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 10:59:00 -0600

I was reading through a DVD recorder manual the other day for my grandmother and came upon this quotable:

Virtual Surround System:
You can enjoy stereophonic space through your exciting 2 channel stereo system.

Doesn’t that just make you want to go out and get one for yourself today. We’re talking bleeding edge home theater here.

Watermelon!

Dave Minor — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 15:37:00 -0500

Where's the mute?

Dave Minor — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:26:00 -0500

”... and the endless flow of almost entirely content-free chatter.”

—Tim Bray on his 8 year old son and friend at a ballgame chatting.

I can relate, but I’m not sure I can share his feeling of it being a “treat to listen to.”

Reader Submitted Content

Dave Minor — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 22:26:00 -0500

Ah, the first entry for the dminor.com About Me page has arrived and been published. It’s … unedited. Thanks Dane. Any other contributors??

iTempted, iIndulge

Dave Minor — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 13:24:00 -0500

Welcome to My Minivan

Dave Minor — Thu, 10 May 2007 11:28:00 -0500

I’m glad to know there are others who share my frustration with how my vehicle looks.

Coding on a shoestring

Dave Minor — Wed, 02 May 2007 10:23:00 -0500

I was playing with some code in irb just now and was randomly using the noun “shoe” and got this error:

NoMethodError: undefined method `pluralize' for "shoe":String

Contextual Spelling

Dave Minor — Tue, 01 May 2007 13:18:00 -0500

I can’t believe I haven’t noticed this before and I don’t know to what extent it works. In some apps (mail.app, safari forms except this one that I’m filling out), if you right click on a word, there will be alternative suggestions of the word available. I also hadn’t noticed the “look up in dictionary” option.

I have used the Esc key to show me suggestions, but that doesn’t work in all apps either. I’m really not sure why the right click won’t work in this form field while it did on another site.

Maybe someone will comment on when and how this works.