Thursday 18 February 2010

OS X Server - Connection Failed?

So I've been working with some colleagues on a problem whereby users trying to connect to a OS X server from their OS X client were getting a connection denied.

If the user were to go to the Finder and via the hostname in Finder try to connect to the server (which uses Bonjour) they would get a Connection Failed even if they entered their username and password correctly. However, they could connect whenever they pressed Ctrl-K (i.e. Connect To Server) and used "afp://servername/" or "ftp://servername/" with the same username/password.

Trying different things like updating the replication of OpenDirectory, changing the users passwords.

In the end, we discovered that there was a directory that users had as their home directory (a default one /99) and the permission on that directory were set to 700 and only for one user. Changing it to 777 (we didn't try 770) solved the issue.

Useful MegaCli commands

As I mentioned in an earlier post, finding the manual for the MegaCli command was rather hard. I've decided to put some of the more useful commands I've discovered/started using.

MegaCli -AdpAllinfo -a0 -- shows you firmware versions, serial number, and LOTS of useful information.

MegaCli -CfgDsply -aALL -- Also very cool and useful.

MegaCli -PdList -a0 -- give you the disk information which shows media errors which will help if you're having problems with your disks.

Monday 1 February 2010

iPad with no flash? No problem!

Everyone is complaining that the Apple iPad doesn't have flash, but you know what? This is easily solvable.

Gordon (demos) is a Flash runtime written in Javascript by Tobias Schneider. With this you should be able to view Flash on your iPad. All that's needed is for the site to call the JS with the swf file as an attribute. Something easily done when you detect that the user doesn't have flash.

-P