iOS Safari Media Playback

Posted by on January 5, 2012 No comments

Apparently Safari on iOS 5.0.1 does not like to play media files from a server running Tomcat (6/7) on JDK 7 over SSL. The certificates are all trusted and the mime-types are correct but the media player just says “Quicktime: Movie could not be played.” It seems to work in iOS 4 and in iOS 5.1 beta, but since you can’t really expect people to be on a specific iOS version the only solutions are:

  • Don’t use SSL – not a great solution
  • Downgrade to JDK 6 – probably the best solution

Hope it helps someone else.

OpenSolaris Sendmail Auth

Posted by on April 18, 2010 No comments

I’ve been wanting to setup my OpenSolaris server at home to be able to send me email notifications when a disk fails, service dies, etc. Like most people though, my ISP requires authentication in order to send mail through their SMTP gateway. So these are the steps I took to get the sendmail service setup with SMTP Auth. Read more »

Set default organization name in Xcode

Posted by on June 11, 2009 No comments

Run the following in Terminal, just fill in your company name:

defaults write com.apple.Xcode PBXCustomTemplateMacroDefinitions '{ORGANIZATIONNAME = "Some Company Name"; }'

Google Updates Gmail Label Column Width

Posted by on March 26, 2009 No comments

It’s been almost 10 months since I posted Gmail Feature Request and what do you know? Google answered!

Well, maybe not directly but either way the problem has been fixed! As you can see in the picture on the right, the Gmail navigation column (including the labels) was increased by 23 pixels!

So thanks Google.

CAS Authentication in an iPhone App

Posted by on March 20, 2009 29 comments

We use CAS here at ACU for our single sign-on service and it works great but trying to authenticate with it from an iPhone app can be a little tricky. Luckily the latest versions of CAS server can implement a RESTful protocol which can be used to programatically obtain a Ticket Granting Ticket and subsequent Service Tickets.

I’ve been able to successfully do this in a native iPhone app but the method still needs refinement. I’m posting this to see if anybody else is doing this or knows of a better method. If anyone else is interested I’d be glad to share code, just let me know.

Update: This code’s new home is at GitHub

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Using The Solaris Samba Service

Posted by on February 17, 2009 No comments

Before you can enable the samba service in SMF the config file needs to be created. Copy /etc/sfw/smb.conf-example to /etc/sfw/smb.conf. Make sure you have lines that look like this:

security = user
passdb backend = tdbsam

That will let you use the Solaris user accounts for samba access. Next set up a share that you’d like to test with. Here’s a simple one I used:

[htdocs]
path = /opt/coolstack/apache2/htdocs
valid users = cjs00c
public = no
writable = yes

Start up the samba service with svcadm enable samba. Now we need to add a user/pass to the samba user database: smbpasswd -a cjs00c. You should be able to connect to your new samba share now.

Just for fun, the samba password database file is located at /etc/sfw/private/passdb.tdb. If you’d like to check it for users you can use:
tdbtool /etc/sfw/private/passdb.tdb
tdb> info
3 records totalling 224 bytes
tdb> dump

key 12 bytes
USER_cjs00c
data 213 bytes
[a whole bunch of encoded data here]

key 13 bytes
INFO/version
data 4 bytes
[000] 03 00 00 00 ...

key 13 bytes
RID_000004b0
data 7 bytes
[000] 63 6A 73 30 30 63 00 cjs00c
tdb>

Disable console logging (sysmsg) in Solaris

Posted by on November 12, 2008 No comments

I often disable the GUI login on my Solaris machines for simplicity, so they just sit at the console login prompt. This presents a problem because by default Solaris sends logs to the console via /dev/sysmsg. This means that system errors, kernel and authentication notices are right out there for the world to see. So I like to redirect these logs to a more secure location (and keep my console nice and pretty).

The config file is /etc/syslog.conf. Comment out the line:

*.err;kern.notice;auth.notice                  /dev/sysmsg

by putting a # in front of it, or point to a new file location.

You should notice that most of these messages are being captured by the line below it as well and are being sent to /var/adm/messages. That’s a good place for these logs so leave that. However, it’s not capturing the auth.notice messages. Look a bit further down the file and you’ll see an ‘auth.notice’ line that’s commented out. Uncomment that line (make sure loghost is set in /etc/hosts) and your auth messages should be sent to /var/log/authlog. Which is a much nicer location than the console don’t you think?

User errors are defined further down the file and it also has an entry for logging user errors to /dev/sysmsg so you can comment that out as well if desired.

How To Install Solaris 10 (u6) On ZFS Root

Posted by on November 7, 2008 1 comment

Boot to the Solaris DVD and at the GRUB menu select Solaris (it’s the default option)

At the next menu choose ‘Solaris Interactive Text’ either desktop or console. I chose #4, the console session because it loads faster.

The installer asks you a few network and configuration questions first. For simplicity I’ll just list my summary:

Networked: Yes
Use DHCP: No
Host name: gibbs
IP address: 150.252.xxx.xxx
System part of a subnet: Yes
Netmask: 255.255.xxx.xxx
Enable IPv6: No
Default Route: Specify one
Router IP Address: 150.252.xxx.xxx
Configure Kerberos Security: No
Name service: DNS
Domain name: acu.edu
Server address(es): 150.252.xxx.xxx
150.252.xxx.xxx
Search domain(s): acu.edu
NFSv4 Domain Name: << Value to be derived dynamically >>
Time zone: Central Time
(US/Central)
Date and time: 2008-11-03 14:14:00

After entering the root password the screen goes blank for a few seconds, some scripts start executing, then the installation screen comes back.

  1. Select the “Standard” installation
  2. Automatically eject CD/DVD
  3. Auto Reboot
  4. Accept the license agreement
  5. Select any extra regional support
  6. Select POSIX C (C)
  7. Select None for Web Start products
  8. Select ZFS for the filesystem
  9. Select Entire Distribution
  10. Select disk to install on

Configure the ZFS settings. I changed the swap size to 2G and left everything else default.

ZFS Pool Name: rpool
ZFS Root Dataset Name: s10x_u6wos07b
ZFS Pool Size (in MB): 39214
Size of Swap Area (in MB): 2048
Size of Dump Area (in MB): 1024
Keep / and /var combined

Add remote mounts if you have any and begin installation!

Creating Solaris Containers (zones) – Part II

Posted by on November 6, 2008 1 comment

So apparently when I wrote part 1, I completely forgot about the zone configuration – which needs to be done in order to use any networking services.

So to configure the zone you need to log into the zone’s ‘console’ after booting it for the first time.

# zlogin -C myzone

If you don’t see anything hit enter. You should be presented with a terminal choice. After that it should be pretty standard system configuration questions.

Alternatively, this can be automated by creating a sysidcfg file and placing it in /etc

Akismet makes me happy

Posted by on November 4, 2008 No comments

1,376 spam comments I don’t have to deal with. :)