This is a first. I get done posting my previous post, and I then later (45 minutes or so) proceed to search Google for more information on Leopard Filevault features, which answered some of my previous questions such as Filevault handling via TimeMachine (which it does store it encrypted) and some other details. But low and behold, one of the search results that came up was my OWN POST. My GOSH, I tell you, I write for the bots not the humans.

Click the image to see an expanded view. I am in “new user” interface on Tiger install while a backup is being performed of my FileVault sparseimage in prep for tomorrow.

FedEx is set to deliver Leopard 10.5 tomorrow morning to my doorstep. While my excitement level does not compare to the excitement of getting my iMac, it is definitely a noteworthy day to blog about. I figure I will be spending my time working and playing with the new features, and too busy to blog so why not just blab about it before it comes.

I am really looking forward to “Spaces”. While I have had this functionality with 3rd party applications on the Mac prior, it seems since Spaces was announced way back when, that existing developers abandoned their own versions and as subsequent updates and releases came out for 10.4, those older applications became unstable and I ended up just having to stop using them and wait ever so patiently for tomorrow to arrive.

I am curious to how Time Machine deals with security, if at all. Will it have the option to encrypt your backups or to backup to an encrypted DMG. It would be nice if it was a built-in functionality. How will/well it work with FileVault? Will it store your FileVault contents unencrypted on the backup drive? Not so cool. I am not a “go back in time” type user of backups. If I need multiple copies or versions of files, I keep them. I rarely lose anything or desire to retrieve something from a week or month ago. Keeping current backups is essential in my book, if my hard drive fails, I can be back in business with a current backup.

Speaking of backups, I have recently been testing out two software/services for both Mac and Windows. One is called Mozy, which allows you to backup an unlimited amount of data to a geographically distant location for $4.95/month. While it takes a week or two to upload 60GB of data, once that is done, then just the changes to your system are backed up and not a big deal or time consuming task. This is great if a fire destroys your home or office, perhaps where your backups are stored as well. A tornado comes through and re-distributes your goods to some other state for some farm boy to turn into yard art. Or a thief breaks in, and takes your system and your backups as well. Whatever the reason, off-site backups are desirable.

Another application I have been testing, but still waiting on a newer software release is called CrashPlan. I believe CrashPlan has the most potential. While they offer a $5/monthly option, much like Mozy, they will start charging you 10 cents per GB stored beyond 50GB. But, what separates CrashPlan from Mozy is the ability to backup to other systems not only on your local network, but other systems on the Internet that you may either own, maintain, or know… like a friends system. The data is store encrypted, and once the license fee is paid for the software, you don’t have to maintain monthly maintenance fees. Of course, a good friend desiring to harbor their data in your castle, would supply you with a separate external hard drive to store those backups on. CrashPlan supports more customized features on the number of revisions to store and how long to store deleted files, with the option to store it indefinitely, for which Mozy’s only setting is 30 days.

In other news, I sure wish I could plug a 3rd monitor into my iMac. That would be the bomb.

I have been waiting since Nov 2006 for a redesigned iMac. While I have been fighting the urge to replace my current system since then, I am sure glad I held out. The new iMac is very cool, and I hope that like my iPhone, it’s even cooler when I get my hands on it.

The interesting thing will be the glossy screen. My wife’s MacBook has a glossy screen and I kind of like it, but not fully in love with it, but I don’t despise it. On the upside, I still have my Dell 24” display and I will be connecting it up to have a dual 24” display and should I need to view something outside of the gloss factor, I can just drag it over and view. Purchased 4GB of memory from a 3rd party to go along with it, so I can power Vmware Fusion and have a true all-in-one system.

In 1994, I never thought I would own a 1 Terabyte HD much less afford one as I see advertised now. Digging through old boxes of stuff, trying to clean up my old computer junk I have laying around, I found a number of old SCSI HD’s. Using other junk equipment I had around, I managed to get the drive mounted on a older Mac running OS 9. The last modified date on the drive was 1994, or 13 years ago. I am starting to feel rather dated right now. The drive had a “Bad Disk” partition on it, I assume was the dead part of the drive I wasn’t able to use. Today, if a drive is even partially bad, we just toss it and buy a new one or at least I do. But, 13 years ago, parts where more expensive and my pockets weren’t as deep.

I was hoping to find some OLD files, documents, on these drives, but thus far just old applications. Now I am doing data recovery on them to see if I can pull anything up, otherwise I will just format them several times, then dispose of them properly. Those where the days.

The demise of all cell phone companies (minus AT&T) is coming on June 29th and the weeks following. If you are curious to see the iPhone in action, what 3 new ads on Apple’s website. I just hope I can get one before my vacation, which means I might have to camp out at the Apple store the night before.

Take a blast to the past and see if you can find the name of a few BBS’s I used to run. Interestingly, I don’t remember my BBS being called one of the names and the other name was only for a short while. The real name of my BBS, at least what it ran last as, was Mac’erland. Or, as my friend used to call it, “Macer’land”. (Yea, Matt – ha ha ha).

The last several days, my server has been getting slammed with incoming SMTP connections. When you manage a server for numerous domains and mail accounts, you can’t just start block SMTP connections. This is not a fun task to try and defend against. My server had nearly 500+ SMTP connections at any given time, and load was in the 530 range, yet still managed to serve web pages fine. I love this box. After several different attempts at different options, I finally nailed down that they where dictionary spamming one domain on the server. I had, ironically set MX records to 1 min TTL for this domain at some point. I went in and changed it to 127.0.0.1, and within a minute… the SMTP connections dropped like flies. Instead of sending me tons of SMTP connections, they where now trying to send them to themselves. How fun is that? The bad news, I do have people with mail accounts on that domain, and I won’t be able to leave it at that for more than an hour or two. But that should be long enough to do damage. If things repeat, I have already found a service to send them through to take the “load” off my box and my sanity for the time being. I hate spammers.

I am really excited. It has been 7 years since I last bought a printer. My current laser printer needed a new fuser, my Ink Jet (hand-me-down) needed new color Ink cartridges, so I figured I’d take the money required to repair everything and spend about double and pick up a brand-new Dell Color Laser Printer. I have had my eye on this printer for quite some time. It has awesome reviews and in comparisons did far better than HP printers… and the price was terribly attractive through a company I found online selling them at a discount. Assuming everything works, and it shows up today I will be chomping at the bit to print out some color pagers.

UPDATE: Well, as I mentioned before, I have a personalized edition of Murphy’s Law. The printer came in, but the alignment/registration is off on the prints. So, now I get to go through the hassle of getting this thing fixed, replaced or whatever. JOY JOY JOY. Welcome to my life.

Update 3/9: After messing around with the thing, and reseating every part in the printer and doing about 500 alignment tests and modifications, I think I got it working. I will need to test it out a few more days before I call Dell.

Now that my cable modem appears good, no dropped packets since they fixed it this morning, the arrival of the DSL modem seemed rather uneventful. Had it been here yesterday, it would have been a life saver, that is, had UPS not forgot it at the shipping facility. But, alas, I have two fully functional broadband services. Outages should be, in theory, a thing of the past no matter how the dice fall.

Time Warner Cable finally came by today and connected the new wire run. My power level increased, because they put in RG11 cable vs RG6, so that means I may not have to re-run some cables I put in the house two years ago to get them to be slightly shorter to the db in the correct “window”. Granted, it has only been 15 minutes, but no hick-ups yet. I will keep you posted. I was sure the 6 inches of rain we got last night would give them an excuse not to complete the job today.

My father told me growing up, that he suffered from a family curse called “William Luck” or as others might call it, simply “Bad Luck”. True to the family tradition, this has been passed on to me. When I got married, I told me wife about it, and she laughed it off and thought I was simply joking. But a few years later, she said, “You where right about the William Luck, if anything could go wrong when it comes to things your deal with, it will.”

This Internet issue is classic William Luck raising it’s ugly head. Today I was suppose to receive my DSL modem, that I ordered last week because who knew when my Cable Internet would be fixed. They made a setup date for Feb 28th, and I was to receive my DSL modem today. So, I decided to check on that status of it, and guess what… UPS left my box in a shipping facility in Texas, and so the delivery date has been pushed out until tomorrow. I mean, statistically, that probably happens a fair amount for UPS, I don’t put them up on the brightest of shipping companies… but still, of all the issues I have had with my Internet service, you’d think that one thing would go right? What are the odds of that happening?

As I am writing this, in an amazing feat for TWC, they actually called me back to say someone will be out tomorrow to complete the installation. That does not mean it will actually be completed, or even if it is, that it will fix my Internet troubles. So, in another amazing statistical achievement, it is a real possibility that I will get two “new” internet services from both providers, on the same day.

In other news my trash compactor went south on Monday. It was only about two years old. The service tech came out today and a gear had fallen off and caused disarray in that section of the appliance. The positive note, its working again, and the only cost was labor.

Okay, I work at home. I am home 99% of the time. As I have been relaying in previous posts, it has taken forever and a day to get my new cable line run at my house. Monday (yesterday) they finally put the cable in, but did not terminate it on the pole or at the house. I called TWC and they said they would need to look into it and would call me back right away. Sure. Whatever. Today, I called to find out what the scoop was, and after trying to explain myself for the millionth time, the CSR finally got it and put me on hold. He came back pretty quick, saying they would have someone out tomorrow or the following day to hook it up. At this point, snails move faster than this company and I took it easier knowing my DSL would be here tomorrow. My backup plan, will finally be in place and life will go on.

So, I decide to run a quick errand around 4:30pm, got back about 40 minutes later. I found this note on my door. Ah, the drama continues!

If you are like me and you work from home, and online, you come to appreciate having a good quality Internet connection during times when your Internet connection is sporadic at best. Since I have moved into my house, 3-4 years ago, I have had this recurring issue with my cable modem. Every 3-6 months, it acts up, starts randomly dropping and then coming back, either by itself or through a Microsoft Reboot of the cable modem. Then, either through a visit of a cable tech or a new cable modem, life is good, for another 3-4 months, then a repeat.

However, lately, the situation has been almost unbearable. Daily, between 10am-3pm, it is like pulling teeth to keep SSH sessions active and do anything which requires a steady internet connection. If my primary system had a modem in it, I probably would have gone to dial-up to keep a steady connection (ugh, the thought makes me sick). Time Warner has been responsive, but not helpful to solving the solution. Three weeks ago, they put in the request to put a new service line into my house, but due to weather, and other delays, it only got installed today. But, having a nicely newly buried service cable isn’t much good until they send someone else to hook it up, and climb a telephone pole.

Up in arms and with no promise from Time Warner on when I might have the new line installed and hopefully steady service (although some doubt remains if that will resolve my issues) I decided that I would sign-up for DSL service. Using my Netscreen 5GT Firewall, I will setup routing in such a way use the Cable modem for most of my normal web traffic, and use the DSL for my stable connections like routing SSH traffic over it, and web traffic on the cable modem, since the cable modem will be a faster connection. If the cable service is acting up, then it will auto-fail all traffic to the DSL.

I figure, the cost of having both services running pales in comparison with productivity lost when I am fighting with restoring my cable service so I can get back to work.

Apple had the first iPhone commercial out tonight, which was mainly a teaser that played during the Oscars. I only watched the Oscars for the commercial that was rumored to be shown. Thankfully, they showed it early in the program so I didn’t have to listen to Ellen mouth off for terribly long.

I uploaded the commercial for all to see. Hope you enjoy it. Goodbye.