OS X Hax

More on using Cardbus AirPort Extreme

Some more data...

If your machine has an old-school AirPort card built in, you may want to disable it. If you don't, the Network Preferences panel may wind up confused. The easiest way I've found is to cd to the Extensions directory, kextunload AppleAirPort.kext, then rename the AppleAirPort.kext and the AppleAirPortFW.kext so that they don't have .kext at the end of their name.

Airport Extreme cards don't seem to be able to connect to FreeBSD machines running 802.11b cards in HostAP mode. Go figure.

If I were you, if you're using the CardBus variants, I wouldn't attempt to power off the card or remove it while the machine is running. I don't think Apple's driver has been set up to deal well with this, given that they didn't consider people using it with hot-swappable hardware. It is safe to sleep your notebook, remove the card, then replace it before you wake. It definately is unsafe to forget to replace it before you wake. What happens is the screen greys out and you get a box telling you in 5 languages that you must power off and restart your system.

IPv6 OpenSSH retrofit

10.2.3 comes with ssh, but unfortunately, it's not compiled with IPv6 support. This is a shame for those of us with IPv6 networking set up. Fortunately, the folks at KAME have a simple package you can load that will replace your ssh and sshd with the same versions, but with IPv6 support enabled. Hopefully one of these days (one of these updates), Apple will flip the IPv6 switch and save us the trouble. :-)

You can fetch it here.

No IPv6 in JRE 1.4.1?

I don't know why I didn't do this sooner, but I performed my little IPv6 JRE test, and unfortunately, the current developer's preview JRE 1.4.1 does not make IPv6 connections. I'm now starting to feel like Apple really just sort of enabled IPv6 in the OS accidently. :-(

(Update: Be sure and check out this entry for more information)

Confirmation! WPC54G works as an AirportExtreme card!

If you can get ahold of the AppleAirPort2.kext (and the associated software), you can get a Linksys WPC54G inserted into the cardbus slot to be your Airport Extreme card.

You must edit the AppleAirPort2.kext/Contents/Info.plist file a bit.

You need to copy the <dict> section that talks about the pci device and modify the copy to give it a unique name and a device name of pci1737,4320.

Here is a patch that does the right thing, and here is the final result.

Of course, if this doesn't work for you, or if it damages your machine or anything else, then you were a damn fool to listen to me.

More on 802.11g

I've learned some more about Airport
Extreme.

1. I was wrong about Apple using the Prism GT chipset. According to the rumors, it uses a chip by Broadcom.
2. My Linksys WPC54G arrived. According to ioreg, it also uses the new Broadcom chip. I did some further googling around and I now remain convinced that getting Airport Extreme to work will require nothing more than an Info.plist entry to have the driver find and associate with this card.
3. I took apart my WMP11 card today. Sure enough, it's a mini-PCI adapter with a miniPCI card. However, now that I've got it taken apart, the bus interface doesn't look very much like the one on the picture of the Airport Extreme card you can see on Apple's site. The good news, however, is that Linksys sells a WMP54G, which is an 802.11g PCI device. Since Broadcom's site shows reference implemenetations for Cardbus and Mini PCI, I'll bet a dozen doughnuts that the WMP54G is the same Mini PCI adapter as the WMP11 with an 802.11g mini-PCI module attached.

Teaching the finder about WINS (NetBIOS name) servers

Did a little more poking around, and I now have a way to get the finder Command-K Connect to server... dialog to use a WINS server. You need to make a file in your home directory called .nsmbrc and put this in it:

[default]
nbns = ip.addr.of.wins

There are probably other useful options to use here as well, but that was enough to get smb://foreignmachine/share to work. The 'detail' view of that dialog box (with the servers that fill in) won't fill in from the WINS server, so you need to know the name of the machine.

Ideas for backports of 802.11g

Apple has introduced 802.11g, or as they call it, Airport Extreme.

It's in the form of a Mini PCI card. 802.11g CardBus cards are available, however. My searches on the net suggest that all of the 802.11g cards out there are probably using the Intersil Prism GT chipset. That suggests that the Airport Extreme driver may be able to talk to the CardBus card by simply teaching it about the device in the Info.plist file of the driver kext. I have a Linksys WPC54G and an Airport Extreme module on order, so I'll have more on this later.

But what about desktop machines? Currently, you can buy a Linksys WMP-11 card, which is a standard 802.11b device. But under the covers, the WMP-11 is a PCI->mini PCI adapter card with an 802.11b antenna!

I have not tried it (yet), but I believe it should be possible to open up the WMP-11, substitute Apple's 802.11g card for the 802.11b module, somehow make an adapter to connect the antenna pigtail from the PCI card to the Apple card, and plug the Frankensteinian contraption into any Desktop mac with PCI and use Apple's drivers to talk to the thing.

Since I don't have a desktop Mac with PCI, but a friend of mine has agreed to plug it in and try it when the parts all arrive.

AirPort Extreme card arrived

I got my AirPort Extreme card in the mail today. The news is not good. The interface does not look a thing like the mini PCI interface on the WMP-11, and even worse, the card did not come with any drivers.

That means that either the card is supposed to work with the current drivers or that new drivers will come with 10.2.4. I hope it's the latter. No sign of 10.2.4 yet.

Printing to an Epson Stylus Photo 870

One of the things I had a bit of trouble with at first was printing. To make a long story short, it turns out that the built-in Epson driver just plain isn't as good as the Gimp Print
stuff.

Also, in the print center, hold down "option" while you click the "Add printer" button to get more transport options, including SMB printing (Windows print sharing).

Using an iPod with FreeBSD

There's not much to this trick.

1. It must be a Windows iPod. HFS formatted filesystems are not yet supported on FreeBSD. I originally got a Mac iPod and ran the Windows updater to turn it into a WinniPod. You can freely go back and forth as much as you want, although you wipe the filesystem and music library every time you change your mind. Note that although it isn't supported, a WinniPod will work just fine on a Mac, both as a hard disk and with iTunes.
2. 4.7-STABLE or 5.0 are required for firewire support. You must add the sbp and firewire devices to your kernel.
3. Having done that, you should see a SCSI device show up when you attach your iPod.
4. Here's your fstab entry:

   /dev/da0s2 /ipod msdos rw,noauto 0 0

   Change da0 to whatever device shows up. mount /ipod and you should see your iPod's filesystem.



5. After unmounting, you'll note that your iPod still has the big "don't" sign on it. To get that to change to the "OK to remove" state, do this: camcontrol eject 1:0:0. The 1:0:0 part is the CAM device identifier. That's what mine happens to be. You can find yours by doing a camcontrol devlist with the iPod attached. camcontrol eject will send a SCSI device unload, which is what will get the iPod to spin down.


6. At this point, you can stop if all you wanted to do was mount the disk. If you also want to fiddle with the music part, you can install WINE and EphPod in the normal way (more about this to come later). Watch out, though. I've found that if I manage my iPod with iTunes, and then touch it with EphPod, it usually winds up screwed up (although the next iTunes sync fixes it).

IOGear -232A USB serial dongle under OS X

I like the IOGear -232A a lot. It's the smallest possible size for a USB serial dongle (it looks more like a small serial cable), and I bought it originally because it was supported by FreeBSD. IOGear's site only provides a driver for OS 8.x/9.x, however. Bummer!

I did some detective work. IOGear and ATEN appear to be the same company, and the IOGear 232A and the ATEN UC232A appear to be the same product. ATEN's site has an OS X driver (or rather, had. It appears to have been taken down) but I couldn't get it to work right. Something about version numbers. No matter. The chip inside the device is made by Prolific Technology. It's their PL-2303 USB serial controller. They also have an OS X driver for the chip. This driver works, but needs one little tweak:

After installing the package, go to /System/Library/Extensions/ProlificUsbSerial.kext. Edit the Contents/Info.plist file. Change the idProduct and idVendor numbers to match those you get from the Apple System Profiler (for mine, the Product is 8200 and the Vendor is 1367).

Having done all that, you can now kextload ProlificUsbSerial.kext and see /dev/tty.usbserial show up whenever the dongle is plugged in. Enjoy!

The last time I checked, the driver was here, but you should check their technical website for updates.

Update: It looks like the driver is no longer available from the Prolific Technology site. Not sure why. There is another manufacturer that has it available on their site. You want the newer one (right now it's the v106 one). Since they're nice enough to mirror the driver, I would suggest that if you don't already have a device that you buy theirs instead of IOGear's.

Adding local CA certs to Safari

Apple released Safari today. Yay! It's a beta, so it's not feature-complete quite yet. One thing missing is that although Safari will check SSL certs on web sites to make sure they're signed by an approved CA, there's no UI for adjusting the list of trusted certificates.

The good news is that the set of approved CAs is managed in a System-wide Keychain file. It's in /System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors. You can use certtool to add to this list easily. Just take the CA cert in PEM format and pull up a terminal window and type sudo certtool i cacertpemfile k=/System/Library/Keychains/X509Anchors. Simple as that.

Modem script for Motorola iDen (Nextel) phones

I use Nextel's dialup data service to get on the Internet. To get this working on a mac, I had to sort of hack together a modem script. I took the Ricochet one and neutered it a little bit, and came up with this. Unpack it and put the file in /Libraries/Modem Scripts. You may need to speed-lock your phone's serial port to 57,600 bps to get it to work. Having done this, you merely plug the phone's serial cable into any serial port you can get to work on your OS X machine (this entry for the IOGear -232A) and set up InternetConnect in the traditional manner.