Me and my Mac

Posts Tagged ‘Leopard’

Making good and speedy use of the OSX Dictionary

Now i need to look up things in the dictionary, and after killing it in spotlight this seemed a lengthy routine.

However it is easily fixable.

Open dictionary and go into it’s preferences.

Now go to a website, doesn’t matter which one and right click on a word:

Click that option and voila:

In-screen Dictionary results.
This works for many many OSX apps and is very handy

Crippling Spotlight, yay!

For weeks i’ve been annoyed with me looking up something in Spotlight, expecting the thing to find what i want and pressing enter in a split second only to find me ending up in a dictionary.

It seems Spotlight deems it necessary to look in the dictionary, wikipedia and more of such things also for programs. And give that higher priority than actually finding an App or file.

No more i say!

defaults write com.apple.spotlight DictionaryLookupEnabled NO

Solves all that. And damn Spotlight is faster too! yay!

Ofcourse for this to take effect Spotlight has to be restarted. Done by either restarting your mac or killing the Spotlight process.

Later i found this options is also available in the amazing prefpane secrets from Blacktree.

Which makes things even easier.

Safari is demented!

weird

Printing via Airport Extreme, Extremely hard?

So i wanted to print something, small page of text… But the printer is a complete bitch about it. Or is the driver?
I’m using the open source Hewlett Packard driver for my HP PSC1315 printer since HP doesn’t make a good driver for Leopard and i’m too lazy to give up on this printer yet.
The printer is hooked up to the Airport Extreme and i never really installed or tested it. So i did now. Installed the drivers, hooked everything up and started to print. Or so i thought. The printer stops in the middle of the first line of printing and the printer is halted by the software for a unspecified reason. When it’s hooked up to the local USB port it works fine.

Ok, stubborn… Dove into /Library/Printers and removed everything there. Re-installed the drivers and tried again. No dice… New drivers needed maybe. But no updates were there. Re-read the manual from the Linux Foundation (where the driver comes from). But everything seems alright.

Blah!

Why is it so hard to create a good driver/software for network printing for OS X? Or is Apple to blame because they’re ditching the Carbon system in favor of Cups? I would think Cups is widely supported though. Since it’s used in Linux for years. Or is the Airport Extreme to blame. I do remember printing via that thing though. However, when i connect the printer to my iMac and share it and then install it on my Macbook Pro it works fine and even assigns the right icon to it. All with the same drivers.
Would this mean the driver is fine? Network printing is network printing. So logically the Airport Extreme would be the culprit here? Bummer if it is!

Any ideas? Thoughts?

To serve or not to serve… Not to server!

So last thursday a small disaster happened in what later turned out an epic week of failure.
I lost communication with my server. Fearing the worst i called my mom, if she could see if the server was powered and perhaps reboot the thing.

She restarted the thing and all seemed well. The monitor wasn’t connected so there wasn’t much else she could do. But me from work could ping the machine again so i assumed it was ok. My mom went on downstairs, still on the phone, to test the internet connection. Nothing worked.

We then proceeded to bypass the server, which handled DNS and DHCP to set things manually and use openDNS. This did not work either. Frustrated we ended the conversation. I had to rush home after work to fix things.

Because the server seemed messed up i started there, rebooted. Found out the network cable wasn’t connected. Or so did OS X Server tell me. Ofcourse it was connected just fine. While pondering what would be wrong then i noticed my switch acted weird. All 8 ports were blinking in a rapid pace. “oh hell! it’s buffer messed up” i thought and went on to pull the power from it to reboot the switch. Which seemed well, the leds went as normal, for 5 seconds then they started blinking again. So i disconnected all Ethernet cables, restarted it again and noticed it was good. Then i connected all cabling one by one noting it went crazy at cable 2, which is going to my Lacie Etherdisk. Leaving that one out things went normal, but nothing could connect. I also noted the switch made a high pitched hissing noise that shouldn’t be there. I then declared the switch dead and angrily thought about a sollution. Which turns out to be a 3Com switch and my Airport Extreme. Hooked everything up… and voila. My LAN was working again. Mom rejoiced, she could read her email. I was more or less happy because the LAN was online and i could read my mail and chat with Catarina again. Life was good!

The next day, the server hung, and after a reboot no-one could connect to it. Remote desktop wasn’t working, shares seemed unreachable. Yet the machine seemed online as it responded to PINGs normally. GRRR! Climbing the stairs to the attic to go local on the monster it quickly turned out the LDAP database was gone. Which means that all users and access rights are either deleted or revoked. Thus no one could login. Luckily Root (admin) isn’t stored there so i could save all files and move them to my Lacie Etherdisk. Again, very angry and frustrated i decided for now i would use the Etherdisk and declared the server an unreliable piece of crap. Worst server OS ever!! Being completely through with OSX Server i decided i would reinstate the Lacie Etherdisk as the main data storage thing and my router would handle DNS and DHCP from here on in.

No more iCal server and no more LDAP hassle. I was so ready to throw it out the window as this was the 3rd or 4th time it lost its LDAP stuff in less than 6 months. With no direct access or a backup present this means i have to re-install the whole thing, set everything up again with only a backupped config file to go on. Lots of time would be lost, AGAIN!

OSX Leopard Server is stupid and sucks and is completely crap and even more unreliable… Aaand i dunno, some other nasty words!

I’m still not sure if i’m going to reinstall the server or not, probably not… maybe a Tiger server or even Linux PPC… We’ll see!