Category Archives: Computers & Gadgets

Using those electronic items.

Network Backup From Time Machine

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Now being one of those “jump first and realize what I did later” people, I jumped into a server upgrade confident of my ability to restore from a Time Machine Backup. Our setup here is a Drobo FS and a few headless Mac Pros. Now all of this seemed reasonable to me, and as might be expected the upgrade from the 10.7 server to 10.8 was a complete failure since I couldn’t for the life of me, drag across the wiki. So, after struggling for some time I acquiesced and decided to restore from my backup.

Right…

It turns out that restoring from a NAS like the Drobo FS is not as straight forward as hoped. I popped in the install usb that I carry around and dropped into the restore form Time Machine option and off the software went to search and search, and search.

Nothing. No networked backups appeared. So it was off to Google and this solution by Urban Toronto. Oddly or perhaps predictably, terminal saves the day… again.

So next time, just so I remember:

Create a mount point on the target disk:

 mkdir /Volumes/TimeMachine

Mount the network share to this newly created volume:

mount -t afp afp://YourDroboFSAdminUserName:YourDroboFSAdminPassword@IPAddressOfDrobo/YourDroboTimeMachineShareName /Volumes/TimeMachine

Finally mount the actual image of your Time Machine backup to make its contents readable:

hdid /Volumes/TimeMachine/yourMacsTimeMachineFile.sparsebundle

If you don’t know the name of your sparsebundle image, just cd into your /Volumes/TimeMachine directory and use ls to look it up.

Command Line Work On Win Platforms

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This is one of those things that seems to come up occasionally: If on Windows how do I get more robust command line interoperability? In short, Cygwin. Cygwin provides terminal like access to the inner workings of your machine, just like its linus/unix/MacOSX friends. If you are new to all this but want to learn more, take a look at Lifehacker’s cygwin intro:

http://lifehacker.com/179514/geek-to-live–introduction-to-cygwin-part-i

 

TouchTerm

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Started using TouchTerm, and found that it beats the pants off of pTerm and possibly the terminal installed under cydia (which really still does look promising).
Bought it, TouchTerm that is, and it works like a charm.

Set-up your email on 2.0 iPhone/iTouch to take advantage of VPN and older Cisco concentrators

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Okay, so once VPN is set-up you go to settings throw on VPN and poof!

Nothing happens. Mail cannot connect, internal web sites are not available… What gives?

Well you can read more about this here:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1596178

We are not alone.

But a fix is not far off. The problems seems to sit with the interface between the VPn concentrator and the DNS servers. This problem can be alliviated by using the IP address of the servers.

Look at your mail application settings and find out the name of your mail server. Do a IP lookup for your server name and find out what IP address corresponds to your mail server name. There are lots of applications out there, if you have a Mac use Applications -> Utilities -> Network Utility.

Once done with this task you will have an IP number that corresponds to your mail server and SMTP server (these are the same for some environments, but not always). Again go back to Settings and this time select:

Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Once inside find your email account, mine is set-up as an IMAP, as I had problems with exchange.

Select the account that will be used over the VPN connection.

Replace the Host Name and SMTP server information with the IP numbers you looked up. Save.

From now on Mail should be good to go over VPN. In fact web browsing will also work, provided you know the IP address for the internal servers that you want to access.

Good luck. Let me know how it works for you.