UPDATE: So, Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 has been installed, and the image quality is quite good. Though, I think I need to clean the window it shoots through. So, no more green halo from the Xbox camera. All and all, very happy. Probably have a brief review forthcoming.
ORIGINAL: Today I changed my webcam to an Xbox Live Camera (the ones for the Xbox360). The image is better than my old Intel CS430, but not great. Also, there’s a nice green ring in the image since it’s reflected from the window.
The solution is temporary as I’ll be receiving a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 this coming Tuesday that will have an even better image, and not have the silly ring.
So, please be patient. Also, I hope to be adding access to a higher resolution webcam image once the new camera arrives. Though, I’m not sure how high, or how often I want to update it since I don’t want my net connection to be taxed too heavily.
Thanks!
After years of Plone/Zope running on a 10.5 web server, this last weekend I started seeing the zope logs filling with errors saying “[420] Too many open files”. One, I hadn’t seen this before, and two, I couldn’t figure out why it was happening after years of solid use.
So, looking around online, it appeared that 10.5 just set the max files open per user to an awfully small limit (especially in the server version)… 256 files per user! Since I use a zeo/client setup, and use FileSystemStorage for storing files outside the zodb, I easily had this many files open. Again, why is this just happening after years?
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At work, we’re looking at a major webpage redesign, and are therefore looking at other similar programs and their websites to see what they are using… and one major thing has struck me in the process. No one uses redirects to force certain URLs. For example: http://www.staze.org vs http://staze.org. Now, in one case, both work, and they present the same content (bad for SEO), in the WORST case, one works, and the other doesn’t. Almost none of the sites we looked at handled this correctly.
Really, it’s extremely easy to fix. Either in .htaccess, or in your virtual host file, just add something like:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^localhost [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^127\.0\.0\.1
RewriteRule ^(.*) – [L]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.example\.com
RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
UPDATE: Please see the corrected code above to account for anything referencing your site on the local machine via localhost, or 127.0.0.1…. some of my site broke without me noticing until today. DOH!
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Since I have been pouring over OD the last few days, I decided to look again at a change in WGM that came with 10.5. Computer records now have a place for Hardware UUID. UUIDs offer a theoretically truly unique identifier as opposed to MAC address, which I’ve seen not be unique (mind you, this was a manufacturing defect that happened when I was working at 3com, where some customers were getting boxes of NICs all with the same MAC address). Trying to populate it, however, results (for me) in a “Attribute not mapped” error, saying I should contact the sys admin. So, self… this doesn’t work.
A quick search around resulted in a Apple mailing list discussion list thread that talks about this very issue. It seems the 10.6 update added these attributes to the schema, but didn’t map them to anything. Cool.
So, here’s the scoop. Open up Directory Utility on the OD Master in /System/Library/CoreServices, then unlock. Open up LDAPv3, then click on 127.0.0.1, then Edit. Now “Search & Mappings”, and scroll down on the left to “Computers”. Open that up, then click “Add”. You should see the option to add “HardwareUUID”. Select and Click “Okay”. Now with that new one selected, on the right, type in “apple-hwuuid”. Now “Write to Server” and authenticate. Hit Okay. Now you should notice that “LDAP Mappings” is set to “Custom” or “From Server”. You should be able to change that back to “Open Directory Server” and click “Okay”.
HardwareUUID in WGM should now work. Have Fun!
I assist other departments on campus with Mac related issues fairly regularly, since I’m one of the few Sysadmin’s on campus that really know Mac OS X Server. The issue they were seeing (and have been seeing since they upgraded to 10.6 about 4 months ago) was any time someone tried to login to a client, or really anything as a user that was part of the OD, it would take about 60 seconds to authenticate. If they used their server’s local admin account, however, it worked instantly.
Everything seemed to be running, but it just took a long time. Investigating further, everything seemed to point to Kerberos just not functioning. It was running, but kinit would take about 60 seconds to come back asking for a password. And for some reason, the REALM for the Kerberos server had been set as SERVERNAME.LOCAL. Which, shouldn’t be an issue in of itself, but it was certainly not “proper”.
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