June 27, 2007, 12:48 a.m.
IT

Mac OS X, Microsoft and VPN

I needed to connect to one of my client's VPN networks today. They used some form of Microsoft VPN server - they could not tell me exactly what version...

Since I am running on a Mac, I tried to use the built-in VPN client from Internet Connect. Since this is a Microsoft VPN it would most probably be PPTP based and not L2TP. So I created a new connection and tried... No luck - I got an authentication error, even though my credentials were perfect.

To test the credentials were really correct, I connected using Windows XP. The system prompted me to change my password as this was the first time I logged in, which I did. After that I was logged in successfully.

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June 26, 2007, 3:02 p.m.
IT

Determining socket owners on Mac OS X

In the Linux world one has netstat and fuser to figure out which PID has opened a given socket. In Mac OS X, netstat does not provide PID's and fuser is missing...

I found this interesting article on how to solve this dillema.

Basically you use the lsof utility that displays a list of open files (a socket is handled as a special file) and the owner PID's:

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June 25, 2007, 9:08 p.m.
Reef Aquarium

I've got copepods!

About four days ago I started seeing very faint signs of diatoms on my glass - and knew it was not long before the pods would start showing up. Well, three days ago I started noticing them - thousands of tiny copepods.

This is a good day.

June 24, 2007, 6:22 p.m.
Reef Aquarium

Merger

Seems I like consolidating things... I have just merged my reef blog with my main blog - I just hate all these billions of small sites floating around.

I'd much rather have one place where I can blog about everything and people can filter based on the categories they are interested in.

Hope this works better for everyone.

June 22, 2007, 2:37 p.m.
IT

Mac OS X 10.4.10 broke VPN!

So yesterday I upgraded to 10.4.10 only to discover my Cisco VPN is not working anymore. It gives an Error 51... That was real bad since I have a client that I support using VPN.

I tried everything to revert to 10.4.9 but it is not that easy to roll back a service pack. Eventually I stumbled across an article on Parallel's forum indicating that my problem might be related to the fact that yesterday I also upgraded from 4124 to 4128...

I did the following to fix it:

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