Portrait of Edd Dumbill, taken by Giles Turnbull

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expectnation
a conference management web application


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Letting the Panther in

Since I got my new Sony TR1 laptop, I don't need the iBook any more. So it's had Linux taken off it and Panther installed, for my wife to use. This is my first concerted use of OS X for a good while, and I was impressed.

The hardest bit of the install has been getting the machine to play nicely with the resources already on my network.

  • WebDAV over HTTPS isn't supported. This is a nuisance, as I figured WebDAV would be the easiest way to make our network shares available. This meant I couldn't escape setting up a VPN...
  • VPN. I had to set up a PPTP VPN for my home network to let the iBook in from the wireless network. Not entirely trivial: it meant patching the kernel and pppd for my Debian 3.0 gateway box. This finally worked when I stopped my gateway from reconfiguring the firewall when the PPTP PPP interface came up. It was causing a race condition which mean the PPTP negotiation was failing.
  • Printing. OS X uses CUPS, and gives it a nice GUI. However, the pretty GUI wouldn't set the right path to my printer, so I had to grub around in the web interface to set this properly.
  • Secure email. My IMAP and SMTP services are only available over SSL/TLS connections. This meant teaching Panther about the certificates I used. Unfortunately, nothing could persuade Panther to accept my own local certificate authority, so I had to switch to self-signed certificates. (These can be imported by copying the certificate PEM file to a file with .cer suffix, double-clicking, and adding into the X509Anchors keychain.)

The general verdict is good: Panther seems to work more or less as advertised, but I had to adjust my local network setup somewhat to appease it. The only profoundly annoying bug is that applications such as iChat don't recognise a change in the default route. So, if you're chatting away, then bring the VPN up, your iChat needs to be restarted. One workaround, preventing the VPN getting the default route, involves hacks to /usr/sbin/pppd. Bad!

Though the UI is great, there's nothing from a system administration perspective that convinces me OS X is any easier than Windows or Linux to administer.

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