macOS on AWS. Finally!

One of my "server farms" (more like a server garden)
with 4 Macs and 1 GSM modem

Finally, after nearly 15 years, macOS comes to AWS. I used to maintain two server farms totaling 11 Macs, mostly Mac minis, running OS X Server with 10 static IP addresses. Configuring and replacing Mac servers was my least favorite and most expensive task.

Amazon's AWS VP for EC2 shared a fun video about how macOS on AWS came to be.

Apple Continuity and Handoff

Summary:
1. Make sure your devices are compatible.
2. Turn Bluetooth on, on all your devices.

Apple released Yosemite (OS X 10.10), last week, and iOS 8.1 today. Together, with supported hardware, these two OSes enable the Continuity feature-set; one specific feature is Handoff. In a nutshell, these features let you start a task on one device, such as writing an e-mail or document, and pickup where you left off on another. They also allow your phone to handoff phone calls and SMS text messages to your Mac.

It took a little digging to figure out how to coordinate this. Here are the detailed details [sic]:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT6337

In a nutshell, your devices need to be on the same WiFi network and Bluetooth needs to be turned on for the them to see each other. FaceTime needs to be turned on and logged into the same iCloud account. It seemed that FaceTime didn't realize that example@mac.com, example@me.com, and example@icloud.com were the same account. I had to uncheck the latter two before I could check the "iPhone Cellular Calls" preference in FaceTime on my Mac.

When my first non-iPhone SMS came through, I had to enter a PIN on my Mac that appeared on my iPhone to confirm I had physical access to both devices.

So far, Continuity seems to be working fairly well.

Macintosh Malware

OS X iframe malware injected into google.com.

Yes, it's true, Mac's don't get viruses.

But viruses are a small part of a larger security issue known as malware which is malicious software. And Macs are susceptible to malware. Malware is software that seeks to harm your computer. Computer viruses, just like real life viruses, attach themselves to something else to reproduce. Computer virus replication doesn't require any action by the user. But, other forms of malware, such as trojan horse software, does require action. Generally, a trojan will masquerade as something beneficial, such as a software or plug-in upgrade.

First Hand Experience

A lady at this morning's Tech Coffee showed me a problem with Safari on her Mac. Last night, she thought she was installing a Flash update, but it turned out to be something else. It was malware that injected an iframe in her home page, google.com. We tried different things to block, avoid, or fix the issue without any success.

Her malware in the iframe would pop-up another window, when clicked on, asking to install more malware. It was an endless circle.

We discussed different ways to fix the problem. Googling for anti-virus software brings up more bad actors than good ones. That's when we realized the best way to find Mac software was to look for it in the App Store. After some more discussion, we realized that she doesn't really need anti-virus software. She only needs something to clean up her mistake. Besides, it's been my experience on the Mac, that anti-virus software tends to get in the way more than it helps.

Her next step is an appointment, tomorrow, at the Genius Bar. In the mean time, she won't be logging into her bank account.

What Hardware and OS are Inside Apple's Data Centers?

Here are a few things to consider about Apple's infrastructure.

Apple used to make the Xserve.

It was a beautifully designed piece of hardware, inside and out. Apple stopped shipping it about three and a half years ago.

Apple maintains it's own data centers.

What's inside these massive data centers? "Stuff," said Steve in this short video clip. Obviously, these data centers are packed full of servers.

So, what hardware & operating system are powering Apple's data centers?

The Apple data centers are most certainly not running Xserve hardware and they're not running OS X Server. I'd speculate they're running HP or IBM hardware with some flavor of Unix, perhaps even Linux.

Anyone else care to take a guess?

Author: Joe Moreno

Beautiful Software You Can't See

There was some discussion, yesterday, asking: What's the most beautiful software?

Most of the answers were front-end consumer or knowledge worker systems such as the original Macintosh or VisiCalc. One thing that these systems all had in common is they were revolutionary end-user solutions that you could see or touch, which got me thinking: What about software you can't see?

As a software developer, I'm partial to some middleware systems. My personal favorite is Enterprise Objects Framework (EOF), but it's very abstract, making it hard to convey its importance as one of the first database-to-object-oriented mapping systems.

Two better examples of software that you can't see or touch, which relates to consumers, are Carbon and Rosetta. These two pieces of software effectively breathe new life into Apple in 1997 and 2005, respectively.

Carbon
Carbon allowed software that was written for the original Macintosh OS (sometimes referred to as Blue Box or Classic) to be compatible with Apple's new operating system, Mac OS X. Developers only needed to recompile their Classic app under Carbon and it would run, natively, on Mac OS X with minimal tweaks. Software that was no longer supported and not recompiled under Carbon would still work, nearly seamlessly in Mac OS X, by launching Classic which was, effectively, the virtualization of one OS (Classic) within another OS (Mac OS X). An elegant solution.

If you were a Mac developer and you wanted to survive the turn of the 21st Century then you'd recompile your apps under Carbon. Hence, "all life is based on Carbon."

Rosetta
While Carbon allowed developers to transition from Mac OS 9 (Classic) to Mac OS X (Unix), Rosetta allowed developers to transition from a PowerPC (PPC) hardware architecture to an Intel CPU. Steve Jobs gave a brilliant keynote during the 2005 WWDC by failing to mention, throughout the first half of his presentation, that he had been running his demos on an Intel based Macintosh until he finally said, "We've been running on an Intel system all morning."

Rosetta was Apple's solution that allowed PPC binaries (executable applications) to run seamlessly on Intel based Macs. What made this software so beautiful was that it was undetectable to users when Rosetta was running. Switching to Intel not only reduced power consumption, which was key, but it also allowed Windows to run either natively or virtualized, instead of emulated, on Apple's Macs.

Unseen, yet truly beautiful software.


And, in case you're wondering, my favorite software nowadays is ForeFlight for the iPad which has revolutionized cockpit resource management (CRM) for the single pilot.

Author: Joe Moreno

Mac Password Recovery in Three Steps

Have you ever stored a password for a website or e-mail account in your Mac's Keychain, only to completely forget it when you needed it later?

I forgot that Keychain has a simple feature which will show you any password you've stored in it.

This past New Year's Eve, I was at the childhood home of a high school friend where I was showing him, his mother, and girlfriend how to stream photos, music, and video to their Apple TV from their computers, iPhones, and iPads.

When it came time for my friend's mother to enter the password for her iTunes account she had forgotten it. In the blink of an eye, she opened the Mac's Keychain app, which is in the Applications/Utilities folder. "Go Mrs. G!," I thought to myself. I suspect that she learned this trick from her brother who's worked at the Apple Store on Fifth Avenue. And a valuable trick it is.

Three Steps

1. Once you've opened Keychain, click on the username of the account that you used to login (jmoreno in the above screenshot).

2. Click on Passwords category, since it's a password that you want to recover. You'll have to find the MobileMe, iCloud, iTunes, etc account that you're looking for under the Name column (also, you can enter the account name, i.e. iTunes, Mail, etc, in the search box, in the upper right to narrow down the search).

3. Click on the Show Password checkbox. Keychain will ask you to enter your Mac's account password. The password that you're now entering is the one that you use when running a software update or after rebooting. (You need to enter your Mac's account password since it's used to decrypt the password that you're looking for.) Once you've enter your computer's password the password will be displayed "in the clear."

Scrolling In Mac OS X Lion

One of the first things that people notice when upgrading to Mac OS X Lion is that scrolling works the opposite way that it used to worked.

Without a doubt, this will seem backwards – at first. Most people have said that it takes several days to get used to the new format. But, why change a paradigm that's work for the last quarter century?

The answer is simple and most people haven't really noticed that this is the exact same way that scrolling works on the iPhone. Before Lion, if you wanted to scroll down a web page, you'd have to grab the scroll bar and pull it down. The metaphor was that you were pulling the window down the page to view the content "below the fold."

Now, the metaphor has been changed to match the iPhone and a layer of abstraction has been removed. Instead of pulling a window down to view the content, you now pull the content up to see it. No more window model – it's just you and your content.

Give it several days to a week to see if you get used to it – it's like learning to drive on the other side of the road. If you use the iPhone, then you'll probably get used to it and not notice it in the same way that you never noticed that the iPhone worked the opposite way.

But, if you really can't stand it, you can change the settings back to always display scroll bars in the General part of System Preferences.

Nefarious Mac OS X Attack

This is one of the most clever attacks on Mac OS X that I've seen in the wild.

I was searching Google for photos of Kelly McGillis since I had driven by "her" Top Gun house, earlier this evening. When I clicked on several of the top results from Google, the following webpage came up and a ZIP file, with a trojan, started downloading.

Click to enlarge
At first glance, this download might look legit to the casual user, but it's not. Fortunately, nothing bad can happen just by visiting websites like this one.

This type of attack is not a virus since it doesn't spread on its own. But, like most social engineering attacks, people could be duped into thinking that they might need to install the application that was just downloaded. After unzipping this file, you'd have to double click on the installer and then grant it administrative access to install this malware on your computer. Falling victim to this attack requires that a user take several deliberate steps, but, that could easily happen if you thought this was a software update from Apple.

While attacks like this aren't uncommon, it's interesting that the attacker was able to figure out how to poison Google's search algorithm into returning their nefarious websites at the top of the list.

iPhone Screenshot

Here's a neat trick with the iPhone 2.0 software.

Press the sleep/wake button and the home button, simultaneously, for about half a second and the iPhone will take a screenshot and stick the image into your Camera Roll.

[ digg this ]

iChat and MobileMe

The @me.com e-mail addresses went live a few days ago.

Does that mean you can use username@me.com in iChat?
Yup, you sure can.

In iChat, simply add a new account (iChat –> Preferences –> Accounts) by clicking on the + symbol in the bottom left.

Instead of adding a .Mac Account, choose AIM Account and add your username@me.com.

GoDaddy Affiliate Program

I've been using a GoDaddy reseller (NoMoreWebMasters.com) to register domain names with GoDaddy at a cheaper price than godaddy.com ($6.95 vs $9.99 for .com).

However, once I was logged in through the affiliate I couldn't change the DNS. When I clicked on "Total DNS Control and MX Records" to change my DNS I got the following error message:
The Total DNS Control Manager for this domain is temporarily unavailable. Please try back later.

After noticing this problem for several days I called GoDaddy. They told me it was a browser issue. While the rep had me on hold I googled the error message and I noticed some other people having the same, undetermined, problems.

I then noticed that the NoMoreWebMasters.com page was actually framing the GoDaddy affiliate page. Once I removed the GoDaddy page from inside the frame the problem went away.

I ran into this problem on OS X Leopard with Safari and Firefox 3.0. However, on Windows XP with Firefox, the NoMoreWebMasters.com page worked inside the frame and I could change the DNS. So, for some reason, framing a GoDaddy affiliate page doesn't work on the Mac.

Web Site Performance Using Safari

Some how I missed the fact that Safari provides performance statistics.
What an incredible wealth of information. However, I couldn't find this feature on Safari for Windows.

Simply right-click (control-click) on a Web page and choose Inspect Element from the contextual menu. From there, click on the up arrow disclosure icon in the bottom left of the inspection window to reveal Console and Network and then choose Network.

Click to enlarge

OS Market Share

Apple Software Build Numbers

Paul Suh, from ps-enable.com writes the following:

Have you ever wondered what the build numbers mean for Apple software? (Click on Version to get to Build to get to Serial Number then back to Version)



For instance, Mac OS X 10.4.10 Intel is build 8R2232. Mac OS X Server 10.4.11 Universal is 8S2169. These numbers have the following rough meanings:

8 - This is the major version number of the software package. 10.5 = 9, 10.4 = 8, ... 10.0 = 4. Prior to that was NextStep 3.3, from which we get the 3 series.

R - This is the minor version number. It is always incremented for system updates (i.e. 10.4.10 to 10.4.11 is always a letter jump), but may be incremented as well for hardware-specific builds. R is the 18th letter, but only the 10th update to Tiger. The other 8 letter bumps were for hardware support for new releases. Security updates generally don't merit a letter bump.

2232 - This is the sequential build number within the minor version. If it is a four-digit number, the first digit indicates a specific platform. In this case, 2 indicates that it is for Intel. A three-digit or shorter number indicates a unified build for all architectures. The remaining digits are the sequential build number. In this case, the R train had 232 builds before release, the first one being build 8R2001. Although the builds are roughly daily, you can't really go by that number. In the early stages builds may only happen once every two or three days; towards the end they may occur two or three times a day. The build trains of successive releases may overlap to a certain extent, based on what Apple Engineering sees as the priority vs. risk of various changes to the code. The earliest builds of 10.4.11 almost certainly overlapped with the last builds of 10.4.10. The builds of Leopard definitely overlapped with builds of Tiger updates, going back to almost all the way to the day after Tiger was released.

Note that different software packages have totally different build numbers, so you can't compare the build numbers to each other in a meaningful way. The exception is that Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server share the same build numbers.

What is the deal with Asian hacking?

The hardware firewall on my mother's network was having a problem so I had her plug her computer straight into the cable modem. I realized that this isn't the best idea, but it's a Mac, so the only way someone could get in is if they guessed her username and password which were both strong.

However, I was alarmed when I took a peek at her security logs (/var/log/secure.log) to see so many attacks over SSH - primarily from from Asia (China, Korea, and India). Here's a small sample:

Nov 10 13:57:27 MacBook-Pro sshd[11704]: Invalid user admin from 208.51.155.141
Nov 10 13:57:28 MacBook-Pro sshd[11706]: Invalid user test from 208.51.155.141
Nov 10 13:57:29 MacBook-Pro sshd[11708]: Invalid user imaging from 208.51.155.141
Nov 10 13:57:31 MacBook-Pro sshd[11710]: Invalid user oracle from 208.51.155.141
Nov 10 19:20:41 MacBook-Pro sshd[12097]: Invalid user test from 218.1.65.233
Nov 10 19:20:45 MacBook-Pro sshd[12099]: Invalid user guest from 218.1.65.233
Nov 10 19:20:49 MacBook-Pro sshd[12101]: Invalid user admin from 218.1.65.233
Nov 10 19:20:53 MacBook-Pro sshd[12103]: Invalid user admin from 218.1.65.233
Nov 10 19:20:57 MacBook-Pro sshd[12105]: Invalid user user from 218.1.65.233
Nov 10 19:21:13 MacBook-Pro sshd[12116]: Invalid user test from 218.1.65.233
Nov 10 20:23:04 MacBook-Pro sshd[12152]: Invalid user apple from 125.16.216.69
Nov 10 20:23:09 MacBook-Pro sshd[12157]: Invalid user brian from 125.16.216.69
Nov 10 20:23:15 MacBook-Pro sshd[12162]: Invalid user andrew from 125.16.216.69
Nov 10 20:23:20 MacBook-Pro sshd[12167]: Invalid user newsroom from 125.16.216.69


Each attack would last between five and 20 minutes and they'd all go for the low hanging fruit such as common usernames and passwords. One solution is to simply change the SSH port from 22 to an obscure port.

I'll be keeping a close eye on those logs.

Apple Dashboard: No Stock Quotes

What happened to Apple's Stock Quote Dashboard Widget? It stopped working yesterday - obviously a server issue.
I'm wondering if this is related to Leopard's forthcoming release or, perhaps Quote.com is no longer providing Apple with their quote data.

First, NBC now Quote.com - when will it end!

Update 1: After digging through the widget, it seems that the call it's making to the following URL which is returning no content:
http://wu.apple.com/fq/applewidgets/quote.asp?key=tHisIsApplewidgeTs&symbols=aapl







If your widget looks fine, try restarting it by clicking on it and pressing cmd-R.

Update 2: After 36 hours it's working again.

iChat: Too Much Information

What happens if you select all your buddies in iChat and then do a cmd-I?



That's almost as scary as pressing ctrl-option-cmd-8 at the same time.

Luckily, option-clicking on any of iChat's red (close window) buttons quickly resolves the issue in an animated way.

Apple Software Update On Windows

How come the Apple Software Update on Windows XP doesn't say:
Downloading (12.70000000000001 MB / 22.399999999999912 MB)?

[ digg this ]

"Never Get Out of the Boat." - Apocalypse Now

"Never delete Safari." - Joe Moreno

Sounds obvious, but I never considered how important Safari is on Mac OS X (or having at least one Web browser) - especially since Mac OS X doesn't ship with any other Web browser.

Something happened to my father-in-law's iMac and Safari went missing. They're not sure if maybe they deleted it and emptied the trash or if the 10.4.10 update failed.

Regardless of how it happened - Safari was gone.

I tried, unsuccessfully, to curl apple.com/safari to get the URL for their download page but I gave up after about 30 minutes of parsing HTML and redirects with my eyes.

I was pretty stumped - I wanted to solve this problem right there on the spot without going home and downloading a DMG to a thumb drive.

As luck would have it, earlier that day, I had downloaded and installed both Safari 3.0b (public beta) and Firefox on one of my servers back home so I AFP'd into the servers and pulled the DMGs out of the trash.

So, I expected the story to end there after downloading both Web browsers. But, for some odd reason, only Firefox would install and run. Safari 3.0b installed couldn't be installed on the 10.4.10 volume. Well, at least having any Web browser is better than none - and Firefox isn't a bad one to have.

Once Firefox was installed I went to apple.com/safari and re-downloaded Safari 3.0b but it still wouldn't install. The installer simply said that Safari couldn't be installed on the Macintosh HD volume. So, I looked for Safari 2 to download. It seems that Apple not longer offers Safari 2.x as a download??? - only 2.x updates are available or the public beta of Safari 3.0.

Since my father-in-law was used to the Safari UI I downloaded Webkit and tried to install that. But, Webkit doesn't work without Safari. So, I manually copied the Safari 3.0b app onto my father-in-law's computer, via AFP, from my server. Although the Safari 3.0b app wouldn't run (it just bounced and then crashed with an undefined symbol error) it was enough to get Webkit up and running. Webkit was now working but not Safari - very odd.

I still wasn't satisfied so I manually downloaded System/Frameworks/WebKit.framework but that didn't fix the problem.

In the end, I remembered that I still had a server with Safari 2.04 and I manually copied that app to my father-in-law's computer and all seems to be working well.

Two questions come to mind:
Why couldn't I install Safari 3.0b on a 10.4.10 iMac?
Does Apple still offer Safari 2.x as a full download?

[digg this]

Safari Thwarts "DoS" JavaScript

I hate seeing the spinning beach-ball of death (sbod) when surfing Web sites with Safari; especially when I'm forced to quit Safari to fix the problem.

While surfing with Safari 3.02 beta I noticed the beach ball again, but, this time, after about 60 seconds, this window popped up:



Fantastic!