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Review: Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar

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  • Very nice review. Just wanted to put my favorite quote. it requires zero configuration once you're configured properly. That's classic.
    • Re:Nice Review (Score:5, Informative)

      by foobar104 (206452)
      Yeah. And it also makes it pretty clear that Pudge doesn't understand Rendezvous. And the whole "printer sharing with Rendezvous" thing sounds fishy to me. Methinks he's actually talking about AppleTalk, not Rendezvous.

      In the interest of clearing things up for the layman-- web resources on Rendezvous and ZeroConf are pretty obtuse-- here's the briefest possible explanation. I don't guarantee it's 100% right, but I think it's pretty close.

      Rendezvous comes in two parts: hostname-to-IP mapping and service advertisement and discovery. With Rendezvous, you can make two machine talk to each other by name without host tables or DNS servers. When I'm on one machine-- felix-- I can address the other machine-- oscar-- by name by using the FQDN "oscar.local." For example, I type "FTP oscar.local." All the Rendezvous-equipped machines on my LAN are listening to a special link-local multicast address for DNS-style queries. When oscar receives my machine's query asking about "oscar.local," it replies with its IP address. This works for any combination of IP addresses, but it works best with self-assigned ones. You know, the 169.254 addresses your computer comes up with when no DHCP server responds. This works perfectly now between two Macs with Jaguar. I've been using it every day for months, on developer program pre-release builds. There were some problems with mDNSResponder running amuck, but that has apparently gone away in built 6C125, which is what I'm running now.

      The other part of Rendezvous is service advertisement and discovery. That's not implemented in very many apps yet, but one that has it is iChat. When iChat starts up (if Rendezvous chat is enabled) it sends out a query looking for all machines on the local net that support the service "so-n-so." (I don't remember what the iChat service is called.) All the iChatty machines out there respond, and among themselves they set up a sort of ad hoc peer-to-peer network where one machine can message any other machine directly.

      iTunes will have this functionality someday, but it doesn't yet. We've all seen the demo where Steve browsed Phil's library over the network. That was a concept demo, not a real feature demo. That's not finished yet.

      So Rendezvous is confusing at first.

      Partially this is Apple's fault, but in all fairness, how would you market multicast DNS as an operating system feature? It's fucking cool, so you want people to know about it, but exactly how would you describe it?

      The end result? Everybody's excited about Rendezvous, but hardly anybody gets it.
      • by MCRocker (461060) on Monday August 26, 2002 @10:06AM (#4141091) Homepage

        Unfortunately, Rendezvous doesn't fix many of my pressing networking problems. Apple should definitely be bitch-slapped for their claims of networking interoperabiltiy when SMB works if you have a newtwork server, but not if you're using peer to peer networking! I think that far more home users have peer to peer networking rather than have some network server sitting in a closet. Consequently, I can't connect to any of the other machines on my network that use SMB.

        My other machines also can't connect to my Mac because the 'Windows Sharing' insists that you add a user name for each Windows user who you want to allow connections from. However, most of my other systems run such things under the user name 'nobody', which you can't add to the 'Accounts' preferences. Even if I come up with other user names, each one has to be manually added one at a time, which is a real pain. Even then, my OS/2 and eComStation [ecomstation.com] boxes refuse to connect with my mac.

        The DNS-less stuff doesn't work either. It doesn't find any of my other machines. All I want is a nice simple host table . On Linux or OS/2 I could easily add all of my host table entries in under a minute. Unfortunately, Mac OS X doesn't support the host table except in console mode. Instead there's NetInfo and a 98 page document that that you need to read to understand the intricacies of NetInfo, but doesn't actually mention how to map hosts to IP addresses! I'm really tired of typing in IP addresses that start with 192.168.0! Please, someone, tell me I'm an idiot and have missed the obious solution, I'd love to see a solution to this. While you're at it, have a look at my MacOSXQuestions [markcrocker.com] page and tell me that I'm all wrong and that there are simple solutions to my Mac OS X problems... please.

        • by foobar104 (206452) on Monday August 26, 2002 @10:27AM (#4141230) Journal
          The DNS-less stuff doesn't work either. It doesn't find any of my other machines.

          Rendezvous can only find other machines on the LAN that also support Rendezvous. It won't help you find your OS/2 machine or your eComStation (wtf?) machine.

          All I want is a nice simple host table . On Linux or OS/2 I could easily add all of my host table entries in under a minute.

          You can do it on your Mac, too. Starting in 10.2, your host table works just like you'd expect. In 10.0 and 10.1, lookupd was configured to ignore /etc/hosts, but in 10.2 it's set up differently by default. You can confirm this by looking at the output of lookupd -configuration.

          LookupOrder: Cache FF DNS NI DS
          _config_name: Host Configuration

          (Among other stuff)

          That means that lookupd will try to resolve host names by looking first in its own cache, then in the flat files (/etc/hosts, in this case), then in the DNS system, then in NetInfo. All this is documented in the man page.

          All the other items in your list of complaints have similarly simple fixes. Except, of course, for that shit about OS/2 compatibility. What's that about?
        • have a look at my MacOSXQuestions [markcrocker.com] page and tell me that I'm all wrong and that there are simple solutions to my Mac OS X problems... please.


          What the heck, I'm waiting on a big compile.


          start up a second copy of an already running application, but as root?


          sudo /Applications/TextEdit.app/Contents/MacOS/TextEdit . The key is to directly launch the executable rather than using open.


          add to the effective host table?


          man niload


          # set the monitor power/sleep button to put just the display to sleep and not my machine?


          I'm pretty sure my G4 at home has an option for that in the Displays preferences pane. It has an Apple 15" LCD, maybe it only shows up for certain monitors.


          add root to the login window?


          You mean as a choice from the list of users? Showing that list is horrible from a security perspective, just have it display username and password fields.


          set an image's icon to a thumbnail of the image?


          Open image, copy contents, bring up "Get Info" window in the Finder, select icon, paste. Just did this in Jaguar, it may not work in 10.1.


          Hope this helps...

          • add root to the login window?

            You mean as a choice from the list of users? Showing that list is horrible from a security perspective, just have it display username and password fields.

            Actually, if you have Jaguar, you can log in as any user- even one not shown in the list- by clicking on "Other." This will, of course, let you log in as root.
          • set an image's icon to a thumbnail of the image?
            Open image, copy contents, bring up "Get Info" window in the Finder, select icon, paste. Just did this in Jaguar, it may not work in 10.1.

            Or, more easily (in Finder's icon view mode):

            1. Open View -> Show View Options
            2. Check "Show icon preview"
          • > set an image's icon to a thumbnail of the image?

            In 10.2, one of the View Options for Icon view is "Show icon preview", but this is disabled by default. Open a Finder window, choose View > as Icons, choose View > Show View Options, and then check the box "Show icon preview". Note the setting of "This window only" or "All windows" at the top of the View Options panel before you make changes. Once Finder is showing icon previews, if you open a folder of images, their icons will appear as their contents. Set the icon size to 128x128 and you probably won't ever have to open an image just to get a look at it.

            The confusion on this is because in previous Mac OS up to 10.1, if an image file had an icon that showed its contents, it was actually a custom icon that was added to the file itself at some point during its life (Photoshop has done this for years, Fireworks does it, and you can just copy and paste an image in Finder's Get Info to do this yourself, too). With a plain custom icon, you could open the image, edit it (say, rotate it) and close it and the icon would still be the same as it ever was. With 10.2, Finder is basically making these content icons for you as you go, so they will be current. If you have images that already have custom icons on them, cut the icon out by using Get Info (select the file or folder, choose File > Get Info, click in the icon field, and go Edit > Cut).
        • Believe me. I am no Netinfo guru, but I was able to use it to map host names. I just authenticated into Netinfo and went to the machines section and made a duplicate of the entry for local host. You can delete the "serves ./local" pair, and just fill in "ip_address" and "name" pairs. I did this for all the machines on my local network, just like I would in a /etc/hosts file. Works great for all OS X stuff, not just Rendezvous. Hope this helps
        • NetInfo, but doesn't actually mention how to map hosts to IP addresses! I'm really tired of typing in IP addresses that start with 192.168.0!

          I'll take this one ;)

          Now, warning, this works in 10.0 and 10.1, and I haven't yet verified it works in 10.2 :)

          And I didn't read this anywhere, or anything, it was one of those experiments which worked back when 10.0 came out ;)

          Gah, 10.2 has eaten my netinfo db :(

          I'll have to restore or something :-\

          Anywho, in /machines (in netinfo space) you'll find entries for localhost and broadcast host, copy localhost, change it to "blahblah" and set its IP up, that should give you a local domain name blahblah

          You will probably need to restart the netinfo service

"You can't make a program without broken egos."

 



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