Latest Mac Happenings

Heya,

Two things of interest:

1. My Macbook is fixed. I went to the new Apple Store in Fair Oaks Mall and left it overnight while they replace the hard disk and reinstalled OS X. While I had Tiger (v10.4.something), they installed Leopard (v10.5.2).

2. During my 5-6 month of Mac downtime, my Macbook's battery went south for the winter. After following the steps in the manual and help pages at Apple.com, I finally realized it was really dead. Fortunately, the Genius replaced it under warranty.

3. My wife now has a late rev Macbook. Hers outspecs mine across the board, with the exception of my system's SuperDrive...her hard drive is bigger, she has more system RAM, and she has a 2.1GHz CPU while mine is a 2.0GHz CPU (both systems are dual-core). She won this system at a PTO raffle. She bought my daughter's whole book of raffle tickets, just to help her out then the following week, my kids came home excited, saying that the previous Friday, my wife's ticket was drawn. Later that day, my wife got a call from the school office telling her she actually won two drawings, one the laptop and the other a $25 coupon for use at The Cheesecake Factory.

So, I can do two things: back up this install of Leopard ASAP onto an external drive, or just buy Leopard (if I have to reinstall the OS, I'll have to revert back to Tiger, since my system disks are Tiger.

I'm going to have to redo my iTunes setup and reconfigure the laptop...this will be fun, especially since I'll be doing new stuff (learning Leopard).

Fun times!!

Panther/Tiger/Leopard Updates

http://isc.sans.org/diary.html?storyid=3656:

Apple released in the last days upgrades to it's Tiger (10.4) and Leopard (10.5) versions of OS X.

For those unfamiliar with Mac OS X: this isn't just security patches, it somewhat comparable to what Microsoft calls a service pack. As such it can include stability fixes, features, etc. and security fixes.

10.4.11 includes a long list of security fixes. Since it's a all or nothing deal, there's very little real use in discussing all of them individually. Just take the plunge: there are a few bad ones in there, so you'll need it anyway. Some readers wrote us that there might be some issues with it all, so be careful. That said, I'm running it for a bit already and have not seen a single bad thing so far.

* CVE-2007-3456
* CVE-2007-4678
* CVE-2007-2926
* CVE-2005-0953
* CVE-2005-1260
* CVE-2007-4679
* CVE-2007-4680
* CVE-2007-0464
* CVE-2007-4681
* CVE-2007-4682
* CVE-2007-3999
* CVE-2007-4743
* CVE-2007-3749
* CVE-2007-4683
* CVE-2007-4684
* CVE-2007-4685
* CVE-2006-6127
* CVE-2007-4686
* CVE-2007-4687
* CVE-2007-4688
* CVE-2007-4269
* CVE-2007-4689
* CVE-2007-4267
* CVE-2007-4268
* CVE-2007-4690
* CVE-2007-4691
* CVE-2007-0646
* CVE-2007-4692
* CVE-2007-4693
* CVE-2007-4694
* CVE-2007-4695
* CVE-2007-4696
* CVE-2007-4697
* CVE-2007-4698
* CVE-2007-3758
* CVE-2007-3760
* CVE-2007-4671
* CVE-2007-3756
* CVE-2007-4699
* CVE-2007-4700
* CVE-2007-4701

10.5.1 includes some security fixes too, all centered around the application firewall:

* CVE-2007-4702
* CVE-2007-4703
* CVE-2007-4704

Apple also released patches for the beta of safari, but hey, it's beta software!

Rex pointed out we were missing the security update to 10.3.9 (Panther) that fixes many of the security problems also fixed in 10.4.11.

'New' Mac G4 Power Mac acquired!

I've not posted in QUITE awhile. Not that I've been idle, but I've been more active in my Slackware blog, documenting mostly security-oriented material, but 2 weeks ago, I got a surprise.

A friend of mine has purchased a sailboat with the intention of living in it, which means that everything in his current home has to be trashed, sold, or given away. He had a Macintosh G4 Power Mac that he needed to get rid of, so I took it off his hands! The image to the upper left is a spitting image of the machine that I now have.

The machine itself isn't particularly powerful, but it appears to be cutting-edge for its day: dual 550MHz PowerPC processors (!!), 30GB hard disk (this is the original disk), 768MB of RAM, a CD-RW drive, and a ZIP drive. I did not know that this was a dual processor system until I checked while typing this post...this is quite a surprise.

Now, I got the Mac and it was running Mac OS X 10.3.9 Panther Server, but the drive immediately began to make noises and I got fed up and replaced it with a 100GB Seagate IDE drive, which was only $50. I could've went bigger, but these machines only recognize 120GB or so, due to BIOS limitations. There are workarounds to avoid this limitation, but I'm not going to spend a lot of money on a 7-year-old system if I can help it. I went out and bought the latest Mac OS X Tiger and installed it on the new drive without issues. The system runs very well. I think I'd much rather run Panther (Server) but my friend didn't provide me with the disks.

The stats of this system are below:

Machine Name: Power Mac G4
Machine Model: PowerMac3,4
CPU Type: PowerPC G4 (11.3)
Number Of CPUs: 2
CPU Speed: 533 MHz
L2 Cache (per CPU): 1 MB
Memory: 768 MB
Bus Speed: 133 MHz
Boot ROM Version: 4.1.8f5

This box is going to be a riot! Hopefully, I can even upgrade the CPU to something more substantial, but for now, I can probably get away with adding more RAM.  [EDIT 03/17/2010:  Not!  CPUs for this machine are EXPENSIVE!   I've also added more RAM and the system now has 1GB of PC133-333 (1x512MB and 2x256MB)...one slot is still empty.  It'll take 2GB of RAM when using OS X, but only 1.5GB if using OS 9.]

This system will most likely end up serving web pages and serving MySQL content.

Lastest Installed Software

I've installed a few software packages in the last few days:

Chicken of the VNC
CyberDuck

Google for those ... they are easy to find. Both are pretty solid. I've yet to ferret out any underlying issues with those tools (or any user-error issues :o) ).

Currently, I'm working on aliases for certain commands, specifically SSH commands so I can log into my remote hosts with one typed word. I've gotten the aliases to work but I'm still working on getting them to be sticky (or permanent). It appears that most web pages out there are focused more on pre-Tiger. It should be long before I have it working though.

I also bought a book, "Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks, which is a pretty good read and appears to be very practical, although it's not as granular as I need it to be, so i may go back out and get another OS X book to assist me in my learning.

One of the book's highlights is firewalling. I had no idea OS X was using ipfw behind the scenes. I shall take advantage of that soon! :o)

OK, it's late and I've to work tomorrow (first time in a week). Laters!