Categories
Apple

Disable X11 When Using SSH On Mac OS X

When you ssh into another box from Mac OS X, X11 automatically starts up because X11 forwarding is enabled by default. I have no idea why it’s a default as I suspect the vast majority of Mac OS X users never use X11 forwarding. It’s annoying to need to quit it every time. The fix however is easy. Edit your ssh config located here: ~/.ssh/config.

By default you’ll see a line like this in a series of otherwise commented out configs:

   ForwardX11 yes

Change that “yes” to a “no” and save the file. No more quitting X11 every time you ssh into another box.

In the event you need to use X11 forwarding from time to time, you can enable it when connecting by doing:

ssh hostname.tld -o ForwardX11=yes

It’s nice to get rid of those little annoyances every once in a while.

Categories
Apple Software

ANSI Color In Mac OS X 10.4

By default when connecting over ssh to my Mac OS X 10.4 box (using bash shell), there’s no ANSI color. Sometimes it’s pretty handy to have. I keep forgetting how to turn it on.

To add, put the following in the .profile file in your home directory:

TERM=xterm-color; export TERM

Now when I ssh in, I get ANSI color goodness.

Hopefully next time I’ll just look for this post.

Categories
Mozilla

Shell Stats

Since it seems like everyone else on Planet Mozilla is doing it… My twist: multiple systems. Actually I found it interesting too see the variation based on what I use them for.

Home

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
114 ls
91 cd
63 sh
41 ssh
37 sudo
14 pico
13 exit
12 ping
10 ./gl_tail
8 top

Home Server

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
68 ls
64 dig
55 cd
45 whois
27 ps
24 clear
23 sudo
14 pico
12 top
12 exit

Work

$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
67 top
65 ssh
31 ls
29 sudo
26 dig
23 cd
20 ps
19 svn
17 php
8 ping
Categories
Apple

iPhone SDK & Enterprise Offering

Apple announced it’s Enterprise offering as well as the long awaited SDK for the iPhone today. A few thoughts:

Enterprise Offering

Pretty impressive, at least the way it sounds. I have a feeling they are dead serious on this one. Exchange support, and the administrative stuff will be very big wins. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the line ends up splitting so there’s an enterprise line of iPhones with a more business set of features, and a “personal” line. That will help them compete more on both sides by being able to focus more. Software likely will be identical among them.

The one thing I can’t figure out is cost. I have a strong feeling a price drop for the current EDGE based iPhones will come in June, as the new 3G models are revealed. It’s still a hard pitch for enterprises to buy iPhones when Blackberry’s are getting cheaper and cheaper. Not to mention they can shop for prices among wireless providers. Because of this, I think there’s a price drop in the works to bring the iPhone to where it can really compete.

SDK

I can has SDK? Still can’t download it. Apple’s on Akamai, but their developer stuff is generally not. That really sucks. I’ve been trying all afternoon.

I wonder if the $99 one time fee (setup fee) applies to open source projects? I’d hope they provide an avenue for them to signup at no charge. Especially considering Apple’s involvement in open source.

Other Thoughts

Still no Apple SSH client? I really hope terminal.app is available for download when this thing actually ships.

More when I actually get my hands on some SDK bits.

Categories
Apple Google

FUSE For Windows

Reason number 1,000,001 to use a Mac for development purposes. MacFUSE rocks (thanks Google). sshfs and ftpfs (when no ssh) are life savers. Yes in Linux there’s the original FUSE which is just dynamite. I just don’t understand how in 2008 there’s no port for Windows. It’s so insanely useful and practical.

IDE’s with FTP browsers built in pretty much suck, or their FTP implementation is just too buggy.

Surprisingly the Mac has FUSE, and the one IDE that I like Coda also has an awesome FTP/SFTP implementation. Avery rare coincidence. To my surprise, several weeks ago I found out it even supports SSH keys. The trick is to use SFTP and to enter your keys password in Coda when setting up the Site. Coda will then connect and use the ssh key. Awesome.