Author: admin

10.4.11 DNS results from doxpara.com

admin

The results are in for my iBook G4 running 10.4.11 with Security patch 2008-005 when using the DNS checker at doxpara

Your name server, at 206.141.xxx.50, appears to be safe, but make sure the ports listed below aren’t following an obvious pattern (:1001, :1002, :1003, or :30000, :30020, :30100…).

Requests seen for cf2cfda1b5c1.doxdns5.com:

206.141.xxx.50:3831 TXID=31583

206.141.xxx.40:6670 TXID=27344

206.141.xxx.35:49337 TXID=35665

206.141.xxx.38:10792 TXID=50022

206.141.xxx.36:11111 TXID=63897

 

There’s some who say things aren’t all right, but the patch from Apple seems to be satisfying the the tool of the researcher who found the bug, and ncircle doesn’t provide the command line or tool that they used to obtain these results. So for me I feel confident in this patch as-is, especially since BIND isn’t turned on anyway and I’m not using my DNS anyway (and the vast majority of Mac owners aren’t either) I’m using my DSL provider AT&T’s DNS server for resolution, so it’s them who I hope have patched all their routers. And I’m sure they did, Tuesday before last

x86 Inertia

admin

So I was reading this interview with Stephen Morse the designer of the 8086 which is 30 years old this year. A couple points it makes are: being in the right place at the right time is sometimes all it takes to be part of something big and the inertia of what already exists greatly affects future designs.Here’s a couple quotes from Stephen I liked:

I always regret that I didn’t fix up some idiosyncrasies of the 8080 when I had a chance. For example, the 8080 stores the low-order byte of a 16-bit value before the high-order byte. The reason for that goes back to the 8008, which did it that way to mimic the behavior of a bit-serial processor designed by Datapoint;(a bit-serial processor needs to see the least significant bits first so that it can correctly handle carries when doing additions). Now there was no reason for me to continue this idiocy, except for some obsessive desire to maintain strict 8080 compatibility. But if I had made the break with the past and stored the bytes more logically, nobody would have objected. And today we wouldn’t be dealing with issues involving big-endian and little-endian–the concepts just wouldn’t exist.    

Basically once you start a bad habit it’s hard to break, which leads on to this: 

I’m a PC guy. I long resisted the Mac because there were still programs that were written for the PC and would not run on the Mac. I felt it was like the Betamax/VHS story: Betamax was a better technology, but anyone buying a Betamax recorder would have a small selection of tapes available to rent and would be limited in who they could share tapes with. Now that you can get a Mac that executes x86 code, the situation has changed somewhat, but I’ve resisted a Mac for so long that it’s hard to switch gears at this point.      

I just find it humorous that these de facto standards in the inductry are sometimes just the product of how someone started doing it one way and everyone followed suit, and even if there was a better or different way to do things, it’s not how everyone else is doing it, and that’s inertia… or entropy? Seems like you need a shake every so often to keep things fresh yes?

What’s in the Time Machine Update?

admin

Here’s the meat of what gets updated: backup daemon helper & file vault image tool, loginwindow.app, Broadcom and Aetheros wireless kexts. Lotsa System.kexts: BSD, IOKit, Libkern, MAC Framework, Mach. The AFP filesystem plugin, metadata framework, the backupd launch daemon plists, and the DiskImages framework.

 

/System/Library/CoreServices/SystemVersion.plist

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/backupd-helper

/System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/fvimagetool

/System/Library/CoreServices/loginwindow.app/Contents/MacOS/loginwindow

/System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AirPortAtheros.kext/Contents/MacOS/AirPortAtheros

/System/Library/Extensions/IO80211Family.kext/Contents/PlugIns/AppleAirPortBrcm4311.kext/Contents/MacOS/AppleAirPortBrcm4311

/System/Library/Extensions

/System.kext/PlugIns/BSDKernel.kext/BSDKernel

/System/Library/Extensions

/System.kext/PlugIns/IOKit.kext/IOKit

/System/Library/Extensions

/System.kext/PlugIns/Libkern.kext/Libkern

/System/Library/Extensions

/System.kext/PlugIns/MACFramework.kext/MACFramework

/System/Library/Extensions

/System.kext/PlugIns/Mach.kext/Mach

/System/Library/Extensions

/System.kext/PlugIns

/System6.0.kext/kernel.6.0

/System/Library/Extensions

/System.kext/PlugIns/Unsupported.kext/Unsupported

/System/Library/Filesystems/AppleShare/afpfs.kext/Contents/MacOS/afpfs

/System/Library/Frameworks/CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/Frameworks/Metadata.framework/Versions/A/Support/mds

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-attach.plist

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto.plist

/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-wake.plist

/System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/DiskImages.framework/Versions/A/DiskImages/usr/share/man/man1/tmdiagnose.1

Here’s hoping that the update in tandem with the Airport/Time Capsule fixes some of the problems people have had with using a hard drive as an Airport disk on the Airport Extremes. For me it wasn’t even about Time Machine, the real pain was transfers were SLOW even over the 100Mb/s Ethernet (dangit I jumped the gun and didn’t get the GigE model) and sometimes the Airport Disk couldn’t be mounted on my computers until the Airport was restarted. Also with the update the ever mysterious Wide Area Bonjour prefs are still around, they are in the Name-Edit… button now.One more thing…/usr/share/man/man1/tmdiagnose.1: Hmmm, is this a Time Machine diagnostics tool?Let’s have a look at the man page or this one:tmdiagnose(1) BSD General Commands Manual tmdiagnose(1)NAME tmdiagnose, Other_name_for_same_program(), Yet another name for the same program. — This line parsedfor whatis database.

tmdiagnose(1)             BSD General Commands Manual            tmdiagnose(1) 

NAME

     tmdiagnose, Other_name_for_same_program(), Yet another name for the same program. — This line parsed

     for whatis database.

SYNOPSIS

     tmdiagnose, [-abcd] [-a path] [file] [file …] arg0 arg2 …

DESCRIPTION

     Use the .Nm macro to refer to your program throughout the man page like such: tmdiagnose, Underlining

     is accomplished with the .Ar macro like this: underlined text.

     A list of items with descriptions:

     item a   Description of item a

     item b   Description of item b

     A list of flags and their descriptions:

     -a       Description of -a flag

     -b       Description of -b flag

FILES

     /usr/share/file_name                          FILE_1 description

     /Users/joeuser/Library/really_long_file_name  FILE_2 description

SEE ALSO

     a(1), b(1), c(1), a(2), b(2), a(3), b(3)

Darwin                           April 2, 2008                          Darwin

 

 Only a dummy man page. And no executable to be found. Its origins though are from the BSD package (see /Library/Receipts/boms/com.apple.pkg.BSD.bom) No change has been made to this man page since 10.5 but yet it is included with this update? Odd. My guess is that there is an Apple internal tool in use but not something for the general public. I mean why would the ‘Rest of Us’ need to diagnose Time Machine?!It’ just works right? ;)