Protecting my dishwasher from theft

Included in my new dishwasher is the standard product registration card from LG Electronics. I usually don't fill out the registration cards as they don't affect warranty service. I did briefly look at the card and laughed when I saw it. It said:
Registration can serve as verification of your ownership in the event of product theft or loss.

I know that this is a standard registration card for all products, but it was funny.

I've decided to provide step by step instructions for stealing my dishwasher because the product registration will help me prove that I own it.

1. Break into house.
2. Get past attack dog.
3. Find kitchen.
4. Take off cabinet toe kick. Hint there is one nail hidden in it.
5. Unscrew dishwasher toe kick.
6. Shut off water to dishwasher (the connection is under the sink; however, the cabinet under the sink has a child lock so you have to find the magnet).
7. Disconnect drain hose while you're under the sink.
8. Unscrew electrical cover.
9. Put on leather gloves and unscrew connections (or go out back and turn off the circuit breaker). Be careful!
10. Find a tool to lower the leveling feet.
11. Lower dishwasher.
12. Pull dishwasher out (you have to feed the drain and supply hoses while you're doing this).
13. If you didn't shut off the circuit breaker (it's labeled in the box), be very, very careful with the water that comes out of the hoses so that it doesn't come in contact with the live wires.
14. Drag dishwasher out front door (it easily fits out the front).
15. Shove it in your truck without my neighbors calling the police.

That's all there is to stealing my dishwasher, so if you're up for the challenge, be my guest as I have LG to back me up when I need to prove to the police that it's mine.

Something Microsoft does right

I've never been a Microsoft fan and really haven't had positive things to say about their software. There are lots of people that are as against Macs as I am against Windows. Today, I attended a Microsoft event where Microsoft was showcasing Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Exchange 2010. I decided to go as most of the companies I interact with are Microsoft shops and it was about time for me to learn about the "dark side".

I went to the track on Exchange 2010. As the presenter started talking about Exchange, my view on Microsoft (at least Exchange) really changed. Microsoft has implemented so many things that companies need and made it easy to use (at least it looks that way).

The presenter was touting how well Outlook Web App worked in Safari and Firefox which is pretty cool. In addition, administration roles are sorely missing from other products I've used so that you can give a junior administrator certain privileges. Also, archiving and discovery is completely integrated. All of this, of course, comes at a price, but it knocks the socks off anything that Apple has put out. If Apple has any chance of competing in the enterprise space, it really needs to examine Exchange. I like the open source underpinnings of OS X server, but slapping together open source apps doesn't make a server solution.

If I had people to run my servers and a vast budget, I'd definitely consider Exchange :-). Hmmm, maybe my head cold is clouding my judgment.

Sad (tech) day at the Gruby house

We've been using a Mac Mini as a media center for a little while now and haven't used the TiVo in weeks. So, today, I decided to unplug the TiVo. The TiVo has been our friend for over 5 years and has undergone a few surgeries to swap out the hard drive.

When I unplugged the TiVo, I said to my wife, "notice how quiet it is?". She hadn't noticed the noise as it has been background noise for so long. The hard drive in it and the fan were quite noisy. The difference is absolutely amazing in terms how quiet it is now in our TV room.

While the TiVo has served us well, it is looking like my Mac Mini with EyeTV is going to fit the bill for our TV watching needs. The solution is not perfect, but it is working well.

RIP, TiVO.

Open Directory and DNS

As I've written before, Open Directory on Mac OS X doesn't like it when DNS is messed up. It requires forward and reverse DNS to point to the same place. Our Open Directory server was running fine, but today we moved DNS to a different machine.

I was unable to authenticate using LDAP and saw an error in the LDAP log:

Miscellaneous failure No principal in keytab matches desired name.

After a little searching, I can across a blog entry mentioning this and talking about DNS. While it wasn't exactly what I had, it made me do a little poking at my system. Turns out that I created 3 A records for the LDAP server which created a reverse DNS entry for the server. The problem is that the forward DNS entry didn't match the reverse DNS entry. I changed 2 of the A records to CNAME records, restarted the LDAP server and the problem went away.

I wonder if there is another cause for this problem or just the authors of the software didn't bother to put in a useful error message. It's easy to ignore putting in useful error messages when writing code, but when Apple decides to use open source software and slap a GUI on it, they should try to make the error messages more useful. Again, I'm complaining about slapping a GUI on command line applications. If I wasn't persistent and didn't know how to troubleshoot UNIX, I'd never be able to run a Mac OS X server.