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Fun with multi-homing
We have a bunch of Xserves running Mac OS X server at work. Most of the machines are only using one of the 2 built in Ethernet ports as they are on the LAN. We have 2 machines that are customer facing and we just added a dedicated inbound connection for them. Being the clever person that I am, I decided that to ease the transition between the old and new IP blocks, I'd block the new connection into the second Ethernet port and we'd be good to go. Turns out it isn't that easy with the Darwin kernel. I setup the default connection to be the new network connection and traffic to the new IP addresses worked fine. However, traffic to the old address got hung up. After a lot of investigation, I determined it was due to Asymmetric routing. No problem, I thought, a few commands and it would work. I managed to do this in Linux by following an article, but it wasn't so easy in Mac OS X. Basically the traffic coming in to the old IP block had the responses going out through the other Ethernet interface out over the new IP block. Many routers block this as it kind of looks like an attack of sorts.
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Misinformed Author
As is pretty routine in our lousy local paper, I read an article where the author didn't bother to do his research. He lumps LinkedIn with MySpace and Facebook as social networking sites routinely used by those under 18. Here is my letter to the editor:
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Accepting responsibility for bugs
When I make a mistake, I take full responsibility for the issue. While some people think I never make mistakes, I am human. The same goes for bugs in my software; software will never be perfect and I make my share of mistakes. I acknowledge these mistakes in my release notes where I say "Fixed". If it wasn't broken, then how could I fix it?
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ScreenSteps, cool idea, but not quite a Mac app
On Friday I stumbled across ScreenSteps, a program for doing documentation by quickly and easily capturing screen shots. While I no longer do documentation for my own software, I am starting to do some internal documentation for work on things like connecting to our VPN, setting up connecting to a file server, etc. I put together one "lesson" in maybe 15 minutes and was able to stick it on our internal web site. One thing that bothered me was that there were some dialogs that didn't look like Mac dialogs like the following (The icon looks funny and it should have been a sheet):