Recently, a friend of mine who has experienced the staining and iSight issues decided to upgrade to the new Unibody MacBook.  After helping her move data from the old to the new,  got the “opportunity” to figure out how to solve some issues.

First,  I had to solve the stained wrist wrest problem.   I have previously used the Mr Clean Magic Eraser to clean MacBook’s, but this time it only had average success.   I then found an article that said nail polish remover was an alternative cleaner.   I tried it, and it seemed to help more.  After both cleaners, the wrist rest is still slightly stained, but i’ll keep working on a fix for it.

Second, and more annoyingly, the built-in iSight wasn’t working.   I did all the usual things like reset the PRAM, and the PMU/SMC.  Nothing worked, and I noticed that the device didn’t even show up in System Info.  More digging led me to some folks who pulled out the LCD screen, and found that the iSight camera cable was slightly unseated.  That seemed like my last best hope, so I went and grabbed some tools.

I found a decent set of instructions for doing the screen removal at ScreenTek Inc. The bevel removal seemed to be the trickiest part. There are no screws, just plastic clips, which translates to “easy to break”.  Fortunately, the removal went ok, and all the clips were still intact afterwards.

I got the screen apart, and sure enough, the iSight cable was slightly out of place.  Slightly, in this case, means less than a centimeter, seriously.

I pushed it back in place, and launched Photo Booth to test.  I saw the green light come on, and then saw video. It worked!

I put the LCD back in place, and screwed it back in (17 screws).  After snapping the bezel back on, all was well.  The OCD in me had to immediately clean the screen, because there were some slight finger prints.  Now, I am back in business with iChat and PhotoBooth goodness.

Oh wait, I just realized how messed up the trackpad button really is.  I’ll leave that repair for another day.

The change of the battery made upgrading a hard drive slightly more difficult, as there is no panel that opens to do that anymore.  The solution now is to remove the whole bottom casing.  There are 10 screws involved, and 3 of the back screws are longer than the others.  It is important to keep track of where the screws go.

Once removed, you have access to everything, including the battery with a sticker saying Do Not Remove.

On the lower left, you see the hard drive, positioned in the same place as the original Unibody MacBook.

There is a small black bracketbetween the hard drive and the DVD drive with two screws.  Remove those screws, and pull out the bracket.  Once removed, the hard drive is free.  Remove the SATA connector from the drive and pull the drive out.  There are 4 screws on the hard drive that need to be removed and installed on your replacement drive.  They require the T6 Hex screwdriver, found at your local geek supply, such as The Shack.  Once you have moved those little screws to the new drive, connect the SATA cable and position the new drive.  Put the black bracket back in place, and secure.  Do the same for the bottom casing, and you are done!

Of course, now you have a Mac with a blank drive which isn’t terribly useful.  Turn on your Mac, pop in the OS X install DVD, and hold down the Option key until it gives you the option of booting from that DVD.  Install the Operating System, and then off you go.

Enjoy the new hard drive.

Mac’s have not always been the most friendly machines to perform such upgrades on.  Powerbooks were notorious for the thousand plus screws necessary to make any sort of upgrade.  There have been some exceptions where Apple made hard drive installs not so bad, such as some older iMacs and the latest generation of Macbooks.

I recently decided to upgrade the hard drive in my Aluminum 24″ iMac.  I assumed it would be relatively straightforward, much like the ram install was.  I was wrong.  I had to remove the glass, remove the aluminum top, remove the LCD screen, and work  underneath it to reach the hard drive.  Good times.

In the end, the upgrade went fairly smooth.  I did run into a couple problem areas, that I made some notes on.

I followed the instructions made available at Amfiteatar.

Some things to be aware of:

• The magnetic pads around the aluminum rim that hold the glass in place are a bit poorly designed.  I had one fall off because it’s sticky adhesive was no longer useful.  I had to improvise.
• Be very careful handling and storing the glass top.  Nobody wants to break it, but equally important is not getting ANY lint or smudges behind the glass.  If you do, you end up noticing after the reassemble, and you’ll have to remove the glass again.
• Be equally aware of how you handle the LCD screen.  Similar to the glass, it easily attracts dust and finger smudges.

Follow those instructions, and you’ll have a faster and bigger hard drive in no time.

At times, I have the need to help a user to remotely solve PC related problems.  The difficulty with the built-in solution for Windows (Remote Desktop), is that it requires port mapping in your firewall and configuration that the user may not be efficiently capable of.  A similar situation exists when trying to use VNC or other remote support tools.

There are ways around this.  MSN Messenger users can invite other MSN Messenger users to assist them, and XP has a couple other ways to invite someone to help.  Again, these solutions often suffer from network access (port mapping) issues.  More importantly in my case, I am on a Mac, and none of those invite based solutions are feasible.

One evening, I found myself needing to help someone in another state (using a Windows XP machine0, but not capable of getting set up for remote access with the built-in solution.  After several failed attempts at walking this person through some problem resolution steps, I gave up, and started looking for a Plan B. After a brief Google search, I found TeamViewer.  As usual, I am a bit nervous about applications that give this sort of machine access.  It could be some sort of malware/spyware, that creates more problems while it solves others.  I did a bit of digging on TeamViewer, and everything I found confirmed its legitimacy.

It’s a secure RSA authentication system, that utilizes a TeamViewer server as a middleman.  TeamViewer provides the technical details of how it establishes connections HERE. The setup is incredibly easy, and it works on mac and windows machines.  The user downloads the client app, and just double-clicks to open it.   No install, no mess, just an executable.

On your machine, you run the full application.  The user provides you a client id, and a unique session password.  You enter those two pieces of information into the application on your machine, and it establishes the connection.  From there, you have full desktop control of their machine.  You can see some presentations of that setup here.

I have now used it several times with different people.  It has worked without issue every time.  It’s free for personal use, and has some licensing costs associated for businesses.  The download is free either way, so businesses can experiment before buying.

Why is the transaction time important?  It can mean the difference between receiving or not receiving some email.  If the transaction time gets too high, other mail servers may just timeout trying to communicate.  This is obviously not a good situation for a mail server.

Ideally, the transaction time should be under 1 second, and that’s what I wanted this exchange server to show.  The first point of interest was the Cisco firewall, which has some ESMTP inspection policy in place.  There are known instances of mail servers having trouble sending or receiving with this policy in place, but I couldn’t find any issues related to transaction times.  The second place to look is the server performance itself.  Processor, RAM,  or drive performance issues could theoretically be affecting transaction times.  None of these are of concern for this particular server.

Further digging got me to a feature in exchange known as Tar Pitting. As the Microsoft Support article explains:

• Tar pitting is the practice of deliberately inserting a delay into certain SMTP communications that are associated with spam or with other unwanted traffic. To be effective, these kinds of communications typically rely on generating a high volume of traffic. By slowing an SMTP conversation, you can dramatically reduce the rate at which automated spam can be sent or at which a dictionary attack can be conducted. Legitimate traffic may also be slowed by tar pitting.

That last statement about legitimate traffic being affected is true.  I dug into the registry and found that indeed this mail server was inserting a 5 second delay.  Microsoft points out that this feature is of little value, unless you use recipient filtering.  That technique is not used on this particular server, so the delay isn’t of much use.

I set the delay to zero, and tested.   Transaction times are now averaging .42 seconds.  That’s much better.

I was pleased with the response.

Bravo Wolfram, Bravo.

Have you ever setup a VPN tunnel between two different brands of endpoints?  It can be a fun challenge, and this time it proved to be no different. 

Smoothwall Express is a free and easy to use open-source firewall solution.  It’s designed to be so user friendly, that they sometimes don’t give access to customize certain features, such as VPN.  Below is the VPN endpoint configuration.

They give you the basics for a connection, but they make the assumption that you’ll have a Smoothwall on the other side.  As such, they don’t let you see or configure the vpn authentication, negotiation, identity, encryption, and other settings. To make matters worse, I couldn’t find the settings they use documented anywhere (let me know if you find them).

pfSense, on the other hand, gives you the freedom (and expects you) to determine the best settings for your needs.

This is where the problem comes in.  Not knowing what Smoothwall’s expect for those settings, makes creating a VPN tunnel rather difficult.  It means spending time trying and failing, and staring at logs to figure it out.

In the end, I got it working.  Here are the pfSense settings I used to make it work:

Phase 1:

Phase 2:

If you end up with a pfSense firewall on one end, and SmoothWall on the other, I hope this is of help to you.

There are many useful and fun applications in the App Store.  There are also many pointless apps that seem to catch public attention.  While the list of available applications is long, there are two apps I am still waiting for.  First, I am hopeful that Adium will release a chat client for the iPhone.  Word on the street was that they would release one, but it seems apparent that was just a rumor for the time being.  Second, I have wanted a way to remotely monitor my Mac server.  This is easily the most important machine in my home network, and it provides many useful functions.

iStat widgets and menus have long been available for the Mac, and are a very popular suite of apps for many Mac users I know.  The fact that they are free makes them an even better deal.  If you like them, please donate.  The one weakness is that these programs are focused on local monitoring, and don’t have a mechanism for remote monitoring.   This is fine for seeing how the workstation you are currently using is consuming resources, but ineffective for monitoring a Mac server.

Word of them developing an application that ran on the iPhone and connected remotely to the Mac of your choice was great to hear.  This new app has been developed as part of the iStat team’s new focus on iPhone apps through the company Bjango.

iStat for iPhone, in conjunction with iStat Server (free) running on a Mac, provides remote viewing of that machine’s current resource utilization, operating temperatures, network information, and fan operations.  

You can run the Server component on as many Macs as you like. They each get paired with the iPhone individually, and securely.  The setup requires that you open a TCP port through your firewall (5109), which allows the two-way communication.  An added benefit of the Application is that it will give you the similar resource information about your iPhone, as well as, an option to free up memory.  

So far, this is my favorite application purchased from the App Store.

All that for $1.99, or $2.99 if you don’t get to it soon.