Michel Jansen

Sometimes solutions are so easy, you just overlook them. I had been having problems getting my NFS volumes mounted when I was connected to a network behind a masquerading NAT router. While trying to mount the directory “/home/jabo” from my server on my Mac, the mounting would appear to succeed, but it would never get accessible, and eventually I would just get the “Server connection interrupted”” message from the Finder. Not a very descriptive error. The log file on the server side would say everything is OK:

Sep 11 15:25:22 persephone rpc.mountd: authenticated mount request
    from xxxxx.utwente.nl:57945 for /home/jabo (/home/jabo)

So the problem had to be on the client side. A look at system.log confirmed this:

Sep 11 15:32:47 mango kernel[0]: 
    nfs server dawuss.student.utwente.nl:/home/jabo: not responding

Of course, thinking about it, this made perfectly sense: UDP connections are stateless, and therefore cannot be masqueraded properly (there is no way of knowing where a UDP packet is supposed to go when it arrives at the router). The solution is simple: use TCP for the NFS connection. Doh!

The GUI connects using UDP, so it doesn’t work. However, nothing stops us from using the command line, so it was just a matter of opening my favorite terminal program (iTerm) and entering:

mango:~ dawuss$ mkdir /Volumes/jabo
mango:~ dawuss$ mount -t nfs -o tcp \
   dawuss.student.utwente.nl:/home/jabo /Volumes/jabo/

Assuming you already set up your NFS server to work using unprivileged ports, this will set up the NFS connection as usual, only now using TCP as transport protocol instead of UDP. You can confirm this using the mount command:

mango:~/Downloads/Disk Images dawuss$ mount
/dev/disk0s3 on / (local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (local)
fdesc on /dev (union)
 on /.vol
automount -nsl [114] on /Network (automounted)
automount -fstab [172] on /automount/Servers (automounted)
automount -static [172] on /automount/static (automounted)
dawuss.student.utwente.nl:/home/jabo 
    on /Volumes/jabo (nodev, nosuid, mounted by dawuss)

Of course I wanted it to show up in Finder too, as it would when using the “Connect to Server” dialog. To get this done, I simply had to open the “Go to Folder” dialog (Command+Shift+G) and enter the mount point: “/Volumes/jabo”.

It really is that simple, but it took me quite a while, and some suggestions from people on IRC to figure it out, because searching the web for “NFS behind NAT” really didn’t produce any sensible results.

Next step for me will be setting up a nicely encrypted SSH tunnel in the way described in this document :)

Kim Bauters has built a nice Battery Status widget for Mac OS X Tiger’s Dashboard. It is roughly based on coconutBattery and it will show you your battery fitness (current capacity), the number of charge cycles it’s been through, and a graphical representation of your battery’s decay.
According to this widget, my battery is still almost brand new, which is a miracle considering the way I abuse my PowerBook: I use it as a drop-in desktop replacement, but when the weather is nice, I yank it off it’s charger for use on the much cooler balcony. I take it to college a few days a week, and it barely ever gets properly charged in between.
About twice a month it gets to go on a nice long trip through the country, so it does get completely drained regularly enough.
Below, you’ll find links to download this widget from it’s original location, or from my personal mirror. It’s not yet available through Apple’s own Widget Repository.

Download from: original location or my mirror.

With a lot of fuss, Google announced a new service: Google Talk. A quick look on the supported clients page, showed nothing spectacular: voice chats are only possible with Google’s own client, which is unfortunately only supported on Microsoft’s Windows platform.
The system used for instant messaging, however, is just plain old Jabber, which means it’s open and free, and the number of supported clients on all platforms is far greater than the list Google keeps.

Let me show you how to get it to work on my favorite client: Adium X.

First, launch Adium X, go to it’s preferences window and select the “Accounts” tab. Click the little “+” at the bottom left, and select “Jabber” from the list of supported protocols.

Next, enter your GMail account information like this:

And finally, enter the server settings:

Yes, that’s right. It’s that simple. Just connect an arbitrary Jabber client to talk.google.com on the default port, and have fun!
I’m really getting curious what Google Talk uses for audio communication. For now, Skype is the only client with decent Mac support, so I’ll stick to that :)