h4×4m4x - hacks for macs

For testing and development, it can be handy to have another installation of OS X, that you can boot from, on an external USB hard disk. You can use this installation to test new stuff without fear of hosing your system should things go terribly wrong. I have a small - 60Gb - disk configured this way that I use to test the articles and tutorials that I write are accurate, and for software development I consider to be experimental. I’m sure you can find a way to use an external disk with OS X on it too. Read more »

A number of articles in this blog require compiling software from source, which requires the use of development tools. That may sound a little scary, and actually it can be, however stick with me, follow the directions to the letter, have a backup stashed away and you’ll be covered.

Most UNIX and UNIX-like OSs ship with development tools built right in - not so with OS X. Fear not though, Apple ship their suite of development tools, known as Xcode, bundled in with the Leopard installation DVDs. All we have to do is install Xcode, and you’ll have the basic requirements to follow a lot of the articles we’ll be covering in this blog. Read more »

Welcome to h4×4m4x, the blog of a *BSD UNIX sysadmin and recent defector from M$ to Mac.

A system administrator for the last 10 years or so for various ISPs, my job involves the installation, maintenance and support of the systems which keep an ISP running - access and authentication servers, web servers, mail servers, DNS servers, switches, routers and networks.

The systems I work on are a mix of FreeBSD and NetBSD, with a smattering of OpenBSD, Linux and Solaris, together with Cisco, Dell and Sun Microsystems hardware. Most of the systems run my BSD flavor of choice, FreeBSD, primarily because I’m attracted to jobs that require FreeBSD experience and if I need to commission a new server it will generally be a FreeBSD box. Read more »