Lion Annoyances

I'm not ready to install Lion on all of my Macs, but it came on my new MacBook Pro at work. Yesterday, Time Machine was a fantastic way to get my applications, files, and preferences from the old laptop to the new! Now comes the more tedious task of making friends with Lion.

First up, the scroll wheel on my mouse scrolled in the wrong direction! I don't want to change everything else (older Mac OS X and Linux) to match, so I had to change Lion's default behavior. Apple menu > System Preferences > Mouse, un-check "Move content in the direction of finger movement when scrolling or navigating." Whew!

After that, I'm making friends with Apple's Lion.

Clothes Make the Girl

Since the start of this calendar year, I've lost about 10 pounds, and just recently people have started to remark to me that I look as though I've lost weight.

Initially, I had two theories. One was simply that a ten-pound weight loss shows. The other theory was that I'm wearing different, smaller clothes now. (No, I have not bought a new wardrobe! I don't enjoy shopping, and clothes shopping is probably the worst form; furthermore most prêt à porter doesn't flatter me) Now that I've heard the remarks a number of times, I can report that all, yes all, of the compliments are when I'm wearing smaller clothes. These are clothes I wore in high school, somewhat worn but they fit well again. Not new and sharp (although I'm sure that would work too!), but old and at least somewhat figure-flattering.

Although I did both, I have to say that dressing to look smaller is more effective to get others to notice than being smaller.

On a similar tangent, clothes that fit well are more comfortable and generally make you more confident in your appearance leading to overall improved confidence. Knowing you look good leads to feeling good. And that's why I can sometimes drag myself out to buy clothes.

IPv6 and Solaris 9

Since static IPv6 on Solaris 9 wasn't fun enough on its own, it turns out that my Solaris 9 servers start losing a lot of IPv6 packets after a reboot. The problem appears to be in.ndpd (what should be the IPv6 neighbor discovery protocol daemon, but appears primarily to be IPv6 routing instead), and syslog reports in.ndpd[PID]: [ID 302683 daemon.error] router_add_k: RTM_ADD (interface bge0): Network is unreachable RTM_ADD every 1 to 5 minutes.

The fix is to shut down IPv6 (it's not working anyway, so go ahead) and then restore IPv6; the only difference is that in.ndpd isn't running. However, just TERMinating in.ndpd isn't enough for IPv6 traffic to flow freely. Try this instead:

# kill in.ndpd

ps -ef | grep ndp

sudo kill -TERM 11292

# bring down the IPv6 interfaces

sudo ifconfig -a6

sudo ifconfig bge0:1 inet6 down unplumb

sudo ifconfig bge0 inet6 down unplumb

sudo ifconfig lo0 inet6 down unplumb

# flush IPv6 routes

sudo route flush -inet6

# verify that IPv6 is gone

sudo ifconfig -a6

netstat -nr

# restore IPv6 interfaces

sudo ifconfig lo0 inet6 plumb up

sudo ifconfig bge0 inet6 plumb up

sudo ifconfig bge0:1 inet6 plumb up your:ipv6:address::here/64

# verify interfaces

sudo ifconfig -a6

sudo ifconfig -a

# restore default IPv6 route

sudo route add -inet6 default your:ipv6:default:router::here

# verify route table

netstat -nr

I'm trying to stay off my diatribe soap box here, but I'm happy that Solaris 9 will be replaced with RHEL 6 in the coming months.

Keyboard Shortcuts for Mail.app

Every previous time I've tried to use Mail.app before, I've gone running back to Thunderbird usually within a day. This time, thanks to a large monitor (so I leave Mail.app in the 3-pane single window more so that keyboard navigation works) and this tip on adding Gmail-like shortcuts to Mail.app using Quicksilver, and this tip to color a Mail message, I don't miss Thunderbird, I have better Exchange integration (ugh), I'm not reaching for the mouse too often, and I can now view graphic attachments like PDFs inline.

Quicksilver is awesome! AppleScript gets the job done, and consequently now Mail.app gets the job done too.

Static IPv6 on Solaris 10

I tried to avoid it since I'm retiring these Solaris boxes soon, but I had to put static IPv6 on Solaris 10 so I could troubleshoot. So here's how to do it, and it's not quite the same as Solaris 9.

First, get your baseline.

sudo ifconfig -a6

sudo ifconfig -a

netstat -nr

Start with loopback, the easy one.

cd /etc

sudo touch hostname6.lo0

sudo ifconfig lo0 inet6 plumb up

Move on to an actual interface, changing eri0 to your interface as needed. This is a change from the Solaris 9 approach!

sudo vi hostname6.eri0

This time, the /etc/hostname6.eri0 file should contain 'addif ipv6:addr:ess/64 up' – not just the IPv6 address/prefix, but the extra directives as well.

Now make it so!

sudo ifconfig eri0 inet6 plumb up

sudo ifconfig eri0:1 inet6 plumb

sudo ifconfig eri0:1 inet6 ipv6:host:addy/64 up

Add a route to the default router, and put its address in that file to survive reboots.

sudo route add -inet6 default ipv6:rtr:addy

sudo vi /etc/defaultrouter6

You'll want ndp running too.

sudo /usr/lib/inet/in.ndpd -a

Check your work against your baseline.

sudo ifconfig -a6

sudo ifconfig -a

netstat -nr

OK! That seems to work for now.

Chicken

On my Mac, I upgraded from Chicken of the VNC to Chicken (and you should too) because it works with IPv6 connections. It's also a very easy VNC client.

Color Your Mail

By using the number keys (zero to five) in Thunderbird (my preferred mailreader) I can easily assign different colors to the mails in the inbox. I’ve made a little system of my own where one color means urgent, another “less important todos” and so on.

My mailbox is IMAP-based and through the magic of IMAP, the color codes even carries themselves between the different machines I use (and works within Apple’s Mail.app too).

It may not revolutionize your life, but it sure helps me just a little bit – each and every day

from Color code your mail « Netfactory

I used to use the IMAP tags to color-code my email in Thunderbird heavily, until we switched from good ol' IMAP to Exchange 2010. Even though this Exchange server has IMAP enabled (thank goodness!), Microsoft doesn't support IMAP tags, so my color-coded tags no longer show up in all of my Thunderbird clients.

That takes some of the shine off of Thunderbird. Add in its memory usage, and I'm trying Apple's Mail.app yet again. I'm now accustomed to messages being colored per-client, but I still wanted to color my messages without creating complicated Rules in Mail.app. Luckily, I found an old post:

If you want to color code your messages in the Mail app just press Apple-Shift-C to bring up the color palette. Select any color and you’re done.

Awesome! I may be able to take the leap this time!