Posts Tagged Mac OS X

Ubuntu on Mac Mini PowerPC

Posted by smoreau in Linux on 08 Jun 2012

The other day, I got an old Mac Mini PowerPC from 2005. And I decided to install Linux on it instead of using an old version of Mac OSX. Fun, ins’t it?

The first thing I did was to download the ISO image of the last version of Ubuntu and burn it on CD. But unfortunately, I discovered that the CD player wasn’t working anymore. 😐
I then tried to put Ubuntu on a USB key and boot on it. But it didn’t work either… This machine didn’t seem to be able to boot from a USB stick.

So how am I going to install Linux without a CD player and USB?
FireWire? Maybe, but I don’t have anything on FireWire.
The answer is netboot! 😀 Indeed, my last chance was to install it via netboot.

Here are the steps I followed:

  1. Install tftp on another Linux machine in your local network
  2. Configure tftp. Please find below the configuration file I used: 
    #
# ftp://ftp.kernel.org/pub/software/network/tftp/
#
service tftp
{
       flags            = REUSE
       socket_type      = dgram
       protocol         = udp
       instances        = 30
       wait             = yes
       user             = root
       server           = /opt/sbin/in.tftpd
       server_args      = -s /mnt/tftpboot
       cps              = 100 2
       log_on_success   = HOST PID
       log_on_failure   = HOST
       disable          = no
}
  3. Put the Ubuntu files in the folder /mnt/tftpboot (in my case). I copied the files of the last version of Ubuntu “Quantal”: http://ports.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-ports/dists/quantal/main/installer-powerpc/current/images/powerpc/netboot/
  4. Reboot the Mac Mini and enter the Open Firmware by holding “Option”+”Command”+”o”+”f”
  5. Type the following command to start the install: 
    boot enet:192.168.2.100,yaboot

    With 192.168.2.100 the IP address of the machine where tftp is installed.

  6. Follow the Ubuntu installation steps and enjoy! 🙂

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Redirect traffic to a specific network

Posted by smoreau in Linux, Tricks on 06 May 2012

This is a little trick which can be useful in some very specific case.

For example, you could have a machine with two network cards. One of the network is behind a proxy and the other one is connected directly to the internet.
You might want to forward all the traffic for google.com to the network which doesn’t have a proxy.

To do this, I am using the command route:

route add <hostname> <target network>

For example:

route add google.com 192.168.101.1

Note that this command is available on both Linux and Mac.

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Samba access problem with Mac OS X 10.6+

Posted by smoreau in Linux on 13 Dec 2011

This is a problem I encountered when I upgraded Mac OS X from the version 10.5 (Leopard) to 10.6 (Snow Leopard). One of my friend also got a similar problem when she upgraded to the version 10.7 (Lion).
This issue was affecting the access to the network shares set up with Samba (version 3.0.24) on my D-Link DNS-323. For some reason, I wasn’t able to authenticate on the shares as soon as I upgraded to Snow Leopard!

Here is the error message I was getting:

After browsing a few forums on the web, I finally found a solution. 🙂
I simply had to change the security mode in the Samba configuration file (smb.conf) to read:

security = USER

Note that this property can be found under the [global] section.

For more information about the Samba security mode, please read the following article by Jack Wallen:
Understanding Samba security modes

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Permissions ignored with Samba

Posted by smoreau in Linux on 17 Jan 2011

After the issue regarding the ntpd process, I encountered another problem with my D-Link DNS-313. This time it was about permissions problem using Samba.

Because I have multiple user accounts sharing the same data, I added the following lines into the Samba configuration file (smb.conf):

create mask = 0774
directory mask  = 0775
force create mode = 0774
force directory mode = 0775

With these properties, a user will have the permission to read any files created by another user and will also be able to edit them if both users are part of the same group.

However, it appeared that these properties had been ignored by Samba! 🙁 Please note that the client was a Mac OS X 10.6.6 (Snow Leopard) and the Samba version on the NAS was 3.0.25a.

After some googling on the web, I found the following explanation on the contribs.org forum:

Samba 3.0.2x has the ‘unix extensions’ option set to ‘on’ by default. This allows Unix users who write to the Samba shares to set their own permissions bits. Mac OS X up until now has never attempted to do this, but from Leopard, any directory that gets created on a Samba share, get chmod’ed through this Samba extension.

Alright, this is clear enough! This means that we have to set the ‘unix extensions’ option to ‘no’ in our Samba configuration file:

unix extensions = no

The problem should be gone after restarting Samba. 🙂

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