Apple

Apple released a BASH Shell Security Update for Shellshock, kinda…

Computers, Macintosh, Security / By / / , , / 1 minute of reading

While Apple has released a security update to address the “shellshock” vulnerability in the bash shell, they have not made it available through Software Update! See the support page at: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1222 for links to the downloads and installation instructions. Update: Apple has rolled the bash shell update into Security Update 2014-005. See the details at: https://support.apple.com/kb/HT6531 Presumably, the fix is also included in OS X 10.10 “Yosemite” (https://support.apple.com/kb/HT6535) which was released yesterday.

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Welcome Back!

Computers, Drupal, Macintosh, Websites / By / / , , , , , , / 2 minutes of reading

After many months in the dark, I have recovered the last of the pieces from my old Mac Mini G4, so that all of my services — DNS, Open Directory, Email (Postfix, Cyrus, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, MailMan), MySQL, and Drupal with updated PHP, since Apple’s default PHP install doesn’t include any of the necessary modules. First my external drive for TimeMachine backups died… I replaced it with a new drive, but it had to complete a new, full backup. During the full backup, the external drive that the server was running from died from old age… After several partially successful attempts to recover the data using DiskWarrior, I tried to reconstruct the old Mini, but wasn’t able to get it to boot up… I thought that I had recovered enough of the data that I could use it to migrate to the new server, but the server migration wizard would die partway through. After manually rebuilding Mail under 10.7 with Server 1.0, I found that when I updated to 10.8 and Server 2.0 that the migration wizard couldn’t even move my data and configuration from 10.7… So I had to manually rebuild DNS and Mail once again… I have since migrated from an old 32-bit G4 Mini, to a newer 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo, with 8Gb of RAM. I’ve gone from OS X Server 10.5.8 to 10.7 and on to 10.8.2 Mountain Lion, with Server 2.2.1. I’ve had to manually install MailMan, since that is no longer included with Server.

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Verizon iPhone

iPhone, Mobile / By / / , , / 3 minutes of reading

So today’s big news from Verizon is the long anticipated announcement that they will begin carrying Apple’s iPhone. My reaction: Disappointed… As I’ve mentioned on my Android page, I gave up waiting for a Verizon-badged iPhone about a year ago, and picked up a Motorola Droid. Jeannette has also gone with an Android phone, the Samsung Continuum, but with a backup plan — we have another upgrade coming up in February. She’s been happy enough with the Continuum that she’s not sure that she still wants to switch to an iPhone, even though she uses a MacBook, an iPad, and an iPod or two… So why am I disappointed? When I saw that Verizon was starting to carry the iPad, I was certain that the iPhone was on their horizon. Since the rumors of a January announcement coincided with Verizon’s roll-out of there shiny new LTE 4G network, I assumed that the timing was intentional, so that Apple could be one of, if not the first, 4G LTE smart phone for Verizon. Since one of the common complaints from AT&T iPhone users is slow data network speed, I assumed that Apple was interested in expanding to Verizon’s market not only because of their large customer base, but also because of their network infrastructure, and their 4G network speed. However, in the details of today’s announcement were a number of disappointments. First, the Verizon iPhone would only be compatible with CDMA technology for Verizon’s current 3G network. In fact, Verizon has said that their 4G network is currently only for data, not

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Y2K10 Bug

Computers, Macintosh / By / / , , , , , , / 1 minute of reading

Since the beginning of the year, I’ve noticed that I had started to catch good email in my Mac OS X Server’s email spam filter. It was odd, since it generally works quite well, and rarely catches any “false positives.” This morning at my office, one of the guys I work with was having to patch one of our systems because of a “Y2K10 bug” where the date isn’t interpreted correctly. Later, I noticed on Slashdot there was a story about the Y2K10 bug affecting a large number of systems around the world. I did a quick search for Spamassassin, and found that it was suffering from a bug in a date rule! Apple has a technical note on the issue: Mac OS X Server v10.5 and 10.6 use SpamAssassin to filter “spam” from inbound messages; SpamAssassin includes a rule that increases the spam score for any inbound message sent on or after January 1, 2010. This increased score may cause some inbound messages sent on or after January 1, 2010 to be inadvertently filtered as spam. There is an updated spamassassin rule that fixes the problem as well. Run the command: sudo sa-update –nogpg to apply the new rule. The –nogpg flag is needed for OS X Server since it doesn’t have GPG installed by default.

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