The Past

That’s how I initially felt about 1Password, from Agile Web Solutions. Perhaps it was because I was extremely tired and under a fair amount of stress – I’m not sure – but I simply did not give the app the time and attention it deserved for a truly fair assessment.   

And so it was – 1Password sat on my mac for a long time without really being used much. I knew – in the back of my mind – that it had potential and that I really should dig into it and see what it could do for me. For months, I avoided doing so.   

1Password Touch came out for the iPhone and I dutifully downloaded it, but again it mostly sat unused (though it was synced with my mac, which I tested and thought was neat).   

The Present

Then, about six months ago, I finally got the time and energy to really use 1Password and see what all the talk was about. I can safely say – I am impressed, and can’t imagine not using it. In a job where I often have to keep track of dozens of passwords I no longer have to worry about them – I simply have to remember one password.

I was still not too thrilled with the 1Password Touch – not because I didn’t like the interface or think it was useful, but because it didn’t integrate with Mobile Safari – which I like and want to use. With the release of the 3.0 software for iPhone, and 1Password Touch 2.1, however, there’s now a bookmarklet for Safari that allows for quick copy-paste of passwords into web forms. This allows me to use 1Password to remember my passwords, but still use Mobile Safari. Very slick, and very much worth the $5 on the App Store (introductory price – final price will be ~$14 (still very well worth it).   

The Mac version and the iPhone/iPod Touch version sync over wireless – a process which has been improved over earlier versions of the wireless sync by allowing you to sync even if Bonjour doesn’t work over your wireless network (like at work, for me).   

As it is now – there are only a few things I wish 1Password could do above and beyond what it already does.

1. Work with anything that requires password, not just websites.
2. Work on more platforms (Windows, Linux)
3. Grill me a nice steak and bring me a beer.

The first would be great, but I’m not sure how feasible it is. It’d position 1Password to be an even stronger position possibly, though. The Second I seriously doubt will occur – they seem to be a Mac only developer, and I respect that. Sadly, there just isn’t anything comparable on other systems. Nothing near as cool, anyways. The third is just down right ridiculous. If the awesome folks over at Agile make THAT happen I’ll buy them a new car*.

Other thoughts

It’s not uncommon to find the 1password developers commenting on blog posts, and generally addressing concerns and thanking people for talking about their product. This is clearly a developer who cares not just about making great products, but also about interacting with their users and building a solid community of devoted followers. They seem less out to price-gouge and rip people off, and more out to make an honest living by providing great products. Having not met them personally – I can’t speak to their motives, but, that’s the way they come across. It’s also one of the reasons I have no problem paying for their products and recommending them to my friends as well.

If you use a Mac and don’t use 1Password, you should.

While visiting my friend, he finally wore me down and I let him jailbreak my phone. This gave me the ability to change how the UI looked, to some extent. Beyond that, it also severely decreased system performance and stability, causing my phone to run slow when doing simple things like, say, opening my sms messaging app.   

Beyond that, the app to get more jailbroken apps was slow, somewhat confusing to navigate, and not all that helpful. Some apps worked on the 3.0 software platform, others didn’t. I was never fully sure which ones would work and which wouldn’t.

Overall, I found the experience to be about what I expected it to be – too much hassle for too little gain – i.e. not worth it.

To a point I can see why some people Jailbreak. The phone doesn’t offer them everything they want, and jailbreaking is a way to freely get what they are looking for out of their device. They forgive the flaws and drawbacks, the performance hit, etc in the name of having that one killer app that they just can’t live without. There ARE some cool apps out there for jailbroken phones, and you can still take advantage of the app store – but you have to wait to upgrade to a new phone OS – including patch updates – until it’s been jailbroken.

Call me silly, but one of the draws of the iPhone is that it’s a system that works. When there’s an update to the software I just plug the phone in and it updates. I don’t have to wait, I don’t have to worry about being able to use some of my apps. I don’t have to re-add those apps in after an update. Everything is there, exactly like it was. Life is good. If there’s something I want the phone to do, in 99.9% of cases I can find it on the App store. in that .1% where I can’t… I can live without it.

The main complaints I had about the phone have been addressed: Cut and Paste, voice activation (on my 3GS), better camera w/video support (again 3GS) tethering (as I’ve mentioned here before) and the ability to search through my email or other items on my phone. There’s really nothing left to compel me to want to jailbreak.

I’ve done it, I’ve used it, and you know what? It’s just not for me.

The update provides some wonderful new features (searching, cut and paste to name a few) with a few promised to be “on the horizon”. What it doesn’t offer, for those on AT&T anyways, is MMS and Tethering, two of the most sought after features. Two that SHOULD be there, but aren’t because AT&T seriously dropped the ball.

For those who are adventurous, it IS possible to enable tethering on the iPhone on AT&T. While I do vouch for these instructions working, I do not know what – if any – repercussions may come from following them. You do so at your own risk, and I will not be held accountable for YOUR actions.

Having said that – here’s how to enable it (if you’re using Mac OS X)

• First, download This File to your desktop
• Next, connect your iphone to your computer. If it syncs when you first connect it, wait until it finishes syncing.
• Then, run the following in a terminal: defaults write com.apple.iTunes carrier-testing -bool TRUE
• finally, go to the device summary for your iPhone within iTunes, while holding down the Option key, press “Restore”. in the window that opens locate the ipcc file you downloaded in the first step, select it and click ok.

NOTE: If for some reason the ipcc file is grayed out, re-run the command in the terminal. I had to run it twice for it to work.

Now, tethering is enabled on your phone, to turn it on go to Settings -> General -> Network, you’ll see a new option there to enable Tethering. Click that button and follow instructions.

There you have it – you can do what you want with this information, but you do it at your own risk

Enjoy!

[Update]: my buddy Brian points out that if you download the file linked above, directly onto the iPhone, it goes into effect immediately. shaving off three steps.  Thanks Brian!

After almost a year I am still very happy with FrontPoint Security, and the alarm system.   The company has been very responsive whenever issues would arise – and that’s very important to me.   I’m realistic enough to know that problems WILL arise with ANY system.  The test of a company is how they handle those problems, and FrontPoint has exceeded my expectations.  They are prompt in responding to issues, knowledgeable on the systems and how to fix things, and will continue to follow up until the issue is resolved to your satisfaction.

Recently the service, which for those who didn’t know allows you to access your alarm from anywhere in the world via the internet, sent an unexpected bonus my way – an iPhone app.

The free iPhone app, Alarm.com, allows you to log in to your alarm.com enabled services natively from the phone.   This means I no longer have to go to a website, awkwardly enter my username and password, and use a sparse web interface to interact with my alarm system.   While that method still works, and worked well enough for what I wanted before, the alarm.com app makes interacting with my alarm a beautiful experience.

The interface is clean and straightforward, allowing you to see the current status of the alarm (status of doors and windows, armed or disarmed, etc), change the status of the alarm (arm/disarm), see the past history of events on the alarm and, if you’ve got the service, you can view and interact with an alarm.com video camera.

All of this works beautifully from the iPhone app, and there looks to be expanded ability to do home automation functions directly from the alarm.com app on the iPhone in the works as well.  The automation functions are ones I am waiting for, and am really hoping to see some cool things come from that.

The app is fairly sparse, but I didn’t expect much.  That said, it’d be nice if I could use it to change alerts, and do “everything” the web app could.   I’m not sure that’s realistic, or feasible, but it’s a “would be nice”.

Overall, I feel the app is a solid app for what it’s supposed to do.  It gives people who have alarm.com powered alarm systems the ability to interact with their systems via a native iPhone app, and does a good job of doing that.   It’s obvious that expanded functionality is coming soon as well, which means we have even more to look forward to.

I’ve been told that a Blackberry app is in development, so those of you with a crackberry addiction can get in on the phone app goodness as well.

In the year since I’ve started using FrontPoint’s Alarm.com powered service, I’ve been pleasantly surprised.   New features and capabilities keep being rolled out which keep expanding on the base functionality, making it ever more useful for a geek like me.

For some reason my Macbook Pro locked up during the encryption process (I can say positively that it’s an unrelated issue – the encryption itself is not the cause of the lockup, it was happening before encryption was introduced and Ive yet to identify the cause).

Upon reboot I was able to get into the drive, but PGP was locked up on encrypting the drive and wouldn’t proceed forward.   Likewise the gui gave me no option for stopping the encryption, or decrypting.  It seemed at first glance as though my drive was borked in an eternal state of half-encrypted.

Thankfully, first glance was incorrect.

PGP’s WDE engine recognized that there had been a poweroff, and because of that the disk was in an unknown state and PGP was not proceeding forward.

The fix was fairly straightforward.   From a command line I issued the following commands:

pgpwde –enum    (this will tell you the disk number)

pgpwde –disk 0 –stop –passphrase <passphrase>  (this stops the current encryption)

At this point I logged out and logged back in to complete the process.

When I logged back in, PGP still looked like it was stuck.   Issuing the following commands rectified that:

pgpwde –disk0 –decrypt –passphrase <passphrase>

pgpwde –disk0 –stop

pgpwde –disk0 –encrypt –passphrase <passphrase>

The first tells pgp to start decrypting the drive, which throws it immediately into a known state.   The second stops the decryption, and the third restarts the encryption – at a known state – and will resume at or around the same place where it had been stuck before.

Passphrase needs to be the passphrase you set up when you initiated encryption in the first place.

Earlier today, on a hunch, I went and booted the server. I figured the worst that would happen is another Kernel Panic. This time, instead of the expected text output informing me the kernel had a mental breakdown I was greeted with, after a short delay, the login prompt.

My best guess, and it’s just a guess nothing more, is that this is a temperature issue. It was VERY cold last night, to the tune of about 0 degrees. Also note that, at the time this started, the garage door had been left open (and yes, my server rack is in my garage). My best guess – at this point – is that the server had a difficult time booting at such temperatures. Once things warmed up a bit during the day the problems disappeared.

This is, however, just a guess. The machine could crap out and start kernel panic’ing again at any time for all I know. I sincerely hope it does not.

I have not cut my network over to start using it as the gateway again yet. That is a project for either tomorrow or Tuesday, depending on the stability of the system.

I’ll update here as more information becomes available.

[Update]: The issue was temperature.  The temperature around the rack was approximately -3 degrees F.  For those that happent to have read the specs on XServe operating temperatures,   the low end of it is about 53 degrees warmer than my rack was.    Oops.   Apparently you CAN get a computer too cold .   Helluva problem to have, though.

And so it was, last night, when I noticed my connection to the Internet did not appear to be working (quite suddenly, as it had been working moments before). I decided to go check out my router – an older model XServe I built into a gateway. I found it hung on boot with a strange message (that I PROBABLY should have written down but didn’t – it was 12:30am) so I hard cycled it. And it promptly Kernel Panic’d. Subsequent reboots all were met with the same panic: Panic(CPU 0) Unable to find driver for this platform: rackmac 1,3

I have tried a few potential solutions, such as booting while holding Command-Option-O-F, waiting until it gives me a prompt and typing reset-nvram, pressing enter then typing reset-all followed by enter, which resets the NVRAM then forces a reboot. The reboot came up the first time with a flashing folder/question mark. At that point I figured “ok, it now just can’t find the system volume – I can probably repair the disk and be good to go, at least that’s worth a shot. So I tried booting from the 10.5 DVD by pressing and holding C while booting, and was met promptly with the kernel panic (before I could even select the boot media). Subsequent attempts at using the reset-nvram trick have not met with the same success as the first attempt. In fact – everything tried since that has met with the same kernel panic.

What I have NOT tried, mainly because I’m still not entirely sure of the correct procedure, is resetting the PMU. I spoke with a buddy of mine regarding this last night, shortly after it happened, and it was suggested that resetting the PRAM might work, and if that didn’t then resetting the PMU might but is a bit more work (since I believe it requires actually pressing a small button on the logic board).

You may be wondering: If the xserve you were using as your gateway/router is dead, and you WEREN’T able to get it working again, how are you writing this?! The answer to that is that I have been using an Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS) for my wireless. A quick re-configuration of the AEBS, and my 2-Wire POS DSL gateway, as well as a re-routing of some ethernet cables in my server rack, and everything was back online. It’s not the IDEAL solution, but I’ve got everything working fine in the interim.

I did lose internal DNS functionality, but I’ve been considering bringing up an internal DNS server on my second XServe that I can use in the interim.

If anybody has any suggestions on possible causes for this kernel panic – or better yet, solutions, please let me know in the comments. I’d like to be able to recover the system if I can.

Traditionally, when I’m doing a reinstall of my system I’d make sure to have a full backup of my entire home directory, and then import that backup in and be up and running with no changes.  I opted NOT to do that this time, however.   Instead I backed up the things MOST important to me – my iTunes library,  my iPhoto library and my Aperture library, along with the domain file from iWeb and a few assorted documents.  (I also backed up my Adium 2.0 folder under ~/Library/Application Support/ becuase I really like how I had it configured and didn’t want to deal with reconfiguring it).  Most of this was accomplished by simply copying what I wanted to backup onto an external hard drive.  The one exception to that is the Aperture library, which I backed up by creating a vault on the external hard drive and adding my whole library to the vault.   

After that I performed a clean install of Leopard,  the patches and updates and various bits of software (iLife ‘08,  iWork ‘08, Aperture, LaunchBar and several other paid-for programs I wanted to keep).    On my OD server I created a new user account and set it up to create a portable home directory on login.  Once I had that set up and had the MBP bound to the OD server I logged in as that user and when prompted told it to create the home directory.    This didn’t take long at all since there was really nothing to sync in the initial sync. 

Once I was logged in and had the home directory created I started migrating in the data I wanted to keep – I copied the iTunes library to the appropriate place on the filesystem ( ~/Music/iTunes) and the iPhoto library to the appropriate place as well (~/Pictures/), then opened up Aperture and had it rebuild the library from the vault I created on the external hard drive.  This process took a while, and when it was finished I had to restart Aperture.   It then took a little while longer to rebuild all of the projects I had been working with,  and it had to regenerate all of the thumbnails,  but once finished everything was perfect. 

iTunes simply required launching itunes and telling it that you would import files yourself later (instead of having it search for them).    Once you do that it will take you too your library and probably display a message like “updating library”, which takes only a few minutes at worst (for me anyway) and once completed you’re up and running.  You can either authorize your computer yourself, or wait until you play something bought through itunes – it’ll prompt you to do it then. 

iPhoto required nothing special – I just started it and it worked and saw my images.   

iWeb was likewise pretty easy.  To restore it all I had to do was take the domain file I backed up (found in ~/Library/Application Support/iWeb) and put it back in the same location.    Starting iWeb then will find the domain file and it’ll be like nothing ever happened.  

Plopping Adium 2.0’s folder into Application Support likewise worked beautifully.  Adium was configured exactly how I wanted it when I first launched it. 

The documents got copied into ~/Documents,   a no-brainer to many.

So – everything was working great,  until I realized I forgot to back up some important stuff.    In particular, Things and 1Password. 

Turns out I didn’t need to – my iPhone saved me.  I fired up both app’s and synced them with their counterparts on my iPhone and *poof*,  everything is restored on both.  Beautiful. 

So now I have a system that has all of the files I wanted to save, and none of the cruft I wished I could be rid of.   It’s backed up to the server and everything FINALLY seems to be operating properly.  

Sure, it was a time consuming process but well worth it in my estimation.  I applaud Apple’s ability to make transitioning to new machines as easy as importing your user accounts,  but eventually you get to a point where your account is bloated and needs to be slimmed.  I probably COULD have gone through and tried cleaning a lot of this out by hand, but this seemed to be a much simpler approach.  

[edit 9/9/08]:  I want to note, because it wasn’t clear in my post, that I had (and still have) and maintain full and complete backups for the system and my files. Should any of this have NOT worked I could have recovered easily.  I strongly encourage the use of backups.   

First it was AFP,   it kept locking up and requiring a restart of the process – this in turn caused all sorts of problems with my portable home directory on my Macbook Pro.    Eventually syncing just completely stopped working and nothing I did could get it to work again. 

That’s about when I gave up trying.   

Then I moved, and moved the XServe with me,  and decided to wipe the machine and give it another go – figuring the problem to be something corrupt with the installation.   I did that, and at first things seemed to be running fine.    The next morning, though, I realized I was wrong. The system had locked up hard and required a hard reset.   Over the next few days I experienced random lockups, kernel panics, and services dying.   Then the boot volume raid array (raid 1,  software,  and yes I am aware it’s generally not considered good form to use a RAID for your boot volume – I don’t care about good form) degraded.  It was listing one of the drives as “FAILED”,  but the drive hardware itself was listing itself as fine.  I opted to wipe the drive and try rebuilding the array.    I did that and after a few failures during the rebuild process it finally took.     Then degraded a few hours later. 

I looked through the logs to see if I could find a cause for the degraded array (and the failed rebuilds) and was somewhat surprised that the reason was an I/O error reading from the “good” non-failed drive.  Interesting.   

I replaced the “FAILED” drive with a known good drive of the same capacity, and tried another rebuild.  Again it failed – same error message.  Aha!    I have the culprit!

It turns out that the problem was on the supposedly good drive in the array,  and not the ones showing up as failed (like you’d expect).  I replaced that drive and did a full clean install of the OS (I hadn’t spent much time populating OD or anything since the system had been so unstable) – the install took a LOT less time than it had on previous attempts and the system itself is behaving a lot more stable.   AFP has yet to crash, syncing works fine for the most part (though I don’t recommend doing it over a 54 Meg wifi connection

Also as a side note:  Apple’s XGrid Administration and High Performance Computing guide has great instructions on building a gateway device (look at the section for “Setting up Cluster Controller”,   but there’s one thing you really should change from how they do it – use AFP instead of NFS for home directories.  NFS caused all sorts of problems for me (logins would not work) while AFP worked perfectly (and solved the problems).   Otherwise it’s a pretty good guide to follow,  though I made some modifications to my approach (given that I’m on a dynamic IP address, instead of static.     If you want to know how I got kerberos and OD to work with that email me). 

This past weekend, and over the past couple of days,  I’ve changed the network topology quite a bit – setting up one of the XServes as a gateway device with NAT, DHCP, DNS, NFS, Open Directory (with Kerberos) and XGrid – the last one not currently being used, but I am contemplating a few uses.  I then set up the second XServe to serve as a media server housing all of my digital media – music, movies, tv shows, etc.  This server isn’t yet, but soon will be, linked to my AppleTV in my media center (via gigabit ethernet) to sync my movies and shows across.

I’ve got a few things left to accomplish to make everything run smoothly, but for the most part things are looking great and working well. 

OS X Server 10.5.4 runs incredibly smooth and has been a joy to use (as opposed to my previous experiences with OS X Server which had issues, though I believe that to have been a corrupt installation or something.).   I was able to get the gateway device setup pretty easily following instructions found in Apple’s X-Grid clustering and advanced computing guide (available on their site). 

I’m still waiting for my iPhone 3G – I made the mistake of doing a direct fulfillment from AT&T (apple’s store here was out of stock and I was impatient).  Unfortunately AT&T has been slower than an elderly woman with a broken hip when it comes to actually doing the fulfillment.  It’s been two weeks and still no iPhone.  Way to drop the ball AT&T.