Archive for September 2005

Goodbye Terry

I’ve been so behind on lists, that when I finally did catch up, I found some amazingly bad news. Terry Teague, longtime OpenOffice.org Mac OS X contributor, has passed on. I met him at WWDC’04, and it was great talking to him. Little did I know he worked for Apple but kept it quiet online, till I met him, doing all sorts of amazing hardware related testing (he tends to write the Apple Hardware Test stuff you see on Disc 1 of some of your Macs). Showed me some cool things you could do, all on a floor! Didn’t get a chance to catch him at WWDC’05 this year, as he didn’t rock up, but in passing, we’re going to miss you mate.

Update: There’s a great eulogy to Terry. And his brother left a comment on this blog, mentioning if there were nice words, etc. it could be forwarded along to his e-mail address.

Bad Cisco VPN client

Proprietary software always sucks. This time its the Cisco VPN client. It refuses to compile on FC-4 with all updates applied (I even tried on the newer acpi-is-busted kernel). It probably won’t work on rawhide, but that’s not what my laptop has. Monash’s VPN doesn’t work with vpnc from Extras either, so no NetworkManager-vpnc goodness for me.

Then I try the OS X version. And lo and behold, I read that it destroys /opt where DarwinPorts tends to live. In fact, thats not the only damage that it does: it symlinks var to private/var and tmp to private/tmp. Don’t even think of moving var, as err, you’ll slowly realise your sudo options don’t work. Apple+S into single user mode, then mount -uw /, to recreate the var symlink. Bad cisco, bad 4.7.00.0510 release.

Anyone think the following is hazardous?

lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin  11 Sep 26 21:28 /tmp@ -> private/tmp
lrwxr-xr-x   1 root  admin  11 Sep 28 01:29 /var@ -> private/var

And should I be changing it (in single user mode, none the less)?


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