TNG 8 – under development for about a year since the release of TNG 7 – was released today.

New & Improved in TNG 8:

• Better Search: Hover over the results to see a dynamic summary of each person or family on the list.
• Look and Feel: Most pages have been restyled for easier use and a nicer appearance.
• Easier Installation: Do more right up front and hit the ground running.
• Media: Enjoy a new image viewer, plus a more streamlined slide show.
• User Roles: New labels make it simple to assign rights to members of your family or research team.
• Relationship: Now locate multiple relationships between people in your file.
• Search Engines: A few key changes should make your pages more visible.
• People: Build your tree right from the pedigree page if you’d like.
• Dates: New calendar page summarizes family events.
• “Mod Manager”: Allows you to easily add or remove custom code changes.
• Plus more than 100 other improvements! See a complete list of all changes here. Tested on all major browser platforms.

Information about the software can be found here on Darrin’s site.

I’ve been testing this for quite a few weeks now, helping iron out the kinks along with several other users and Darrin. There are some great new features and capabilities added.

I’ve got my TNG Testing site upgraded, and hope to have my main site done this evening yet.

Now we can wonder what Darrin will choose to include in TNG 9

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

The arrival of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard meant the end of support for AppleTalk (see my previous article on some other aspects of Upgrading to Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard”), and so the ability to print from computers running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard directly to printers that used AppleTalk. In my case, for many years I have been using my HP LaserJet 4MP (it’s now into its 17th year!!!!) connected to an AsanteTalk box so that the printer could be seen on our home network by any/all computers on the network.

But after I installed Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard on my MacBook, that computer could no longer print to the LaserJet. The workaround was to set up another computer (my FileMaker Server eMac) running Mac OS X 10.4.11 (or one running Mac OS X 10.5.x would have worked too) to share the LaserJet 4MP using Printer Sharing.

But eventually as I upgraded our other computers to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard this wasn’t going to continue working. So after some digging around online I learned that using an HP JetDirect Print Server should allow me to keep the trusty LaserJet 4MP, and get to use the 3 spare $100+ toner cartridges I have on hand for it.

HP JetDirect 300x Print Server

I purchased an HP JetDirect 300x Print Server on Ebay – not for the $250 that the HP page says they cost, but for $5 plus $8 postage to me. For that I got the print server, and a short parallel printer cable. I didn’t get a power supply with it, so fortunately in the collection of about 100 various power bricks I’ve accumulated over the years I had one that had the right connector on it (see below).

Front of JetDirect 300x shows the two indicator lights "Status" and "Activity" and the "Test" button between the 2 lights.

The rear view shows DIP switches, RJ-45 10/100 EtherNet connection, Parallel port and power socket.

Setup

Setup was very easy.

1. Connect the parallel cable to the JetDirect and to the printer.
2. Connect the network ethernet cable to the JetDirect
3. Connect the power supply to the JetDirect

Once it is connected and powered on, you can then press the Test button on the top. This generates a 2 page printout titled “Hewlett-Packard JetDirect 200X (PCL Configuration Page)” in 5 languages

HP JetDirect 300x Configuration Printout

The above is the English language column from both pages. The items of interest are highlighted:

1. The configuration is by DHCP
2. The assigned IP address is 192.168.123.211
3. The subnet mask s 255.255.255.0
4. The Default Gateway (router) is 192.168.123.254

So now this is setup, we can go to “Print & Fax” in System Preferences to Add a new printer. NOTE: There might be some merit in changing the configuration so that the JetDirect has a fixed IP number – see below for notes on this.

First window for the Add Printer steps

Click the + button to open the Add Printer window

Add Printer - Step 2

In this window do the following steps:

1. Click the IP button at the top of the window – we’re adding an IP Printer;
2. In the Protocol menu choose “HP JetDirect – Socket”;
3. In the Address box, enter the IP address we have learned from the Configuration page above
4. In the Name box enter a name for the printer – this is the name the printer will show as in Print Dialogs
5. In the Location box enter a location for the printer – where it physically is if you want to
6. From the Print Using menu choose “Select Printer Software…” This opens the next window you see
7. This window contains a list of all the printer drivers known to Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. Type a few characters from your printer’s model to narrow the list down – I typed 4MP and got only 1 match.
8. Click that printer to select it
9. Click OK

Add Printer - Step 3

Click the Add button to add this printer to the list of Printers in the Print & Fax System Preference

Add Printer - Step 4

The printer now shows up in the list of printers configured on this computer.

Some Notes:

• The power supply connector on the HP JetDirect 300x is not like the ones commonly used for computer peripherals currently. Technically it is a “EIAJ-04″ as described on WikiPedia and has a yellow tip with a 1mm diameter pin inside it. The more common yellow tipped connectors are hollow in the centre. So if at all possible, when buying an HP JetDirect 300x on Ebay, make sure it comes with the appropriate power supply.

• As noted above, there may be some merit in changing the settings of the HP JetDirect 300x to use a fixed IP number. Once the HP JetDirect 300x is connected to your network and powered on you can telnet into it to view and change the settings.

• The HP JetDirect 300x also functions as the AsanteTalk box did, so computers already set up to print via AppleTalk don’t need to be reconfigured to use the HP JetDirect 300x for printing

• Since the set up under Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard to use this is via IP Printing the MacBook can now print directly either by AirPort or when connected by EtherNet cable without having to turn AppleTalk off on one interface  and turn it on on the other.

Then the Help

So as seen in the Help, it is possible to change the configuration to disable DHCP and then assign a fixed IP number to the HP JetDirect 300x if you want to be sure it always has the same IP number.

References

Details on the power supply and connector from here

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

• 320 GB – the one that came with the computer. This is little changed from when I got the computer as I immediately added a 500 GB and 750 GB to the machine as soon as I got it
• 750 GB – this is my startup volume, and has all the applications and documents on it. 90 GB free. It contained 1,803,033 files using 608.5 GB (653,331,116,032 Bytes).
• 1000 GB – this is my Time Machine volume, and has Time Machine backups going back 16 months to October 2008. 135 GB free. It contained 16,765,985 files using 787.6 GB (845,667,311,616 Bytes).

So for the upgrade – the plan was to add a 2 TB drive into the last empty drive bay in the Mac Pro to become the Time Machine volume, then clone the 750 GB drive to the 1000 GB drive, then use the 750 GB drive as a network backup volume perhaps.

So the first step was to attempt to move the Time Machine volume. This article http://www.macworld.com/article/146085/2010/02/migratebackups.html indicated it should be a fairly straight forward task. So I followed the instructions and set out. It took about 2 hours to copy all the data from the 750 GB drive to the new 2 TB drive, then I waited another 2 hours for the “Verifying” phase to complete, and just as it appeared success was at hand, a dreaded error message.

Well that wasn’t very helpful. Thinking that it was finished verifying I just accepted that thinking all would be good, but attempting to check the disk with Disk Utility gives

Even less impressed now. So I decided to run a Disk Repair on the 750 GB Time Machine volume – that took over 6 hours and found a few errors which it said were fixed. Then I tried the MacWorld procedure again, with at the end of another 4 plus hours the same frustrating result – an error message and a failure to be able to verify the drive.

Googling the error message led to a number of other sites with people complaining of similar problems. I tried the several suggested solutions, including initially making a partition on the new drive that was only a little larger than on the old drive, doing the Copy, and then enlarging the partition. This time the copy was successful, but enlarging the Partition wasn’t.

By now 3 days have passed me by.

So I tried Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software, but when that was unable to manage the task I found that copying Time Machine volumes isn’t supported by Carbon Copy Cloner.

So I then tried SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket Software. This set out to do the copying, but seemed agonisingly slow. After some 8 hours it had copied less than 6,000,000 of the files, so having read more sites that indicated that the MacWorld process, or very similar variations thereof really would work, I aborted the SuperDuper process and started another process using Disk Utility, but alas this too failed.

So it was going to have to be SuperDuper!. I set that running yesterday, and it finally completed today after an elapsed time of 17 hours 22 minutes.

According to Activity Monitor, at times the copy speed was above 100 MB/sec – presumably when copying large files, but for much of the time the copy speed was around 3-4 MB/sec as it copied the tens of thousands of symlinks that make a Time Machine volume work.

I don’t know what happened to the apparently missing 1,741,753 files (16,765,985 – 15,024,232), but once the copy was finished, Disk Utility reported that the drive had 16,269,744 files on it – a difference of a mere 496,241!!

When it was all done, and a “Repair Disk” from Disk Utility showed that all was normal, I opened the Time Machine preferences, selected the new 2 TB disk as the Time Machine Disk, and nervously waited for it to complete the first backup. This took a bit over 2 hours for Time Machine to scan the volume, Spotlight to get it indexed for Time Machine, and then the first backup done in several days to run, but HAPPILY when it was finished it recognised that the oldest backup was October 22, 2008, and reported that the next backup would be in about 45 minutes time. That backup ran successfully and completed in only a few minutes – it seems we’re back to normal, with a whole TerryByte of free space on the Time Machine volume now!!

So the next challenge is cloning the 750 GB drive to the 1 TB drive. Tomorrow is another day!!

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

Some Googling later I came up with several helpful sites that got me up and running with this.

First, using the Apache server logs identify the IP number, or range of IP numbers you want to block. I used TextWrangler to open the log file and do some preliminary editing, and then imported that into FileMaker Pro to get only the log lines applicable to PiplBot (BAD ROBOT!!!!). Over the course of about 5 hours it used 84 different IP numbers as it hit away at one of my sites over 19,000 times.

So once I had a list of these numbers, I was able to break them down into a number of shorter lists that had the first 2 or 3 octets of the IP number the same. With this done, this site http://www.mikero.com/misc/ipcalc/ provides a VERY handy calculator that will take the starting and ending IP numbers in a range, and convert it to a range in the CIDR notation (very technical explanation here) which takes a range of numbers like

which potentially covers 14 different numbers and converts it to 67.228.42.160/28 which represents 16 numbers without the need to list them all out. And simlarly the range from 208.43.23.227 to 208.43.33.238 covers 2,572 addresses, and is represented by 208.43.0.0/18 – a range of 16,384 addresses.

So, armed with this knowledge and ability, I’m now able to understand the instructions on this page http://www.dancatts.com/articles/dealing-with-bad-bots-at-the-firewall-level.php and this page http://www.ibiblio.org/macsupport/ipfw/ which in their simplest form are saying that you can use Terminal with this instruction

to add a block into the Firewall for the range of numbers 67.228.42.160/28. You can see the current status of your ipfw with this Terminal command

which will return a list in this form

Changes made by Terminal only last as long as your Macintosh is running – they are not saved to be used on a Restart unless you write a startup script to do this. This site http://www.ibiblio.org/macsupport/ipfw/ provide details on this, including a number of sample scripts, but frankly this was way over my head, so I turned to MacUpdate to see if there was an application that would do this via a GUI (Graphical User Interface). I found several, and settled on WaterRoof by Hany El Imam. This allows you to define the rules you want to implement, and then takes care of creating the script that will activate these rules each time your Macintosh is started up.

WaterRoof Screen Shot

This seems much easier to deal with

So for now PiplBot is banned, even though they seem to be honouring their statement that they would remove all of my sites from their list of sites to crawl.

I hope this helps someone else – I’ve written it partly to help me remember what I did, but also to help others.

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

Being the cautious type I knew that I would first upgrade the MacBook, and see what out of PHP, MySQL and Apache didn’t work afterward before embarking on upgrading my Mac Pro which does full time duty as a webserver for a number of domains that use PHP and MySQL.

The install of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard went about as easily as advertised, and an hour after starting the MacBook was back running again. There was a notice that I had some now unsupported applications, but I didn’t see a list of them. I tried to open Parallels and was told that it wouldn’t work with Mac OS X 10.6 – I had Parallels 3. But no worries – I have VMWare Fusion 2 and that works, so upgrade the Parallels Virtual Machine to work with VMWare Fusion and delete Parallels.

Then I set out to see if my previous installs of PHP 5.2.9 from http://entropy.ch/ and MySQL 5.1.32 from http://mysql.com/ were still working. Here the news was not so good.

Apple had seemingly reset everything – given me a new httpd.conf file that didn’t have PHP enabled and updated the built in PHP to 5.3.0. Luckily the built in PHP now supports the GD Library, so perhaps I can stay with Apple supplied PHP from now on as that is the only “extra” I’ve needed in the past.

So some hours of “circular” troubleshooting and confusion later I managed to get things working again. Here are some of the things I did.

Open /etc/apache2/httpd.conf and uncomment line 115

and save the change. Restart the WebServer from the Sharing System Preference.

After installing MySQL 5.1.37 and trying to get that configured I was presented with errors about the socket not being in the right place – yikes!!!! And since I needed to be able to make some changes in the php.ini file I had to create that too. Apple has some bizarre way of having a default configuration used even when there’s apparently no file in place. So in Terminal

to make a copy of the php.ini.default file and name it to php.ini
then open that file for editing – I use TextWrangler – and look for the 4 instances of mysql.sock to find that php.ini is expecting to find them in /var/mysql/ but actually the mysql.sock file is in /tmp so change the 4 instances of

to

and save the changes.

Now PHP and MySQL are running.

The next thing to do was to set up the MySQL passwords as described here http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/default-privileges.html

Then after that try out my test TNG setup to see if that worked – drat – confronted by errors telling me that the server MUST have a timezone setting made (a new requirement with PHP 5.3.0). So some Googling later I’m at line 997 in the php.ini file

change this to

or some other valid timezone as listed on this page http://us2.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php, save the changes and restart the WebServer.

Now we’re pretty much set I think. My TNG site seems to work, apart from issues restoring the tables which Darrin has already now sent me an update for.

Note that the above is a very abbreviated version of what I did for far too many hours last night, and in all likelihood wasn’t the best way to achieve this – for example providing a symbolic link to the mysql.sock file in the place it was expected should also have worked, but I needed to modify a php.ini file to take care of the timezone requirement and to change the upload_max_filesize setting also.

So all that taken care of, it was time to try out a couple of my other fears….

Drat – my HP LaserJet 4MP, which uses AppleTalk can’t be found – Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard has removed AppleTalk. Up until now it’s worked just great with an AsanteTalk box connected to the LAN and the printer. The LaserJet 4MP might be 16 years old, but it still works like a champ and doesn’t need replacing yet – particularly since I have at least 2 brand new $100 toner cartridges for it yet. So, instead I now have the eMac in the basement with Mac OS X 10.4.11 installed – running 24/7 as a FileMaker Server machine now “sharing” the HP LaserJet 4MP via Printer Sharing and the MacBook running Mac OS X 10.6 can see that and print to it just fine. But I guess eventually I’ll either need some type of HP DirectJet print server, or a new printer.

Followup 27 April 2010 – I’ve written an article about using an HP JetDirect 300x to allow my HP LaserJet 4MP to be used by computers running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard.

Next – the Epson R220 Inkjet Printer. Connected that to the MacBook and right away Software Update offered to download the required printer drivers and install it. A test page comes out of the printer no problems so that one seems to be easily solved.

But I seem to have lost the Epson Printer Utility that allowed for ink status, nozzle check and head cleaning. Turns out that has been replaced by “Epson Printer Utlitity Lite” which can be found in

and it is “Lite” – it shows a menu for printers, the Ink level status and buttons for “Nozzle Check” and “Head Cleaning”, but nothing else.

Next – the Epson Perfection 2450 Photo scanner. According to http://support.apple.com/kb/HT3669#epson it is supported. But trying to start up Epson Scan results in an error that the scanner can’t be found. The Scanner is recognised by Image Capture, but I can’t get it recognised by an earlier version of Graphic Convertor that I have. Epson’s website notes that there might be incompatibilities with the Epson Scan software and to “check back”. UPDATE – have just found that Adobe Photoshop CS3 sees the scanner just fine as long as Photoshop is “running in Rosetta” so that’s a relief!!

Now I need to stop worrying too much about this, and try and do something productive for the rest of today. Hopefully the next few days will bring some clarity from others on the issues surrounding PHP and MySQL so that I can upgrade my Mac Pro and keep the PHP and MySQL all working with less hassle, Epson will get their act together on my scanner software and the eMac in the basement running as the printing server for the LaserJet as well as of course hosting 28 FileMaker Pro databases will keep on ticking.

Followup 27 April 2010 – I’ve written an article about using an HP JetDirect 300x to allow my HP LaserJet 4MP to be used by computers running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.

FamilySearch Indexing support replied to my eMail(s) to them with this link

https://help.familysearch.org/publishing/202/104450_f.SAL_Public.html

which covers both Mac OS X 10.4 and Mac OS X 10.5.

========================

I noted with some excitement last evening that FamilySearch Indexing had a project underway with a New Zealand flavour to it – “New Zealand—Passenger Lists, 1871–1915″, so I thought this was the incentive I needed to get back to indexing – something I hadn’t done in quite a few months. But alas I couldn’t get the FamilySearchIdexing application to start up – no matter what I tried it generated an error “Unable to start the Application”.

Some Googling led me to this page https://help.familysearch.org/publishing/301/103757_f.SAL_Public.html which provided the hint as to where to look, but unfortunately those directions aren’t directly applicable to Mac OS X 10.5.7 which I’m running.

So this page lists what I did to fix this problem. NOTE – these instructions apply to Mac OS X 10.5.x

Go to your Macintosh HD ——> Applications ——> Utilities folder and find the icon “Java Preferences”. Double click that to open it, and then click on the Network tab

Now click on the “View Cache Files…” button at lower right.

Find any items in this list that show “FamilySearch Indexing…” in the Application column and delete them – highlight them and click the Red X at the top of the screen, or right click on them and choose Delete.

Now click on the pop up menu at the top of that screen that says “Applications” and choose “Resources”

Click the “URL” heading to sort all the entries by their URL – this puts all the items from http://www.familysearchindexing.org/ together in the list. Select all of them by clicking on the first one, holding down the shift key and clicking on the last one, and delete all of these files. Close the Cache Files window and then the Java Preferences window.

Go to http://familysearchindexing.org/ and click on “Start Indexing” at lower right. After the application is downloaded – several minutes on a fast DSL or cable connection – and the programme should start up.

Good Luck, and Happy Indexing.

©2010 Roger’s Ramblings. All Rights Reserved.