Connecting the dots... » OSX

Fixing backspace in screen in terminal on OSX

rp — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 20:02:20 +0000

Screen is awesome, I am surprised I never bothered to learn about it earlier. It all stemmed from the fact that I was working on a pretty low powered VM and couldn’t afford to open multiple xterms on it. Later when I started SSH’ing into it the screen utility came in pretty handy, however when you are on OSX and ssh into a remote box and use screen, when you hit backspace, it doesn’t instead gets the screen to give you a ‘wuff — wuff’ and I am not kidding, that’s the default message.
The fix is simple, run this on the console, close and restart, sorted.

defaults write com.apple.Terminal TermCapString xterm

Enabling HTTPS support in curl installed through MacPorts on OSX

rp — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 22:27:40 +0000

While doing development just noticed that if you have installed php with curl support using macports it does’nt install ssl support in curl by default which is quite frustrating. Especially I just spent 30mins of my life trying to debugging what had gone wrong.

This is what you would get if you have a similar problem:

% curl -k https://www.yahoo.com
curl: (1) Protocol https not supported or disabled in libcurl

The problem is that you would usually have something that depends on curl so you cant install the version of curl with its variant straightaway, so you will first need to remove the dependent first, then remove curl and clean up the install and then finally install curl with its ssl variant followed by its dependents.

The steps are something like this:

busybox:web rp$ sudo port uninstall curl @7.19.3_0 curl @7.19.3_0+ssl
--->  Unable to uninstall curl 7.19.3_0, the following ports depend on it:
--->  	php5
Error: port uninstall failed: Please uninstall the ports that depend on curl first.
busybox:web rp$ sudo port uninstall curl @7.19.3_0 curl @7.19.3_0+ssl
busybox:web rp$ sudo port uninstall php5
--->  Deactivating php5 @5.2.9_0+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear+sqlite
--->  Uninstalling php5 @5.2.9_0+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear+sqlite
busybox:web rp$ sudo port uninstall curl @7.19.3_0 curl @7.19.3_0+ssl
--->  Deactivating curl @7.19.3_0
--->  Uninstalling curl @7.19.3_0
--->  Uninstalling curl @7.19.3_0+ssl
busybox:web rp$ sudo port install php5 @5.2.9_0+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear+sqlite
Error: Requested variants do not match original selection.
Please perform 'port clean curl' or specify the force option.
Error: The following dependencies failed to build: curl
Error: Status 1 encountered during processing.
busybox:web rp$ sudo port clean curl
--->  Cleaning curl
busybox:web rp$ sudo port clean php5
--->  Cleaning php5
busybox:web rp$ sudo port clean php5
--->  Cleaning php5
busybox:web rp$ sudo port clean curl
--->  Cleaning curl
busybox:web rp$ sudo port clean php5
busybox:web rp$ sudo port install curl +ssl
--->  Fetching curl
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for curl
--->  Extracting curl
--->  Configuring curl
--->  Building curl
--->  Staging curl into destroot
--->  Installing curl @7.19.3_0+ssl
--->  Activating curl @7.19.3_0+ssl
--->  Cleaning curl
busybox:web rp$ sudo port install php5 @5.2.9_0+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear+sqlite
--->  Fetching php5
--->  Verifying checksum(s) for php5
--->  Extracting php5
--->  Applying patches to php5
--->  Configuring php5
--->  Building php5
--->  Staging php5 into destroot
Warning: php5 requests to install files outside the common directory structure!
--->  Installing php5 @5.2.9_0+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear+sqlite

If this is your first install, you might want
cd /opt/local/apache2/modules
/opt/local/apache2/bin/apxs -a -e -n "php5" libphp5.so

* copy  /opt/local/etc/php.ini-dist to  /opt/local/etc/php.ini
--->  Activating php5 @5.2.9_0+apache2+macosx+mysql5+pear+sqlite
--->  Cleaning php5

Cisco VPN on OSX

rp — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 21:55:28 +0000

This has happened to me far many times, so thought I might as well document it somewhere instead of having to search for the solution. So here’s the problem, you are on VPN and then you put the laptop to sleep, you wake it up later and try to make it connect to the VPN again and it complains there are no interfaces available to hookup to.
The exact error message is this:

Could not attach to driver. Is kernel module loaded?
The application was unable to communicate with the VPN sub-system.

The solution to this is the following set of commands:

# Shut down the FireWire network interface
sudo ifconfig fw0 down
# Restart the cisco vpn subsystem and verify that it works
sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart &&  \
sudo /usr/local/bin/vpnclient autoinit

and then fire your vpnclient again, this time it works fine and asks you for your username and password.