Month: April 2014

Install this kernel driver so OS X can monitor the S.M.A.R.T. diagnostic data for external drives

EDIT: Sorry to say that it appears this no longer works in MacOS. Every time Apple upgrades MacOS, things that formerly worked perfectly seem to break, and this program is one of those things that apparently no longer works. The code is available on GitHub, so if you care and if you are a programmer, maybe you can fork and fix it.

If you use OS X and have ever gone into Disk Utility, you may have noticed that OS X cannot monitor the S.M.A.R.T. status of external drives connected via USB or Firewire. To fix that, all you need do is install this kernel driver:

S.M.A.R.T. for USB and FireWire Drives (MacUpdate)

S.M.A.R.T. Status - VerifiedAt the time we are writing this article, there are two versions available, “Stable” version 0.8 and “Beta” version 0.9. We went ahead and installed the 0.9 beta on a system running OS X Mavericks. At first, when we fired up Disk Utility and looked at our external drives, it didn’t appear that the driver had worked — it still showed “S.M.A.R.T. Status : Not Supported” for each of the drives. But then we discovered the secret — after installing the driver, you must unmount each of your external drives, then power cycle them. That is, actually disconnect the power to each drive for a few seconds, then reconnect it. When it powers back up, OS X should automatically detect and remount it, and then if your drive is supported, you should see “S.M.A.R.T. Status : Verified” for that drive in Disk Utility.  It is NOT sufficient to unmount and remount the drive, you must power cycle it. Alternately, a full system reboot would likely also work.

Unfortunately, this driver will not work with all external drives. The project page (where the source code is available) notes:

This is a kernel driver for Mac OS X external USB or FireWire drives. It extends the standard driver behaviour by providing access to drive SMART data. The interface to SMART data is same as with ATA family driver, so most existing applications should work.

The driver requires a SAT (SCSI ATA Translation) capable external drive enclosure. The driver should work with Snow Leopard and Lion and Mountain Lion. People have reported problems with Lion and Encrypted volumes. Some enclosures are reported to work with FireWire but not with USB. The driver is not compatible to WD Drive Manager, or enclosures with custom kernel extensions.

As noted above, we installed the 0.9 beta version on a system running Mavericks, and it appears to be working great, so they probably should add that to the list. We have three Western Digital external drives connected, and the driver is working for all three. We suspect it will work with most consumer-grade external USB drives. However, if you buy your own external drive enclosure and mount an internal drive in it, then the chances that it will work are probably a bit lower. If it doesn’t work for you, or for some other reason you want to remove it from your system, simply enter the following two commands from a terminal window:

sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTDriver.kext
sudo rm -r /System/Library/Extensions/SATSMARTLib.plugin

and then reboot your system.

It’s great to be able to check the S.M.A.R.T. status of your external drives right from the OS X disk utility. Apple should purchase the code from the author of this project, make any necessary tweaks to ensure that it is stable, and include it by default in upgrades and future versions of OS X!

Link: 18 commands to monitor network bandwidth on Linux server

This post mentions some linux command line tools that can be used to monitor the network usage. These tools monitor the traffic flowing through network interfaces and measure the speed at which data is currently being transferred. Incoming and outgoing traffic is shown separately.

Some of the commands, show the bandwidth used by individual processes. This makes it easy to detect a process that is overusing network bandwidth.

The tools have different mechanisms of generating the traffic report. Some of the tools like nload read the “/proc/net/dev” file to get traffic stats, whereas some tools use the pcap library to capture all packets and then calculate the total size to estimate the traffic load.

Full article here:
18 commands to monitor network bandwidth on Linux server (BinaryTides)

Link: 5 of the Best Code Editor Apps for Your Mac

Is programming your profession or passion? No matter what category of programmers you belong to, you will need a tool to write down your programming code. If you take a look at the apps available to do coding, you will find that there are many, and choosing the one that will fulfill your needs seems to be quite a difficult task. Here, we have come to the rescue of those of you who are looking for some of the best code editor apps for Macs. Go ahead and get started with coding using the tools listed below.

Full article here:
5 of the Best Code Editor Apps for Your Mac (Make Tech Easier)

Link: 5 Free Tools that Let You Edit PDF Files

Isn’t it really annoying when you have a PDF file that you need to modify or change? Actually going into the PDF and changing it requires a slew of expensive Adobe software that, quite frankly, very few people can legally afford. I am not a proponent of illegally downloading software – especially Adobe’s expensive software – so I have compiled a list of my five favorite tools that let you openly edit PDF files.

Full article here:
5 Free Tools that Let You Edit PDF Files (Make Tech Easier)

Note: Some of the suggestions in the above article are Windows-only. If you run OS X, you could try running one of the Windows-based programs, or use one of the “Universal” solutions in the above-mentioned article. Alternately, here is a somewhat dated article that may offer some additional suggestions, and note that Preview (which comes with all recent versions of OS X) has the ability to edit unprotected PDF files. If you run Linux, you could try PDFEdit or some other editing tool.

Link: Remotely copy files to and from your Raspberry Pi

Most of the time I remotely log into my Raspberry Pi. Depending on what I am doing I will either SSH into it or VNC into it, which allows me to do almost whatever I would like to.

I say almost as there is a caveat.

What happens when I want to transfer a file to or from the Raspberry Pi?

I have to find a memory stick, plug it into my computer, copy the files onto it, unplug it, plug it into my Raspberry Pi, go back to my computer, copy the files over…

Then if I happen to modify a file and want to transfer it back I go through the whole process again.

What an absolute pain!

There must be a better way… Well you will be pleased to know there is!

Full article here:
Remotely copy files to and from your Raspberry Pi (Trevor Appleton)

DynDNS will discontinue free DNS service on May 7, 2014 – here are some alternatives

A little over two years ago, DynDNS took the first steps toward discontinuing their Free DNS service, and now they have announced that it’s really coming to an end for most users. In the 2012 article linked above, the following alternatives were mentioned:

Those that have replaced their router’s firmware with DD-WRT have the option to use DynDNS.org, freedns.afraid.org, ZoneEdit.com, No-IP.com, 3322.org, easyDNS.com, TZO.com, and DynSIP.org (or you can use another “custom” service).

Dynamic DNS service selections in DD-WRT
As time rolls on, the list of available free DNS services changes, but it seems like there are always plenty of choices. Since that 2012 announcement we’ve used the one at freedns.afraid.org and have been quite happy with it. But you want more choices, you say? Then check out this article:

Best Free Dynamic DNS Services (Updated 2014) (GNU Tomorrow)

Just remember that if you want to use a free DNS service, you need to sign up for one of those alternatives before the May 7 cutoff date, preferably long enough before that you have the time to update any configurations that specify the DynDNS address. Don’t put it off until you realize that your dynamic address will be no longer functional in just a few hours, or worse yet, has already ceased to function!

Related:
Dyn Decided To Stop Offering Free Accounts for Dynamic DNS (Dyn)
Dyn discontinues free DynDNS service to clean up its DDNS network (Ars Technica)
Beat it, freetards! Dyn to shut down no-cost dynamic DNS next month (The Register)

Link: How to Set Up WiFi Hotspot in Windows 8

Last year, my roommate moved out of my apartment and ended up taking our wireless router. I didn’t want to wait for twenty-four hours for Amazon to send me my new router, so I decided to turn my PC into a wireless router (or hotspot). My PC, which was wired directly to my modem, turned out to be a great replacement for my router and allowed me to hook up to the internet via WiFi with my laptop and mobile devices.

There are two ways of turning your Windows 8 PC into a wireless router, and I will walk you through both.

Full article here:
How to Set Up WiFi Hotspot in Windows 8 (Make Tech Easier)

Link: How To Setup a VPN in Ubuntu using OpenVPN

We love Linux and we love it for its open source nature, security, and powerful tools. There are a lot of free as well as commercial VPN solutions available for Ubuntu. We are not going to list or rank all the top VPN providers. We don’t necessarily want to rank them simply because users choose their VPN provider based on their personal requirements. If you want an US VPN service, you should look for the best US VPN service that supports OpenVPN. The intent of the article is to help newbies configure and use their favorite VPN service without going back and forth in Ubuntu community forum and embarrass oneself before the rather patronizing users.

Full article here:
How To Setup a VPN in Ubuntu using OpenVPN (Linuxaria)

Link: How to Mount EXT4 Linux File Systems on a Mac with OS X Fuse

The EXT file system (short for Extended File System) and it’s family members of EXT2, EXT3, and EXT4, are the file systems used by Linux. Mac users who work with multiple platforms may notice that OS X is unable to mount EXT partitions on its own, and thus anyone wishing to mount and read EXT drives and other file systems will need to rely on a third party utility.

OSXFuse is one such tool, a free open source offering that allows OS X to read EXT volumes, and if you’re comfortable with some uncertainty and risk to the Linux partition, you can even enable an experimental EXT write function too.

Full article here:
How to Mount EXT4 Linux File Systems on a Mac with OS X Fuse (OS X Daily)