ImageMagick, MacPorts and MAMP

After installing ImageMagick from MacPorts, I ran into the following error in my MAMP Apache error log when trying to run PHP code that resized images:

Symbol not found: __cg_jpeg_resync_to_restart

To solve this, edit /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/envvars to read:

DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH="/Applications/MAMP/Library/lib:$DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH"
export DYLD_FALLBACK_LIBRARY_PATH=/Applications/MAMP/Library/lib


Cannot install OS X Server Admin software on Leopard

I'd like to install Apple's Server Administration Tools for OS X 10.4 Tiger Server. But I'm running Leopard. The installer stops with the following helpful message: "You are not allowed to install the software on this disk for an unknown reason."

Apparently if you just copy the apps from a computer running Tiger to one running Leopard, it works fine.

Subversion server on OS X 10.5

Sonzea: Installing a Subversion server on Leopard.

Time Machine cannot do a full restore

I've been using Time Machine in OS X 10.5 Leopard on my Mac Pro to do nifty backups. It has come in handy a couple of times now, when I've been chasing problems down a rat hole (like, "why does ImageMagick work from the command line but not from an exec() call in PHP?") and I just want to give up and revert back to a previous state. Very nice.

Yesterday I got a new drive (WD2500YS) that has a nice 16MB cache on it, and I thought I'd swap in that drive as my boot drive. Normally I'd use SuperDuper! for this but it's not yet fully Leopard-compatible. So I thought, now's the time to do a full restore using Time Machine and see how it goes.

I booted from the Leopard DVD and selected Restore from Time Machine Backup. I was a bit nervous because the "time of last backup" shown by Time Machine was two hours earlier than it should have been, but this turned out to be a time zone issue; all my files were restored, including the ones saved just before I shut the machine down.

It took a while (over an hour) and booted up fine. As I've learned from my attempted Tiger-to-Leopard upgrades (do a clean install!) things are not always running smoothly under the hood. Sure enough, the console greeted me with

11/21/07 8:36:41 AM com.apple.launchd[1] (org.postfix.master) Failed to count the number of files in "/var/spool/postfix/maildrop": No such file or directory

Upon further examination, /var/spool is...empty! Taking a look at my previous drive, there are over 100 entries (some noted here). Why is this? Devin Lane has a nice post listing the exclusions Time Machine makes. Wait, I thought, maybe they are created on demand?

bash-3.2# mail foo@example.com
Subject: Hi

This is a test.
EOT
bash-3.2# postdrop: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/229433.449: No such file or directory
postdrop: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/230063.449: No such file or directory
postdrop: warning: mail_queue_enter: create file maildrop/230821.449: No such file or directory

Nope.

Conclusion: Time Machine is fine for protecting the mainstream data in your home directory, but is currently not capable of doing a full restore of a boot drive.

Installing Drupal on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard

I thought I'd write up the steps I took to get Drupal running on a stock Leopard installation. You may wish to save some time and install MAMP instead. Especially if you need GD support (i.e., you're going to have Drupal do image resizing). Update 17-Dec-2007: In fact, I recommend using MAMP instead.

Step 1: Enable PHP

Uncomment line 114 in /etc/apache2/httpd.conf to enable Leopard's built-in PHP:

LoadModule php5_module        libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

Start Apache 2 by using the Sharing panel in Preferences or at the command line with the following:

sudo apachectl start

(If Apache was already running, use restart instead of start.)

Place a test document into the default htdocs root to see if php is running. I created /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpinfo.php with the following content:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Now going to http://localhost/phpinfo.php shows me the info page for PHP 5.2.4. Yay!

Step 2: Friendly Virtual Hosts in Apache

I don't like keeping my websites in /Library/WebServer/Documents. It's a cumbersome place; I'd much rather keep them in /Users/john/Sites. That's right in my home directory and when I copy or sync my home directory I get the sites I'm working on, too. But using Leopard's built-in URL support for my home directory is verbose, too:

http://localhost/~john/sitename

I'd much rather use a nice short URL like http://dev/sitename. So first I assigned the name dev to my computer by adding a line to /etc/hosts:

Since Leopard caches DNS queries, we force it to reread /etc/hosts by using dscacheutil which replaces the lookupd utility that was in OS X 10.4.

dscacheutil -flushcache

I changed /etc/apache2/users/john.conf from

to

You can test that everything works and you didn't make any typos by using

sudo apachectl configtest

which should tell you that the syntax of your Apache configuration files is OK (it will point you to the line containing the error otherwise). If all is OK, restart Apache to effect the changes:

sudo apachectl restart

Now you should be able to go to http://dev/ in your browser, and the file at /Users/john/Sites/index.html should be displayed.

Installing MySQL

There was no friendly installer for OS X 10.5 so I used the OS X package for 10.4. It ran fine.

It was unclear from my web searches whether the startup item for MySQL is working on Leopard. So I created the following file at /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.mysql.mysqld.plist to autostart MySQL (thanks Joannou Ng):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
	<key>KeepAlive</key>
	<true/>
	<key>Label</key>
	<string>com.mysql.mysqld</string>
	<key>Program</key>
	<string>/usr/local/mysql/bin/mysqld_safe</string>
	<key>RunAtLoad</key>
	<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Before I restarted, I wanted to make sure that mysql would be in my PATH environment variable when I restart. So I created a file at /etc/paths.d/mysql containing

For more information on this, type man path_helper.

Then I restarted to make sure that MySQL would launch. Yes, it's running:

Now to set it up securely.

mysql_secure_installation

This allows you to set a root password, disallow remote root logins, and generally tighten up MySQL security.

It's nice to be able to tweak MySQL parameters, so I created a my.cnf file:

sudo cp /usr/local/mysql/support-files/my-large.cnf /etc/my.cnf

The only thing I tweaked in the my.cnf file was to add one line under the [mysqld] heading to prevent MySQL from listening on port 3306 (I don't like unnecessary open ports):

skip-networking

Now I can create a database for Drupal to use:

One more thing. PHP and MySQL are confused about which socket to use (/tmp/mysql.sock vs. /var/mysql/mysql.sock). So let's provide a symlink so they can use either one:

Installing Drupal

Pull down a copy of Drupal 5 from the CVS repository:

Change permissions on the settings file so the installer can modify it:

chmod o+w drupal/sites/default/settings.php

Run the Drupal installer by going to http://dev/drupal.

Remove the permissions from the settings file:

chmod o-w drupal/sites/default/settings.php

And create Drupal's files directory:

Rejoicing

Now I've got an easy setup where I can create my Drupal sites under /Users/john/Sites and refer to them with short names like http://dev/foo. MySQL is running nicely. Public access to my dev sites is disabled by Apache. Life is good.

Leopard and SoftRAID

If you use a RAID 0 array created by SoftRAID 3.6.4 as the boot drive on your Intel Mac and you feel the urge to install Leopard on it, don't. Just be patient until SoftRAID 3.6.6 comes out. Also, get your head examined. You should not be running striped RAID as your boot drive! *grin*

Leopard firewall

OS X Server 10.4 has an excellent firewall. It has a nice UI, lets you rearrange firewall rules by dragging and dropping, and is basically a sweet interface to ipfw. I haven't checked if they've made any changes or improvements on OS X Server 10.5.

What I can tell you is that it is a crying shame that Apple didn't take that nice firewall interface and put it into OS X 10.5. I understand their motivation (make it easy for Aunt Betty to feel secure) but I want more control. More at Securosis.com and Leopard firewall takes one step forward, three steps back. Alternatives are WaterRoof and DoorStop.

Mann pages

For a long time I've just used the man command to look up man pages inside Terminal. I find this frustrating. I downloaded a copy of ManOpen years ago but for whatever reason I don't use it. Mostly because I have to resize the window every time. Anyway, fast forward to today when I resolved to spend 10 minutes solving this problem. Here's my solution.

1. Download Bwana and drag it to your OS X Applications folder.
2. Add the following line to your /Users/username/.profile file:

mann() { open man:$@; }

This adds a bash function named mann that opens the man page in Safari, complete with hyperlinks and searchability. So now I can type, e.g., mann lookupd. Yay! And it has the following bonus: whenever I look up a unix command, I now think of Boris.

Solution to iMovie 6.0.3 consistent crashes

For a while now, my copy of iMovie HD has been crashing when I try to open it. I've been putting off finding the solution since I haven't needed to do much with iMovie, but today I needed it.

I first reinstalled the iMovie 6.0.3 update. No luck. Then reinstalled QuickTime 7.2. Still crashing. An examination of ~/Library/Logs/CrashReporter/iMovie HD.crash.log showed this thread as the culprit:

Thread 5 Crashed:
0   com.apple.CoreFoundation       	0x90811125 CFRetain + 56
1   com.apple.MediaBrowser         	0x67e01f56 -[MediaGrabberiTunes _loadMusicThreaded] + 733
2   com.apple.Foundation           	0x927f52e0 forkThreadForFunction + 123
3   libSystem.B.dylib              	0x90024227 _pthread_body + 84

That led me to a thread on iPhoto crashes on Apple's discussion forum, with solution posted by Terence Devlin: start up GarageBand.

I started up GarageBand, quit it, and now iMovie HD is working fine. Although Terence recommended saving something from GarageBand, I found that just starting the application was enough. Apparently something in GB's initialization routine fixes the problem.