[thelist] Some Mac OS-X tips

Bob Davis bobd at members.evolt.org
Wed Mar 28 15:06:32 CST 2001


I've been setting my PowerBook up with OS-X, so I thought I'd share some 
of the things I had to look around for.


<tip type="MacOS-X and PHP">

So you bought X and you're trying to develop some PHP on your newly OS'd 
machine...and it doesn't work.  That's because, for some reason, the PHP 
installation in the system is broken out of the box.

Here's what to do to get an easy to install package (yes, package, as in 
pre-compiled, double click and watch it install package.).

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20010327083358205

Instructions and links to the downloads including a new httpd.conf file 
and phpinfo.php.
</tip>

<tip type="MacOS-X and SSH">
You're serious about security, and would never send usernames and 
passwords in plain text, right?  Well, you'll need to install OpenSSH on 
your OS-X Mac so that you can use all of the SSH, scp, slogin and port 
forwarding goodness that it has to offer.

http://www.stepwise.com/Articles/Workbench/2001-03-21.01.html

Stepwise has all of the info you'll need.  You will have to install the 
developer tools that come with X to compile it, but they're cool anyway. 
Having some knowledge of using the terminal and tar (and having root 
access enabled so that you can su to root) will also be necessary.

One thing they forgot to say though - after everything is done and 
you've logged out from root, issue the 'rehash' command to get access to 
the programs.

It's very cool though - once you set up a secure tunnel to your host 
machine, you can ftp to localhost and you're on the remote box.  Just 
put stuff up, and you've gotten the job done without compromising any 
security.  The only thing that will keep your systems administrators 
happier is free Bombay Sapphire martinis ;-)
</tip>

<tip type="MacOS-X and man pages">
So, now that you've installed all of these cool *nix apps, how do you 
find out how to use them?  "Man" pages - that's how.  The thing is, they 
aren't always where your shell thinks they should be.
You'll get an error like this:

[localhost:~] bob% man ssh
man: no entry for ssh in the manual.

If you know where they are, you can temporarily add  them by issuing the 
following in the terminal:

	setenv MANPATH ${MANPATH}:/path/to/man/directory

For the ssh man pages, you would type this:

	setenv MANPATH ${MANPATH}:/usr/local/man

If you just want to see what your MANPATH (path to man pages) is, type:

	echo $MANPATH

In the case above, where I added the man pages for ssh, that command now 
prints:

	/Users/bob/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/share/man:/usr/local/man

If you want to permanently add them, you can create a .tcshrc file in 
your home directory (but I haven't gotten to that yet).

</tip>

Hopefully, these are helpful. Personally, I think that OS-X is going to 
be *the* kick ass operating system for the development of sites that are 
to be deployed on *nix systems.

bob

--
bob davis
bobd at members.evolt.org




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