This week’s mac techmail is Create your own SSL CA with the OS X Keychain. This talks about how you can use the Certificate Assistant on OS X, to create your own SSL Certificate Authority for a local network or internal organization. The tool is quite slick, if a little complicated for the uninitiated, but it does work quite well.
Tag Archives: techmail
Convert CVS repositories to Git
This week’s techmail is Convert CVS repositories to Git which goes into the how, and possibly the why, of converting a CVS repository into a git repository, retaining all commit and history information.
Remotely wake a sleeping Mac
Last week’s mac techmail was Remotely wake a sleeping Mac which explains some tricks on how to wake up a local Mac that is asleep. Useful if you want to have a file or media server that is also energy efficient so it’s only on when it needs to be.
How to create LXC system containers to isolate services
This week’s TechMail was How to create LXC system containers to isolate services which goes into further details on using LXC, using an OpenVZ template to create a new LXC container for use, and a brief rundown on how to configure it, start it, etc.
Using ExpanDrive to mount remote file systems
This week’s mac techmail was Using ExpanDrive to mount remote file systems which takes a look at the ExpanDrive tool, which sits in the menubar and allows you to connect to remote SFTP, SSH, FTP/FTPS, or Amazon S3 file systems and mount them on the computer as if they were local filesystems. It’s essentially a polished front-end for FUSE with sshfs support for the SFTP/SSH connections. It’s a really great tool and while not free, it’s relatively inexpensive and works wonders. With it I can remotely mount the filesystem of my VPS using SSH with keys, or connect to the home filesystem while on the road, etc. And instead of having to navigate the remote filesystem within one application like a traditional FTP client, I can access it using the terminal, Finder, PathFinder, or any other utility that operates on the local filesystem. It securely mounts the remote filesystems to be as available as a SMB or AFP share.
Introducing Linux virtual containers with LXC
This week’s techmail is Introducing Linux virtual containers with LXC. I played with LXC for the first time a little while ago when writing this tip, and it’s pretty slick. It’s not quite as feature-complete or as robust as OpenVZ, but it’s very close. It also has some benefits over OpenVZ, like direct integration with the upstream kernel. LXC is something to watch; it would be extremely cool to see things like Firefox stuffed into an LXC application container in the future, so it can really only ever mess with specific files/directories. LXC is definitely something to keep an eye on.
