HR Geeks

I bought a 1TB Apple Time Capsule today. I plan on replacing my Linksys WRT54G and a Dell Linux Samba server I have.

As usual, Apple nails the out-of-box experience. Pop the CD in, run the utility, follow the directions presented, and the Time Capsule was up and running in about 5 minutes (3 of which were spent rearranging cables to accommodate the new machine).

The utility software picked up the un-configured Time Capsule and walked me through the configuration in just a few simple steps. After confirming that my cable modem used DHCP, entering a password for disk access, and entering a WPA2 password, everything was up and online.A nice little touch, the utility software that configured the Time Capsule’s wireless network automatically reconfigured my Airport card to connect to the WPA2 secured 802.11N network on the Time Capsule.

After getting online, I opened up the Time Machine configuration setting pane, selected ‘Change Disk’, picked the Time Capsule out of the list, and that was it - it’s now doing DHCP, Wifi, NAS, TimeMachine hosting (for both Macbooks), and routing/NAT’ing my cable modem, with a grand total of 5 minutes of configuration and maybe half a dozen clicks. Fairly impressive!

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Here’s a cool tool for everybody using OS X that needs to work with files on other UNIXy machines. It’s called ‘MacFUSE‘, and is based on the work done for the Linux FUSE user-space file system driver. Basically, it provides a framework for userspace file system drivers in OS X, using a plugin style architecture. There are quite a few plugins available already, but the most useful by far is ’sshfs’. The sshfs plugin uses the MacFUSE system to provide OS X system mounts to remote file systems using ssh/scp. Once you install it, and give it connection details, the remote filesystem shows up just like any other SMB / network share mount in Finder. Drag / drop works, assuming you have permissions on the remote side to create/modify files. Opening files, mime detection, etc all appear to work flawlessly. It also hasn’t crashed or locked my mac up yet (I’ve been using it for a few hours with TextMate, to do remote editing without getting frustrated by Terminal.app).

MacFUSE Site - http://code.google.com/p/macfuse/

SSHfs installer | read_me (requires MacFUSE first)

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