Stickies are awesome

I looked at Stickies once when I got my Mac, but didn't really use them a lot. Now that I'm finally doing a lot of design stuff at work, I need some way to quickly jot down my ideas so I can discuss them later with my team. I used to open up text files previously, but then I had to remember where I saved those and always had to come up with names. I tried Outlook's notes on Windows but again, I tend to not look at them. Stickies are perfect. They stick on my screen like these blaringly colored Post-Its so they are always on my mind. And I never have to save them since I rarely shutdown my Mac anyway.

SSH Configuration

I had a really tough time while trying to SSH to my Linux machine at
work which is running my company's custom version of Debian Woody. It
always died with an error saying "Permission denied (publickey).". I
tried all the usual things like cleaning up known_hosts, creating a new
key, etc, but nothing seemed to work.

Finally looking closely at the known_hosts file, I saw a DSA key for my
Linux machine there. Looks like that key of bad ... but the more
interesting thing was that my Mac was using protocol version 2 by
default. A quick change to /etc/ssh_config did the trick. I simply
added Protocol 1,2 to it and everything was fine. I could have tried
creating a DSA key myself, but I use protocol version 1 everywhere else
and didn't want to create a second key.

resolv.conf issues

I had a tough time dealing with network issues for the past couple of
days. I usually like a few different search fields in my resolv.conf so
I can connect to my regular servers without typing the FQDN. So, I
wrote a cron job that runs every minute as root and updates
/etc/resolv.conf, which works so well on my Linux machine.

It worked well on my Mac too .... till I went home and connected to my
wireless network at home. resolv.conf refused to update itself to
whatever network I connected and I had to manually change it to the
Comcast domain and nameserver. Same thing when I returned to office
today, it still had the Comcast information.

Searching on the web didn't get me good leads till I was persistent.
One article mentioned something about /var/run/resolv.conf which made
my error clear. When I connect to a different network, lookupd seems to
update /var/run/resolv.conf and /etc/resolv.conf was just a link to
this file. I broke that link and broke my network preferences. Just
repairing that link solved my problem.

I'll have to think of a more intelligent way to write my cron script
... maybe update /var/run/resolv.conf, but for now I'm all set.

Keywords : DHCP, nameserver, domain, resolv.conf