Getting POP Mail to work with 10.7 Lion - Fix

While we generally advise our clients to hold off on upgrading to newly released versions of OS systems until they have had time to mature, and for vendors to provide compatible apps, many our of customers will still upgrade regardless. And when they do, the 'broken' reports fly in.

The most glaring break in Mac OS X Lion 10.7 has been POP mail compatibility.

Hundreds of users from varying ISPs, companies and institutions have reported that the new Lion Apple Mail 5.0, while working fine for IMAP, can no longer make successful authentication handshakes while in POP mode.

While most of our newer customers are IMAP users, our older clientele tend to be POP.

Though there are many mail server systems out there, we will focus on the Perdition Mail Proxy server for POP.

If your ISP, company or institution uses Perdition POP then there is a chance you will see an issue with Lion depending on its configuration.

Below are the changes that should be made to the perdition configuration file.

Before Perdition 1.8 a proper delimiter was two spaces " " but starting with 1.8 a proper delimiter is now a '.' space.

So in the Perdition configuration file instead of having a

"--pop_capability" string perhaps of:

TOP UIDL USER LOGIN SASL

It should instead be:

TOP.UIDL.USER.LOGIN.SASL

Once this change occurs, apart from successful POP handshakes while in Lion Apple Mail, the results can also be seen when querying the server with a telnet session.

You should see server response change from:

$ telnet [your server] 110

Trying [server IP]...

Connected to [your server].

Escape character is '^]'.

+OK POP3 perditon ready on [your server]

capa

+OK Capability list follows, mate

TOP UIDL USER LOGIN SASL

STLS

to

$ telnet [your server] 110

Trying [server IP]...

Connected to [your server].

Escape character is '^]'.

+OK POP3 perditon ready on [your server]

capa

+OK Capability list follows, mate

TOP

UIDL

USER

LOGIN

SASL

STLS

We hope this will be useful to Perdition admins with newly minted Lion customers who are most likely roaring about Lion's POP problems.

Go Go

iPhone Nano Revealed

Following on purported images of an iPhone 5, Go Go has received an artist rendition from one of our reliable sources on what was described as "close to final design" on the long rumored "iPhone Nano". While few technical specs were provided, our source did disclose the screen size would be the same as the current iPhone 4 (though possibly sans the IPS technology). Yet, the device would still be close to 1/3 less in size. This feat is apparently achieved by removing the Home button, which symmetrically speaking, allows reduction at the top of the bezel as well. Our source indicated the Home button action would be replaced by a five finger gesture (previewed to developers in iOS 4.3).

We are cautious with this information but nonetheless excited at the possibility.

Go Go

Mac OS X 10.7 Lion now with DFS support

While customers in a home setting would never notice, those in enterprise or education were far too aware of the glaring omission of support for Microsoft's DFS (Distributed File System) in Apple's SMB/CIFS implementation.

For institutions in which cross-platform environments were the norm they would generally have to build their entire file share technology around this limitation. Rather than having the ability to organize shares into logical units, or even include the ability for transparent fail over, only direct top level shares could be created (sometimes creating an unmanageable sea of directories). For those that chose to implement DFS irregardless of the Mac's ability it would usually then necessitate expensive licensing from add-on products such as Thursbys ADmitMac to provide the needed DFS capability.

After extensive testing here at Go Go we can safely say that 10.7 lion has support for DFS which should help ease the burden of enterprise storage administrators as they move forward. The man pages relating to the newly created SMB utilities in Lion also directly reference DFS. From the man page of 'smbutil':

dfs smb://[domain;][user[:password]@]server/DfsRoot[/DfsLink]
Display the Dfs referrals for this URL for the authenticated session.

Great news indeed.

Go Go

Bye Bye Rosetta & Adios Eudora!

With Apple's announcement of Mac OS X 10.7 Lion came the news that PowerPC binary translator technology "Rosetta" will be dropped for the OS revision. While Rosetta has allowed many PowerPC apps to continue to run, and made transitioning from PowerPC to Intel quite smooth, it has now largely become a hindrance keeping many Mac users stubbornly on out of date PPC apps.

Here at Go Go the biggest offender is Eudora for which many of our HiEd contacts refuse to give up or simply have become stuck in it due to the overwhelming migration woes it carries.

With Rosetta finally coming to an end, the pill will finally have to be swallowed, and apps such as Office 2004, Fugu and the aforementioned Eudora will finally come to a technological end. While we will miss Eudora's cute Pigs who faithfully alert you of new mail, we won't miss Eudora's tendency to implode on itself. Appropriate for the moment, "that'll do, Pig. That'll do."

Go Go

Playstation 3 - Converting PS3 incompatible MP4s into PS3 playable MP4s (no transcoding)

When it comes to consoles the gaming side is a toss but here at G0 Go we firmly believe the Playstation 3 is the most capable media center from the pack.

Below is our first look at hints, tips and hacks on getting the most out of media playback.

The PS3 has great playback capability but like the other consoles occasionally you have to massage your media files to get them to actually play.

Like many videophiles we appreciate quality and will do everything possible before having to transcode a file and lose quality.

MP4 playback on the PS3 will occasionally run into compatibility issues that arise from various factors such as file header information and profile levels.

Below are the steps you need to convert Playstation 3 incompatible MP4s into Playstation 3 compatible MP4s without transcoding.

1. Using mp4box, available for the Mac and PC, obtain the profile level.

2. Using your favorite Hex editor, many available for free, open the mp4 file.

3. Find the Profile Level hex string using the chart below and from mp4box info:

Right next to the ascii "avcC" string, you can find the Level hex code:

42E0xx: baseline

58A0xx: extended profile and low complexity aac

4D40xx: main profile and low complexity aac

6400xx: high profile


The xx is the level.

Level 5.1 is "33"

Level 4.1 is "29"


4. Do a Find and Replace All to level 4.1 since it is the highest the PS3 will playback (so if 640033 then change to 640029)

Your file should now be able to play!

Go Go

Check an MP4 file's profile level

From the Terminal on the Mac or CMD on the PC, type in:

mp4box -info

Sample Command:

mp4box -info samplevid.mp4

How to spoof a MAC Address on a Mac

We find this command incredibly useful for all kinds of test purposes.

However, this procedure only works on certain models of Apple's hardware.

Here at Go Go we have been successful with the current line up of Apple's Macbook Pros.

In the Finder, go to /Applications/Utilities

Open the Terminal

Type in:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether

Press enter.

A sample of this command would be:

sudo ifconfig en0 ether 00:10:3F:7C:53:CD


Now your Mac can masquerade as any network device of your choosing! This is useful when trying to force a router to hand out that initial lease that devices like printers and NAS boxes generally have trouble doing when set to DHCP (since they are not “chatty” enough).


To verify whether your Mac took the command, type in the terminal:

ifconfig en0


It should report back the MAC Address you entered.

To get the Mac back to normal, just restart.

Go Go