But once again, just like the last fix, this one’s a quick and easy edit too!

The file you’ll need to edit this time is ~/Library/Widgets/iStat\ Pro.wdgt/scripts/core.js

Find this function:
function getExtIP(){

And replace this line:
ipURL = 'http://whatsmyip.islayer.com/?random='+new Date().getTime();

With this line:
ipURL = 'http://www.whatsmyip.us/showipsimple.php?random='+new Date().getTime();

Then, just above this “if” statement:
if(extIP.length < 20 && ipConnection.status == 200 && extIP.match(/\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}/)){

Add these 2 lines:
extIP_len = extIP.length;
extIP = extIP.substring(16, (extIP_len - 3));

So that you have:
extIP = ipConnection.responseText;
extIP_len = extIP.length;
extIP = extIP.substring(16, (extIP_len - 3));
if(extIP.length < 20 && ipConnection.status == 200 && extIP.match(/\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}\.\d{1,3}/)){

Now just save the file and restart the iStat widget by either re-adding it, or just click on the widget and hit Command-R.

With plenty of options out there that wildly range in both price and ease of installation, I needed to find something that could be retrofitted into an existing home. Ultimately I decided to go with Insteon mainly because it works over existing power lines and RF.

The Ups and Downs

There are some quirks with this system which I’m hoping won’t be too much of a problem for me; the first is what’s described as communicating over phases in the electrical wiring which, put in simple terms, are the different branches of electrical wiring from the main panel. This is due to how the power comes into the home as 2 lines of 110V for regular home use and combined to provide 220V for larger appliances such as your stove and washer/dryer. The problem is, communications over power lines can have issues jumping between the two phases which means part of your home won’t get any of the commands sent from the controller or become intermittent. You can purchase a phase coupler which not only acts like a repeater and links your two phases when put on a different phase from the main controller, but helps increase the range of all your other modules at the same time.

The other issue this system has, which is also electrical related, is that it can be particular about any noise on the power line. Anything plugged into the wall or even lighting (some CFLs apparently can create interference), can create noise on the electrical system and garble commands. There is a filter you can buy to remove any noise from electronics that are plugged into the outlet but to me, it just seems bulky and could be expensive… I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it. Fingers crossed.

On the flip side though, the advantage with this system, beyond being able to retrofit it into an existing home, is that the more modules you have throughout the house, the better the system works. This is due to how Insteon works; when a command is sent, it is broadcast out to anything in the vicinity which in turn takes that command and repeats it again (up to 3 times), like a ripple in a pond. (Insteon has a great demo of this on their website)

The Hardware

For the main controller, I had originally wanted to go with the newly released Insteon Hub which looks great and seems to just work out of the box, but has some growing to do before it can really be as good as it’s advertised to be. Being the first model, I figured I would leave it to others to work out the kinks and decided to go with the more popular ISY-994i by Universal Devices which not only seems more reliable, but also has some greater abilities allowing users to create custom programs based on conditions and added functionality via optional software modules for weather, irrigation, and even integration with an Elk security system. Being a geek who loves to customize everything and tinker with things, I knew this would be a far better fit for me.

The ISY-994i however, does not work with the Insteon network straight out of the box and requires an extra piece of hardware by way of a 2413S PowerLinc Module (PLM) to do so, which is sold separately. I should also add that while it isn’t mentioned anywhere on the site, the unit does come with the power and ethernet cables you need.

For the modules I’ll be using around the house, I picked up a number of simple on/off switches and outlets, a 6 button keypad, 2 button remote, garage door status and controller, and front door lock. In hindsight, I should have gone with a few dimmer switches in place of the simple on/off ones for things like being able to slowly increase/decrease the lighting during the night in the washrooms and bedrooms but that’s also something I can order at a later time when I decide to expand upon my system.

I also ordered a thermostat but sadly, I found out that it would not be compatible with my furnace a few days after I had already placed the order. Unfortunately, there are no Insteon thermostats out there for my basic 2-wire furnace and have no idea if there are even plans to develop one so I’ll have do without that for now and stay with my current programmable thermostat.

Once everything arrives and I’ve had a chance to install and test a few modules out, I’ll write another post on my impressions.

The upgrade was straight forward as always and I had no problems. Youtube was gone, but now I had Passbook, Google was out and TomTom Apple maps were in!

One bug I noticed was that when you went into Passbook and hit the “App Store” button, you would get an error, “Cannot connect to iTunes Store” I dig some quick digging and found I wasn’t alone. Luckily there’s a fix and it’s quite easy. No idea why it solves the problem but it does.

Simply go to Settings > General > Date & Time, and turn off Set Automatically. Then change your date AHEAD. The poster suggests a month, I just changed the year. Either way, move it up.

Try the iTunes store again and it should work!

Then change your date back to what you had and you’ll be fine!

Thankfully, there’s an app for that, and it’s free! SlimBatteryMonitor is a fully customizable app that can be configured to display time remaining or percentage with or without an icon and in any combination for when you’re plugged in, charging and on battery power.

Personally I like seeing time remaining for when I’m on battery power or when the battery is charging, but when it’s full, I don’t really need to know that information so it simply shows the icon then. You can also change the colours of the battery for the different states along with the look of the battery itself.

The icon could be made to look a little nicer, I’d even like to have the option of having the battery in sections as if it were an LCD display but apart from that, you really can’t complain!

So even if you don’t miss the time remaining display on Mountain Lion, but you like customizing everything, I’d definitely recommend checking out this app.

This really only affects anyone who has multiple email accounts, so if you have just one, you won’t notice this at all.

What’s happening is when you reply to an email, Mail will currently use the first listed email account instead of the account the email was received from like it’s supposed to. Apparently this is something Apple is now aware of and hopefully we’ll see a fix for it soon.

In the meantime, one thing you can do is to reorder your accounts so your most commonly used account is at the top (making it the default account), and just make sure to pay attention if you’re replying to something received through another account.

To reorder your accounts, just drag the inboxes around on the folder list under Mailboxes. Thanks to a user on the Apple forum for clearing that up, I was going crazy trying to figure out why I couldn’t do it in Preferences.

The problem is that when you go to your outgoing mail settings, “Use Secure Socket Layers (SSL),” is always checked. When you try to remove it, it just comes back right away or when you leave the page and return to it. Hopefully something Apple will address in their next update (whenever that is).

Luckily, it’s a simple fix. All you have to do is, instead of using the “Default Ports,” select “Use custom port” and enter the port your mail server uses (usually port 25 or 587). Now you’ll be able to uncheck “Use SSL,” and you’ll be able to send out email again!

Thanks goes to Tonden who posted this solution on the Apple forums!

However, fortunately for us, a member on the Mac Rumors forum has found a quick and easy fix and all it takes is adding a space in two locations to the widget!

1. Locate your widget, it will be under /Library/Widgets or ~/Library/Widgets
2. Right click it and select: “Show Package Contents”
3. Open Wide.js or Tall.js file in some editor (Wide is for horizontal view, Tall for vertical)

4. Locate the line
WideSkinController.prototype.updateProcesses = function(){
var _self = this;
var exclude = "";
if(p.v("processes_excludewidgets") == 'on')
exclude = " grep -v DashboardClient | ";

if(p.v("processes_sort_mode") == 'cpu')
widget.system('ps -arcwwwxo "pid %cpu command" | egrep "PID|$1" | grep -v grep | ' + exclude + ' head -7 | tail -6 | awk \'{print " "$1""$2""$3,$4,$5""}\'', function(data){ _self.updateProcessesOut(data);});
else
widget.system('ps -amcwwwxo "pid rss command" | egrep "PID|$1" | grep -v grep | ' + exclude + ' head -7 | tail -6 | awk \'{print " "$1""$2""$3,$4,$5""}\'', function(data){ _self.updateProcessesOut(data);});
}
Change “PID|$1″ to “PID| $1″ (Add space before $ sign)

5. Save the changes

Works like a charm!!

I had done a bunch of reading on the subject before going ahead with this from which SSD I should get to what was the best way to configure OSX after the install. Everything looked pretty painless and straight forward and there didn’t appear to be any surprises (famous last words). A friend of mine knew about what I wanted to do so when he came across a $100 rebate from Intel on their 240GB 520 Series SSD, I took it as a sign and ordered the drive right away (Intel, I have yet to see my $100 rebate by the way).

With the SSD down, I looked at drive adapters to replace the optical drive. Going against most people’s suggestions, I went for the OWC Data Doubler Bracket. I was actually going to get a generic one off Amazon or eBay but reviews of people having them not fitting right steered me away. There were alternatives, but I liked the idea of a lightweight bracket and figured it wasn’t worth the hassle dealing with the UK or full on enclosure/adapters. I’ll admit though, it is a little more than I wanted to spend on a small piece of metal.

Now having the hardware down, and Mountain Lion being only a few short weeks away, I decided to hold out on doing the install until it was released so that I could take the opportunity to do a fresh new install of OS X. Today was that day. “Burning” the OS X installer to USB was really easy except that at the end of it, Disk Utility threw an error about Invalid Parameters or something. Doing a quick search actually showed the error could be ignored and the installer was in fact successfully copied to the USB drive.

All set! Time to install the hardware!

Installation of the SSD was as advertised, unscrew these, unplug that, swap form here to there… Extremely straight forward and the supplied tools from Mac Sales meant I didn’t even have to go dig up my own to do the job!

Once installed, I left the old drive unplugged just so there would be no chance of accidentally installing Mountain Lion to the wrong drive. Just as a backup in case there was any need for me to go back to the old drive before I was ready.

OS X install was quick as always. After the initial copy, the installation process only took about 15 minutes if not less and initial boot seemed almost instantaneous. Subsequent boots took a few seconds.

After reconnecting my original drive, I followed the instructions of creating symlinks to my documents, downloads, photos, and music directories. Most things fell into place, like iTunes, which acted like nothing ever happened but some things like ChronoSync, which I use for my backups, had to be set up again since it wasn’t able to follow the symlinks and freaked out about not finding the source directories. Not how I was hoping it would be but something I will have to live with.

Apart from that, I now have my system on the SSD and all my files and documents on the old HDD. Once I’m sure I’ve transferred all my application settings and whatnot, I’ll begin the process of deleting the old system files and moving the data directories to the root of the drive instead of the original user directory where it sits now.

Worth the price of admission? Not sure yet, but I’ll update with another post after I’ve had a chance to really run this setup through. Things do feel quicker but I’ll confirm that after I get over my initial excitement.

Mountain Lion? Can’t say I see too much difference yet, though I have to say I never knew how much I customized my OS until I did this fresh install. There were so many settings I forgot I had changed. Drag lock, double click the title bar to minimize, enabling tab on dialog box buttons, enabling mouse-over highlight in stacks… Not to mention all my little tweaks to Terminal!

A number of people recommended WordPress plugins like Firewall 2 and Exploit Scanner to stop attacks, but none of these worked (Which is not to say it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to, just wasn’t working for this particular exploit).

I flipped through the access logs in an attempt to find something that stood out, like an exceptionally long URL query string or multiple consecutive accesses to a particular page but didn’t notice anything until I thought about filtering down to just the POST requests to the site. That’s when I found the following entry.

83.69.224.227 - - [06/Mar/2012:10:35:40 -0800] "POST /wp-content/plugins/ToolsPack/ToolsPack.php HTTP/1.0" 200 1 "-" "Mozilla/4.76 [en] (Win98; U)"

The ToolsPack wasn’t anything we had heard of or even recognized and there were only 3 different IPs that accessed this page directly numerous times throughout the day across the affected sites. We had our culprit.

Viewing the source of the file confirmed my suspicions and revealed that all it did was decode and evaluate whatever text was posted to that script.

The only thing I haven’t quite figured out yet is how the script got there in the first place. I found a ToolsPack zip file in the WordPress uploads directory which would suggest something in WordPress allowed it to be uploaded and decompressed to the plugins directory, but what, I’m unsure of.

If anyone has any thoughts or information I’d love for you to comment and let me know your findings!

For now, I’ve removed the files, blocked the IPs and made all the index files 444 (globally read-only) which should help prevent this from happening again.

Well, since I had a RAID6 array, I let it be and worked with Adaptec on figuring out what the issue was from home. Unfortunately, it I never got around to trying out the suggestions (supposedly there was an option to add the drive as a Hot Spare, but I swear it was never even an option on the drive).

Jump ahead to a few days ago, I decided to take a look at the issue again. This time I was smart and downloaded the command line interface version of Storage Manager from the Adaptec site.

In normal situations, you simply have to make sure the drive is marked as a hot spare and the card will take over the rest but looking at the status of the adapter on my server showed the drive was in a ready state. (The number 1 here signifies the first controller, if you have more than one, you’ll need to change that number to find the right one)

/usr/StorMan/arcconf getconfig 1

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Physical Device information
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Channel #0:
Transfer Speed : SATA 3.0 Gb/s
Device #0
Device is a Hard drive
State : Online
Supported : Yes
Transfer Speed : SATA 3.0 Gb/s
Reported Channel,Device : 0,0
Vendor : WDC WD50
Model : 00ABYS-01TNA
Firmware : 12.0
Size : 476940 MB
Write Cache : Enabled (write-back)
FRU : None
S.M.A.R.T. : No
Device #1
Device is a Hard drive
State : Online
Supported : Yes
Transfer Speed : SATA 3.0 Gb/s
Reported Channel,Device : 0,1
Vendor : WDC WD50
Model : 00ABYS-01TNA
Firmware : 12.0
Size : 476940 MB
Write Cache : Enabled (write-back)
FRU : None
S.M.A.R.T. : No
Device #2
Device is a Hard drive
State : Online
Supported : Yes
Transfer Speed : SATA 3.0 Gb/s
Reported Channel,Device : 0,2
Vendor : WDC WD50
Model : 00ABYS-01TNA
Firmware : 12.0
Size : 476940 MB
Write Cache : Enabled (write-back)
FRU : None
S.M.A.R.T. : No
Device #3
Device is a Hard drive
State : Ready
Dedicated Spare for : logical device 0
Supported : Yes
Transfer Speed : SATA 3.0 Gb/s
Reported Channel,Device : 0,3
Vendor : WDC WD50
Model : 00AAKS-60Z1A
Firmware : 06.0
Size : 476940 MB
Write Cache : Enabled (write-back)
FRU : None
S.M.A.R.T. : No


So here, you can see that the state of Device #3 is “ready.” To initialize the drive, simply run the following command. The “0 3″ here relates to the channel and device numbers shown in the details for the drive I’m working on. The “1,” is once again the controller ID.
/usr/StorMan/arcconf task start 1 device 0 3 initialize

Once that’s done (should be pretty quick), you can move it in as a hot spare. The logicaldrive number is the ID of the combined drives. You’ll find the ID in the Logical device information from the earlier getconfig output. Generally this will be 0, but if you created multiple arrays, then this will differ.
/usr/StorMan/arcconf setstate 1 device 0 3 HSP LOGICALDRIVE 0

Now you can run getconfig again and see if the state has been successfully changed. To see if the controller is now performing it’s rebuild, just run getstatus, and see what it says!
/usr/StorMan/arcconf getstatus 1

Now, in my case, the drive showed as being a hot spare now, but still the controller would not rebuild the array, so with a few more emails back and forth with Adaptec, it was determined that somehow, the new drive had fewer sectors than the other 3 drives that were in the server making it unusable in the array! The drive was the same size, same brand, but the model was off. I’ll have to check when I replace the drive, but I’m almost certain I bought the same model (only newer) to replace the one that had failed…

To find this, you need to dump the logs from the controller.
/usr/StorMan/arcconf getlogs 1 uart

There are 3 other log files, but this one in particular shows the details of the physical drives attached to the controller right at the top. If you ever need to submit a ticket to Adaptec, you’ll need to attach these logs as well to help them diagnose your issues.

So there you go. If you find that after replacing a failed drive in your array, and nothing happens, make that the first thing to check!

As a side note, if you’re running ARCCONF under CentOS, you might see the error:
/usr/StorMan/arcconf: error while loading shared libraries: libstdc++.so.5: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

In this case, run the following command in order to load the library necessary:
export LD_PRELOAD=/usr/StorMan/libstdc++.so.5

You can also go and create /etc/ld.so.conf.d/adaptec.conf with /usr/StorMan in it and run ldconfig so you don’t have to keep running the previous command each time you login to use ARCCONF.