Month: August 2011

Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
Politics without principle.

Mahatma Gandhi, Seven Blunders of the World

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tricking Leopard Installer for Older Macs

Thanks to this article at lowendmac.com, you can install Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (the most modern and last Mac OS to support PowerPC) on macs that don’t meet the 867 MHz CPU requirement the installer checks for. This has been quite handy for my G4 Sawtooth, Mystic and Tangent machines.

Insert the Leopard install DVD. Reboot into Open Firmware by holding down Cmd-Opt-O-F following the tone. At the prompt, type the following exactly:

Single Processor:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\:tbxi

Dual Processors:

dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@0
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
dev /cpus/PowerPC,G4@1
d# 867000000 encode-int " clock-frequency" property
boot cd:,\:tbxi

Bingo. The system reboots and passes the CPU speed check the installer performs. This trick will last until the next reboot, when the property returns to normal.

Configuring Postfix in Mac OS X 10.5 Server with Dyn Standard SMTP

As a happy user of MailServe Pro on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard “client”, I was assuming my migration to Leopard “Server” would be worthwhile by getting a more capable admin GUI for the built-in Postfix mail server. So far, it’s been a little more complicated than that.

In this configuration, I’m using Dyn Standard SMTP to relay SMTP and configured the 10.5 Server Admin accordingly:

But when I send mail, I get the following error in the SMTP log:

postfix/smtp: warning: SASL authentication failure: No worthy mechs found

Great. After double checking the password, authentication settings, port, etc., it turns out the lovely Server Admin GUI (a major driver for the upgrade) is a little buggy when it comes to editing the Postfix config files. Reading closely in the FAQ from Dyn, you have to manually edit /etc/postfix/main.cf by adding:

relayhost = outbound.mailhop.org:2525

smtp_sasl_security_options=

Mind you editing config files is exactly what I was hoping to avoid with Server Admin. In fact, this worked fine in the prior setup using the client OS with MailServe, no edit required. I plan to post more about the server setup and why I’ve chosen vintage equipment to run it on, but for now I need to document some of the gotchas of this upgrade. I hope this is the last post!