Bluetooth on Hackintosh

Getting a working bluetooth dongle for Hackintosh seems to still be a bit of black magic. On a Lion 10.7.3, I tried the following two dongles:

• Sabrent BT-USBT – Automatically recognized; Could connect MagicPad; Multi-finger gestures cause the cursor to freeze for a few seconds
• Belkin F8T016 – Automatically recognized; Could connect to MagicPad; When coming out of sleep need to replug; Does not wake computer from sleep.

It is possible to get the Belkin F8T016 to show the “Allow Wake” in Bluetooth preferences by editing the IOBluetoothFamily.kext. But this made no difference – the MagicPad could not wake the computer and I still had to replug the dongle after waking from sleep.

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SSH / Putty Key Based Authentication Login

Instructions on restricting ssh login to key-based (ie not by password) and generating the keys necessary for the log-in.  This was done with putty running in Windows, and OpenSSH running on Debian.

Generate Keys with Putty

• Run puttygen.exe
• Choose either ssh2-rsa or ssh2-dsa
• Increase key size to 2048 (because we can)
• Click “Generate”
• Add a comment such “Desktop”
• Add a passphrase
• Save the private key
• Save the public key

Configure Putty to use private key

• Modify the profile that you would liek to use key authentication
• Go to SSH->Auth
• Under “Private key file . . .”, select the private key generated above

Configure sshd to accept private key

• Login to the target machine with the target username
• go to ~/.ssh
• Modify / create authorized_keys
• Copy and paste the public key saved above into the authorized_keys file.
• Make sure that you do not introduce any extra characters (like line returns) in the key

Test

• Test the set-up by logging in with putty.
• When you connect with putty, putty should ask you the passphrase to the private key, but you should not have to type in the password for the user on the target machine
• If it doesn’t work, figure it out!

Server-side modification

• Make sure you did the test, and you can log-in with the key based authentication.
• Modify /etc/ssh/sshd_config:

PermitRootLogin no
PasswordAuthentication no

• Restart sshd

/etc/init.d/ssh restart

Voila.

Shortcomings of Macbook Air (2010)

Here are some of the shortcomings of the Macbook Air (2010).  While I have the 13″ (4GB, 128GB SSD), most of it applies to all variations of the Macbook Air , including the 11″

• Keyboard touches screen, when closed.  Unlike other Macbook’s, there is no glass on the screen, hence the keyboard is directly touching and pushing on the LCD — which will probably lead to LCD bruising.
• No keyboard light.  The keyboard is not lit, and there is no light above the keyboard (eg ThinkLight).
• Confusing keyboard layout.  Page-Up, Page-Down, Home, End, Delete are all removed from the keyboard.  They are still available by doing key combos, such as Fn-Up for Page-Up.
• No indicator lights for power, sleep, or wireless.  There is no way to tell if your computer sleeping, on, or off.
• No Ethernet.
• No microphone port.

How To Setup strongSwan Proxy on Single IP VPS for Windows 7 Client

Introduction

This post explains how to setup and use strongSwan with the built-in Agile VPN Client in Windows 7.  This setup will create a IKEv2 IPsec tunnel with EAP-MS-CHAPv2 authentication.  This simply means you’ll have usernames and passwords, and everything will be authenticated and encrypted.  This setup is not the easiest, but it allows you to use the built-in VPN client in Windows 7 without any additional software.