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January 12, 2008

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Belkin UPS

Today I started smelling something really awful coming from behind my desk, like a rotten-egg sulfur type smell. But it was tinged with a slight metallic burn, very hard to describe, something that made me think it was electrical in nature. But it was very hard to localize. After a little sniffing around the office, I determined there was a corner of the room that definitely smelled worse than anywhere else, right where I had two UPSs and a power strip which provide power to that quarter of the office (driven off of two outlets). So immediately, everything gets unplugged. I'm taking no chances. And I start sniffing the devices as I pull them off of the power. The culprit? A Belkin UPS, barely a year old, which had started belching forth this horrible odor, and was getting worse even as I stood there holding it. Fortunately, I was home today, and it didn't have a chance to really funkify the house (at best) or catch fire (at worst); I suspect the UPS was on the way to meltdown, ...

This is not about Leopard.

(Photo: Gil, outside Epcot's "Living Seas" pavilion, Canon EOS Rebel XT) So after having a conversation with a friend of mine about sucky web interfaces to blogs, I'm trying out "MarsEdit", to see if it is better than using the Web interface to blogger. So far, it's nice, having access to the raw text being posted (and I like the ability to embed pictures automatically). I'll probably play with it during the 30-day trial and see how I like it. No more complaints about Leopard yet. :-)

Error 51 from Cisco VPN client under MacOS X

Of late, I have been repeatedly getting an "Error 51" when starting up my VPN client on MacOS X Leopard. The complaint seems to be that the VPN subsystem can't bind to a network interface. A quick Google search turned up this awesome blog entry, and from there, the workaround is pretty simple. Restart the VPN subsystem with: sudo /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN restart Sadly, this does seem to be an annoyance with Cisco's VPN client under Leopard when interfaces are changing -- adding/dropping an Ethernet port, say. I agree with the aforementioned blog's opinion that, being that telecommuters are mostly the ones using this client, it's pretty sad that the client can't seem to deal with changes in the system's network configuration. In any event, the fix works -- filing this away for future reference. Update: Found another site with a pre-compiled AppleScript application you can just run from the dock/bar. Thanks so much for this!

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