Yes... yes it is... And it's storing all that information in an unencrytped file that can now be accessed using Pete Warden's free app, iPhoneTracker. Here's where I've been over the last 10 months.
Recently I was faced with a challenge. We needed to get our OWA/OMA sites out of the DMZ so we could stop Internet traffic from directly connecting to our Exchange server. The world seemed to give us two options: ISA firewall (which is upwards of $1000 plus hardware) or a reverse proxy.
I wasn’t a big fan of buying the Microsoft Firewall, the Windows Server license and the hardware, and there were plenty of reverse proxy appliances available, but this is only a temporary solution until we upgrade to 2010, so I didn’t want to drop change on those solutions either. I decided I would create a virtual instance of Ubuntu Server and install Apache with mod_proxy for the price of free. I’m not going to go through all the steps, but this snippet here is probably the most important part. Drop that into your /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000default file with your tweaks and it’ll be a great start. Luckily for us, our internal domain name and our external domain name were different, so there were no DNS issues. If your names are the same, you’ll probably have to do some host file tweaking. My actual configuration file is far more complex than this starter file, as I had multiple interfaces to monitor. Please excuse any references in the config file to multiple interfaces. I don’t claim to be a Linux expert, so there may be a more secure/efficient way to do this, but for me, this has worked great. The proxy uses almost zero resources and has yet to cause any problems after 3-4 months in production.Let me know how this works for you and if I can help in the comments.
Disclaimer: No promises that this solution will work for you. I take no responsibility for any changes you make to your configuration.I recently was trying to upgrade my iPhone to the 4.3 beta software, when I kept getting the 1013 error from iTunes towards the end of the restore process. I finally found out why iTunes couldn't connect to the Apple servers.
Apparently Cydia modifies your host file to redirect gs.apple.com to their servers. If you don't undo that modification, your iPhone cannot connect to Apple.
To correct this, open Terminal. Enter "sudo nano /private/etc/hosts," enter your password, and comment the line refering to gs.apple.com. The results should be similar to below. Hit ctrl+x and then Y to save.
### Host Database
#
# localhost is used to configure the loopback interface
# when the system is booting. Do not change this entry.
##
127.0.0.1 localhost
255.255.255.255 broadcasthost
::1 localhost
fe80::1%lo0 localhost
#127.0.0.1 gs.apple.com
#74.208.10.249 gs.apple.com
Then try the restore again.
I appreciate beauty and simplicity, especially when it comes to gadgets. I guess that's why I love Apple so much. I recently spent some time beautifying my iPhone, so I thought I'd share the results, as well as point you in the direction to do the same.
Let's start with the background, since it's the easiest. This comes from Jimsy and is available here.
The next thing I worked on was the Twitter for iPhone icon. I think the default is really dull compared to the app as a whole. Loren really had something nice in the beginning and Twitter's acquisition ruined it. I took some time and put my non-existant Pixelmator skills to use to come up with this.
I decided I'd share my work. Download the Twitter for iPhone (cough, Tweetie) icon here. Now, you may notice the little black line around the icon when you use a light background. As I said before, I'm no good with software such as Photoshop or Pixelmator, so by all means, fix it and share the fixed version.
In case you didn't know, you can change your iPhone App icons without jailbreaking. Lifehacker has a great tutorial on how to accomplish this.
Anyway, this is what I'm working with and I thought I'd share. I still haven't come across my Homescreen.me invite yet, so this will have to do for now. Enjoy!
Now share yours.
UPDATE: My homescreens.me profile
After the Jailbreakme.com website went live, I believe I was one of the first few to jump on board. I wanted to jailbreak my new iPhone 4 so I could get back to the fun loving I had with my 3G with WiFi sharing/tethering and SBsettings, etc.
I remembered seeing Wi-Fi Sync on YouTube and TUAW, but I also knew that it didn't get approved by Apple, so I thought I'd add that to my list of Jailbroken Apps to check out. After doing some further "jailbreaking," I figured I've probably screwed up more stuff that I needed to, so I wanted to do a restore. Haha, well that didn't go so well. The iPhone 4 continuously hung at approximately 60%, and iTunes reported about 99%. I'm not going to lie, I started to freak. After a Google session and a couple of beers I've determined that the Wi-Fi Sync component on the Mac was the culprit. After running their uninstall script, I was able to completely restore my iPhone. Cheers to that! I hope this helps someone else who is desperately trying to find the solution.This just in...
You can now jailbreak almost any iOS device (i.e. iPod Touch, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad) by visiting http://jailbreakme.com and swiping your finger across the screen. Dead simple. It installs Cydia in seconds.
In May, the company I work for made the dive into a virtual environment. I must say, I love the capabilities of the VMware environment. Restarting a server went from a 5-10 minute process to a 1 minute process, 2 servers replaced 10, and the ability to move Guest OS's from one host to other is absolutely amazing. Of course our implementation wasn't without fault, but it went fairly well.
Fairly well... Once our consultants split, we discovered that our backup solution wasn't cutting it. We had purchased Symantec's Backup Exec 2010 with the VMware APIs that allow vCenter to take snapshots and back those up. In case of failure, we just restore the entire VM from the snapshot. Easy, right? Yeah, if we could ever get a backup. Our data transfer rates were somewhere around the 200MB/min mark. When you're moving over 2TB of data...well, that takes several days. That's unacceptable. I won't go through all the steps of what I did to troubleshoot the problem, but it went something like this. VLAN'd off the iSCSI traffic, created a new subnet for iSCSI traffic, moved iSCSI traffic to a dedicated switch, enabled jumbo frames and updated every single driver and firmware available. At this point we would reach 600MB/min if we were lucky. I spent weeks on the phone with IBM, VMware and Symantec, trying every little solution they offered. Again, no help. Over a month later, the problem is solved and you'll never believe what it was... well maybe you will since you've seen the title of this post. The Backup Exec/VMware API doesn't work as expected. Nope, not at all. I would love to call Symantec and inquire about the issue, but I've spent 4 hours on hold before and never got issues resolved with them. Here is our workaround. Hopefully this will save someone some trouble one day. I had to install the Backup Exec agent on every Guest OS, just as if they were physical servers. Now we get speeds closer to 2,000MB/min which is a lot more acceptable. I would much rather use the VMware API, but for now, this is the only way we can get reasonable speeds. Maybe Symantec can squash some bugs soon and I can use the product as advertised. Disclaimer: This post is meant to be informative for others troubleshooting slow data transfer speeds using Backup Exec 2010 and the VMware API.Recently I migrated from Blogger and Wordpress to Posterous since I read lots of great things and saw many people migrating as well. Sometimes you shouldn't follow the crowd without realizing what you're getting into. Here's my problems with Posterous at its current state. Hopefully this will help educate you on some of the quirks you may face.
I'll jump off my soap box now. Hopefully these things will be addressed in future releases, but until then, be mindful of its limitations before committing.
Stick around for "What's Right with Posterous."
