Liquid Lunch

don’t mind me…

After reading a whole lot about it on my frequent visits to mac-hacking sites, I decided to give MacFuse a test drive. If you’re not sure what MacFuse is, it’s a Mac OS X version of the FUSE file system for *NIX. What does it do? Imagine browsing an SSH server in the finder just like as if it were a mounted disk. Imagine drag and drop of images into a folder and having them appear in your Flickr account. Imagine read/write FTP access in the Finder. Yes, it’s true. At first glance, it may seem a bit daunting to deal with because the runtime is mostly command line based, but there is another way.

Michael Gorbach has created a GUI for dealing with a couple of MacFuse’s common file systems, SSH and FTP. MacFusion is a small app that lives in your menubar, and lets you define favorite servers and filesystems to mount with a couple clicks of the mouse, or you can have them automount when MacFusion starts.

I’ve only been messing around with this for a day so far, but I can’t help but wonder how I’ve survived this long without it. Do keep in mind that this is beta software and it is a kernel extension, so be wary and keep a backup handy just in case something gets FUBAR’d.

Yesterday I was satiating my addiction for blood playing Gears of War on Xbox LIVE! and out of the blue, it kicked me from the servers and wouldn’t let me back on. Baffled and confused, I did what any person in my situation would do. I panicked. Then I did the next best thing. After resetting my cable modem (because Roadrunner had been having issues as of late with the whole Adelphia/Time Warner shift), and then renewing my DHCP lease on my router, I still had no connection to the LIVE servers. I tested my connection from the Dashboard on my 360 and it reported that my NAT was moderate. Suspecting the worst I went to the Xbox support site and checked the list of supported routers and firmware versions.

I found my Linksys WRT54G(v2) and found that my current firmware ( the latest 4.0.x version) was not on there. Bummer. So after a little googling, I decided to downgrade to the highest supported firmware available (3.03.6). After the downgrade, I was able to connect to LIVE and I had my NAT back to open. Cool.
I started to notice right away though that I was experiencing a frequent disconnection and slow network speeds from my wireless components on my LAN. There had to be another way.

I decided to install the Tomato firmware. I had the alternative of DD-WRT also, but I just wanted a lean alternative. What I got was a lean alternative with a lot more functionality (and a cleaner interface). It also has a ssh/telnet daemon, a wireless site survey, bandwidth monitors, 2 simultaneous DDNS clients, and a plethora of other great features. I really can’t recommend Tomato enough if you are looking for an advanced solution for your LAN for no $$$.

I’m not going to go into all the details about the firmware, if you’re interested, the developers site is worth looking around.