Development on Justin Carmony

Mac OS X Lion, /etc/hosts Bugs, and DNS Resolution

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 22:21:00 +0000

Final Update: I’m working on a follow-up post, but thanks to all the comments, it seems that somehow during the Snow Leopard to Lion upgrade, the /etc/hosts file was encoded incorrectly (likely the type of newlines used), and that Lion would fail to read it properly. Please try to copy the contents of the /etc/hosts file, recreate the file, and paste to fix your problem.

Update: I was still having problems with using .local for my development sites. After some extensive debugging and research I’ve found out some interesting things. It appears that Multicast DNS (mDNS), which is used in Apple’s Bonjuor for network discovery without a tradition DNS Server, has the Top Level Domain .local reserved for special mDNS functionality. Mac OS X will treat domains ending with .local differently! Use another TLD, like .dev, and it will work correctly.

Mac OS X & Wireshark - No Interfaces Found Fix

Thu, 12 May 2011 18:58:57 +0000

Alright, quick fix for a problem I always forget. When running Wireshark on OS X, when I go to select an interface to capture on, I get an error telling me there are no available interfaces to capture on. This is because Wireshark is running as a user that doesn’t have ownership on these interfaces.

Solution, open up the terminal and run the command:

sudo chown <username> /dev/bpf*

After a reboot, these permissions get reset, so you need to do it after each reset (and hence why I need this every now and then but can never remember the command).

Characteristics of Good PHP Code

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 01:20:02 +0000

At the time I am sitting in the Las Vegas airport waiting for a very delayed layover flight to San Diego. Wonderful weather causing all sorts of headaches. So I’ve decided to make the best of my time by writing the introductory article to a series of PHP articles. I’ve had this idea for a while, and now I’m going to finally sit down and write it.

A Different Type of Article

Local LAMP Developement & User Content

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 20:37:26 +0000

I’ve come up with a simple solution for handling user uploaded content when trying to work in a local development environment. I’ve installed XAMPP on my windows machine and at the beginning of every week I take a database snapshot and update my local database. I had a pretty smooth system going with one problem: user uploaded content.

When working with social networking sites, many times they allow for users to upload their own videos, pictures, etc. My current project wasn’t different, but I didn’t want to download 80GB of user content every week to store on my PC. I wanted a way to point my browser to the live server to get recent images, etc.