dot mac hack

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Secret-Fire's picture
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dot mac hack

been bored all day. bored bored bored. anyway...

I just saw something slightly interesting over on the OSx86 forums, and it got less interesting as I read it, but it gave me an idea. The poster claimed that it was a dot mac "hack," and that excited me, but I see no hack whatsoever (it involves installing WebDAV on your computer to use another, free, service, kind of like dot mac... God... I hate WebDAV... it killed Spymac for me).

again, anyway...

What I was thinking was hacking the dot mac stuff on our OS X installations would be kind of cool. Sure, dot mac is neat just the way it is, but for what's offerred, I'm not sure I want to pay $100/year for it. But if I could hack the control panel (and all the apps that are capable of accessing it) to point, instead, at MY servers... or any server I wanted to, that would be pretty neat.

So... *nix gurus and OS X geniuses... lets get to it, lets explore this idea of using the stuff Apple built into the OS to access their proprietary dot mac services into customizing our individual boxes to access, say, a B&W you might have online at home...

What might be involved here (I don't know a whole lot about dot mac, never having used it)?

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Secret-Fire's picture
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nice...

wow... that didn't take long.

Thanks for the link... Its not so often I see the very exact thing I asked for. I'm dedicating tomorrow to trying this.

Curious... why isn't anyone competeing directly with .mac?

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yeah you would think microsof

yeah you would think microsoft or someone else would come out with something to compete

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very very cool, but needs just a bit of work

I've been mulling over this for a while. I thought it would be an elegant backup solution for the new laptops at the office. I spent a little too much time reading about the set up of the webdav server before stumbing across why it could be perfect for the geek at home, but will never work in a university setting. Simerson very clevery figures out all the ports and addresses that .mac is accessing, but in the end does something that's a deal breaker. He uses his own DNS to fool his computer into thinking .mac is at another address (his webdav). The tin-foil hats I work with (well, on the tech listserv, anyway) would never go for it. They'd never configure a university DNS to do that, and they'd never let me run my own in the department. For some reason, I thought the story was going to end with either a) a config file hidden somewhere that could be altered to make the client .mac stuff point anywhere you want (yeah, right... that stuff's probably locked in the source somewhere), or b) adjust the routing tables on the client so that anytime it tries to call .mac, to call somewhere else instead. I think b would work, I just don't have the $k1llz to do it (yet). I believe Simerson didn't use that method because he still wanted to access his .mac account. Well, at least 99% of the work is done. I've got a week and a half before these laptops get deployed, and I seriously doubt I can learn what I'd need about routing to make it go, and test it... and trust it... not to mention acquiring and setting up a resource to be the webdav, getting that up and hunting, and getting it to back up too. But at least I've got some new long term goals.

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Just add a few entries into /

Just add a few entries into /etc/hosts to change the DNS settings. There's no need to do it at the university server if you're willing to configure it on the client machine.

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