My RSS feeds on trick77.com don’t get refreshed in my Google Reader account anymore. Usually, new posts on my site show up in Google Reader within minutes or hours. It looks like the problem started in February 2011 and my site isn’t the only site affected, according to this thread and another thread in Google’s support forum. New posts are automatically submitted to Pingomatic from WordPress and are visible in Feedburner. The feed also passes W3C’s feed validation. I don’t do any shady SEO stuff and I don’t spam Pingomatic with updates. What gives?

This site’s feed does have a couple of Google Reader subscribers, would you mind leaving a comment if you see this post showing up in your Google Reader? Thanks a lot!

Update 3-3-2011: Google is caching a completely outdated version of the front page of this site. It dates back to the beginning of February. I don’t think that’s a coincidence, it must have something to do with my feed not updating in Google Reader. Interestingly, newer posts can be found in Google’s index, it’s just the main page that seems to have some kind of an update ban on it. Weird!

Update 3-4-2011: A closer look at my site’s Google Webmaster Central report revealed that this site served almost two thousand 404 “NOT FOUND” HTTP response codes for pages in the gallery area. The gallery pages look fine in a web browser though. Googlebot gets the 404′s while at the same time in my web server’s log file a HTTP 200 “OK” return code is being logged. An outdated flickr photo gallery plugin is responsible for these errors, the plugin isn’t compatible with the latest WordPress version anymore and obviously does some really weird stuff with the response headers. My theory is that the ratio of good and bad (not found) pages seen by Googlebot was so bad, that Google decided to flag my site. I fired the outdated flickr plugin and installed another flickr gallery plugin called slickr-flickr. So, over time, everything should be back to normal, even though that’s probably gonna take a while. To speed things up a bit up I requested Google to remove the old 404 gallery links from the index so Googlebot won’t crawl those non-existing pages anymore.

Update 3-9-2011: Everything is back to normal, Google Reader caught up all missing posts just a few moments ago. Looks like I was spot on with my assumption.

AFP network connections to many Linux-based NAS units aren’t working in Mac OS X Lion 10.7 developer preview. After hitting the connect button a message pops up saying:

The version of the server you are trying to connect to is not supported. Please contact your system administrator to resolve the problem.

The Time Machine backup feature present in many NAS obviously isn’t working as well because it’s based on AFP too.

You may say that this is a developer preview, things will change for the final release. That’s obviously true. But my source also says that this connection problem most likely has to do with Apple discontinuing support for DHCAST128 (or DHX) authentication in Lion because it was considered insecure. Instead, the successor of DHCAST128 should be used: the more secure DHX2 user authentication module. DHX2 is supported since Mac OS X 10.2 and supports up to 256 characters for passwords (hell yeah, that should be enough). It relies on CAST-128 in cipher block chaining mode for encryption.

I checked my QNAP NAS for available afpd/netatalk UAMs and DHX2 isn’t present, so it most likely wouldn’t work with Lion. Well, if it weren’t for Time Machine, I could always resort to SMB.

[/usr/local/etc/netatalk/uams] # ls -la
drwxr-xr-x      1024 Jan 31 23:08 ./
drwxr-xr-x      1024 Feb 25 20:14 ../
lrwxrwxrwx        14 Feb 25  2011 uams_clrtxt.so -> uams_passwd.so*
lrwxrwxrwx        18 Feb 25  2011 uams_dhx.so -> uams_dhx_passwd.so*
-rwxr-xr-x     10959 Jan 31 23:08 uams_dhx_passwd.so*
-rwxr-xr-x      5304 Jan 31 23:08 uams_guest.so*
-rwxr-xr-x      6996 Jan 31 23:08 uams_passwd.so*

AFP authentication might work if a uams_dhx_2_passwd.so authentication module was present and configured. It may not be a bad idea to raise this issue with your NAS vendor if you plan to use Lion in the near future.

Rumor has it that some NAS vendors intentionally disable DHX2 in netatalk because it’s a lot more CPU intensive. This could lead to longer login times when accessing AFP shares on NAS’ units with slow CPUs.

Update 2-26-2011: It has been verified that Lion is able to connect to a Linux host running netatalk 2.1.2 supporting the DHX2 UAM in afpd.

Update 7-15-2011: Check out this post for a status update on Time Machine support in OS X Lion 10.7.

A 100% reliable source sent me this output from the System Information utility (yep, it’s not called System Profiler anymore) in the Mac OS X Lion 10.7 developer preview.

APPLE SSD TS128C:

  Capacity:	121.33 GB (121,332,826,112 bytes)
  Model:	APPLE SSD TS128C
  Revision:	CJAA0201
  Serial Number:	        902A515CK0YK
  Native Command Queuing:	No
  Removable Media:	No
  Detachable Drive:	No
  BSD Name:	disk0
  Medium Type:	Solid State
  TRIM Support:	Yes

Yes! While this doesn’t mean we actually get TRIM support in the disk driver, it’s certainly a strong indication that Apple is finally implementing TRIM support in its upcoming Lion operating system. It’s about time.

Hey, I just brought my Apple TV 2 back from the living dead. After a botched firmware update all it did was flashing the white LED fast (about 3 times a second).
I followed the official reset instructions using the Apple remote but that didn’t help at all. Then I came across a few posts that said that by hooking up Apple TV 2 to a Mac using just a micro USB cable, you could actually restore it in iTunes. Those posts explicitly said that you have to disconnect HDMI and power and just plug in the USB cable. Read more »