HowTo – Brian Pauley

Flush DNS catch in OSX and Windows

worldchanger — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 17:21:33 +0000

Have you ever found yourself having a hard time loading a website and you know you that it should be loading? Chances are you will need to flush your DNS on your machine.

OSX 10.10

sudo discoveryutil udnsflushcaches

OSX 10.9

dscacheutil -flushcache; sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

OSX 10.7 – 10.8

sudo killall -HUP mDNSResponder

OSX 10.5 – 10.6

sudo dscacheutil -flushcache

Windows

ipconfig /flushdns

Memory Test for Mac

worldchanger — Thu, 09 Jan 2014 14:11:30 +0000

I recently ran into a problem with a used mac mini I had purchased from a friend of mine. He gave it to me fresh with Mountain Lion running on the machine, so the first thing I did was upgrade it to Mavericks. Life was great until I started to put the system under a load and started using it. Files I was downloading randomly began to get corrupted here and there. At first I thought the computer was overheating causing the corruption since it seemed to take some time for it to happen. Then I thought well maybe there was an issue with Mountain Lion and it just followed me into Mavericks, so I wiped it and started over. Not too long after doing so I ran into the same issues. Then it hit me it could be the ram. I took one stick out and it ran great for a few minutes. I thought well this stick is ok and there isn’t any problems here until my computer panic’d. No major deal it does that every once in a blue moon. I restarted the machine onto to find out it had some hard drive issues and needed a repair run on the disk. I booted the machine into recovery mode only to find out even disk utility couldn’t repair the disk and I had to yet again re-install OSX another time. I shut the machine down swapped ram with the one stick that I took out and got the job done this time everything went beautifully with no problems. I was still curious as to if the ram was really bad or if it wasn’t just plugged in all the way. Then after thinking about it I decided I wanted to know for sure so I set out to find myself a RAM tester for mac and found one.

MemTest for Mac is a free tool that does exactly what it says.

Download MemTest NOW [direct download link]

The file above is a zip file with an installer package. The software installed memtest in /usr/bin.

Test Your Mac

So what do you need to do? The process is simple. Open a Terminal window and type the following:

memtest all

If you want to give it a very thorough test then you can specify the number of times you would like to run the test by typing the following:

memtest all 2

The test by itself will take anywhere from 15+ minutes to complete. If the program crashes, or you see it erring out and failing tests it’s a good sign that you have a bad memory modules in there.

Good luck running your tests and verifying if you have a bad ram module and figuring out which one is the problem.

Local Websites in OS X 10.8.2 Mountain Lion

worldchanger — Sat, 22 Sep 2012 01:14:57 +0000

So for whatever reason after updating to OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.2 I couldn’t access http://localhost/~username. Every time I would try to load it I got the following error:

Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access /~bpauley/ on this server.

So in order to fix this you have to perform a few steps.

1. You need to create a file on the desktop and call it username.conf where username is your short username.
2. Past the following contents into the file you just created and again change username to your short username.

Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all

3. Copy the file you just created on your desktop into the /etc/apache2/users folder. You can do this by opening up a terminal window and typing the following command switching out username for again your short username:

sudo cp /Users/username/Desktop/username.conf /etc/apache2/users/username.conf

When you are prompted enter your administrator password.
4. Enter the following command in the terminal window again changing username to the short username:

sudo chown root:wheel /etc/apache2/users/username.conf

5. The final steps requires you to stop and start apache so type the following two commands back to back in the terminal window:

sudo apachectl stop
sudo apachectl start

You are done do a refresh and it will work