Things I've found useful

Just recently I upgraded a Centos 4 machine which broke OMSA, this post helped me fix it.

Just recently I wanted to be able to lock a single process to a specific CPU for testing purposes. A bit of googling lead me to thisnice explanation of how it works.

Essentially you use the taskset command to run a new proc locked to a specific CPU:

% taskset -c 1 sleep 10

Will run ‘sleep 10′ locked to CPU #0.

% taskset -c -p 1
pid 1's current affinity list: 0,1

Shows you what PID 1 has its affinity set to.

Every time I need to use this modem on a new mac I end up fighting with it and often giving up. I’ve made it work this time, so I intend to document the process here so I dont spend hours googling next time.

These instructions worked on my iMac and my MacBook Pro both of which were running 10.5.7.

Before you start, make sure the modem is not connected.

First off download the drivers, the ones buried in the three.co.uk support site lack a actual installer even though the documentation suggests you just need to run the installer. WTF am I supposed to do with a bunch of .kext files three? Have you heard of a nice user experience? Clearly not. Click this link and download the zip file from here, inside is a standard OSX installer package. run that.

After that has installed, you dont need to reboot. Plug in the modem and wait a few minutes. The little LED started flashing blue occasionally for me which I think means I’ve got 3G coverage.

Once its calmed down open up network preferences where you should see a few new devices down the left hand side:

The device you are interested in is the HUAWEI Mobile, select that. Then in the ‘Telephone Number’ field enter *99#:

After you have done that click the ‘Advanced’ button. On the resulting pane, select ‘Generic’ from the Vendor drop down. Then select ‘GPRS (GSM/3G)’ from the Model field. If you are in the UK, enter ‘three.co.uk’ into the APN field and leave the CID as 1:

Click ok, and then click Apply on the main Network Preferences pane. After you’ve done this try clicking connect and you should see the following connection confirmation:

A nice little utility to monitor your connection is CheetahWatch which you can get from here.

Just found out how to turn on vmware-tools clocking syncing from inside the guest, rather than editing the .vmx file on the host.

Once you have vmware-tools installed and configured try this:

/usr/sbin/vmware-guestd --cmd "vmx.set_option synctime 0 1"

To verify this has worked look for this line in the corresponding .vmx file:

tools.syncTime = "TRUE"