Here's all the reasons you might want a VPN.

The problem was Bill Bullock was obsessive about our security/anonymity. So the customer portal didn't really work or hardly existed. Support was over email and a bit hope for the best. Your email address had a single subscription.

Worse yet, when you would go to renew your subscription, you had to create a new account and login.

From the beginning there were two services: Personal, which always included PPTP and now includes ipsec and L2TP and Pro which was twice the price and included OpenVPN. Both are secure but Personal is more easily blocked by governments or corporations as they can usually detect the protocol.

Witopia SSL Service: Tunnelblick then Viscosity

Witopia's upgraded SSL service was always a bit of a crapshoot. For years you had to fight Tunnelblick (one of the nastiest pieces of open source software out there, which requires advanced networking knowledge modifying a text file to get anything done: it defaults to not working and makes you move text files all over your computer, authorizing them each time you do). Then came Viscosity which worked a whole lot better. With your Witopia VPN you got a free preconfigured Viscosity client.

Then something went wrong with Viscosity. When you update Viscosity to keep up with Mac OS X, it's another crapshoot if your settings will carry over to the next version.

So as someone who tried to buy three licenses last year (Personal x 2, Pro x 1) for my company and ran in circles for weeks with absolutely silly suggestions from Witopia on how to fix my configuration, I can tell you the dream was over, the shine off of the hood. With the obliging help of Witopia's owner Bill Bullock finally we managed to get a single one of the personal accounts up and limping. Our ideas of using VPN regularly in the various departments at Foliovision went down the tubes.

We cancelled the other two and got on with our lives. OpenVPN on a small VPS turned out to be an even bigger catastrophe. After a whole day of programmer time settting it up, we were able to eke out 2 KB/sec performance. When Witopia is working, you are looking at anything between 1 MB/sec and 8 MB/sec bandwidth up and down. It's not the 100 MB/sec down and the 10 MB/sec up we have on our connection but it's not 2 KB/sec.

So with clients to serve and lives to live, we more or less didn't use VPN except in emergency.

For reasons of my own, I was using VPN via Witopia a fair amount in the last week. All was well until my VPN account wouldn't connect today.

Witopia happily enough has live chat support now. I lost hours with them today so you don't have to.

Why did my Witopia VPN die?

Witopia created a customer portal and consolidated everyone's account history and orders.

When they consolidated the orders some accounts clearly died. Including one of mine as it was a courtesy account offered for last year's nightmare. Tip: don't kill your courtesy accounts early.

Witopia's ability to consolidate our orders years later begs the question how private were our accounts in the first place if Witopia could consolidate them after the fact.

Locked out of the Witopia customer portal

The new portal sounded great. One problem: it was impossible for me to log in with my old username and password. No problem.

I'll reset my password. No luck: No such username.

Joe suggested I reregister. No problem. Wait yes there is, Username already exists.

Joe suggested I create another account using another email and then consolidate them. That sounds like a lot of work and lots of chances for misunderstandings and broken accounts. No, I want access to my existing account.

Joe needs his supervisor.

Tara comes online (last year Tara was the queen of alternative protocols who led me around an enormous emerald coloured garden of irregularly working VPN). Tara remembers me. A bit awkward. Like an affair gone wrong. Happily she doesn't hold a grudge and we get to work.

Fortunately, Tara is able to get a link which allows you to login to your account and reset your password. Remember Witopia is not access to your data. Witopia is only access to your VPN accounts, so security is important but not paramount. If someone sneaks into your Witopia account, the most they can do is cancel your VPN without asking or change your passwords on you or use your VPN surreptitiously for their own purposes (actually that could get you in trouble if they did illegal things while using your account: but the same applies to your home broadband connection).

Inside the new Witopia Customer Portal

So now I'm in the portal. There are all of my orders for the last three years. Hurray.

On the two active orders, there's 412 days left on one and 46 days on the other. The other is also listed as cancelled, with no options for checking data usage, resetting password or assigning the VPN to someone else.

Looks like portal consolidation this week killed off the courtesy account. Sloppy programming. Thanks sloppy Witopia programmers, you've just stolen two hours plus of my life getting all this working again.

Tara asks me to install Witopia software and use that to access my VPN. No dice. With this track record on working software, there's no way I'm letting Witopia's direct installer get at my network settings. I have work to do this week.

Remember Tara loves the alternative protocols. So I set up all of the different OS X VPN protocols following her instructions.

Alas no protocol, PPTP, ipSEC, l2tp will work.

Testing the main Witopia account

I give Tara the password for my main account (not the courtesy one) to test herself. Tara disappears for about seven minutes. When she comes back she announces that the account works just fine and it surely must be a local problem on my end.

I try to reconnect with a couple of the protocols I'd previously set up and tested unsuccessfully. Bingo, I'm on.

"See," admonishes Tara, "it was a local problem after all."

Yes, Tara, but I haven't changed anything in my settings. All that happened was you went and worked on my account with a tech.

Whatever Tara and the tech did while she was away did manage to reset my Witopia account and get it working.

Witopia Speeds

The second test was on an account with send all connections over VPN so I lost my connection to Tara.

Taking the occasion to test while logging on an on, I ran a battery of tests using SpeedTest.net which is nice enough to give both ping and transfer speeds.

Here's what I found:

ipsec New York
ping 111 ms
download 1.2 Mbps
upload 1.1 Mbps

l2tp New York with built-in Mac client
ping 109 ms
download 2.66 Mbps
upload 7.23 Mbps

PPTP New York
ping 110ms
download 9.7 Mbps
upload 7.36 Mbps

Witopia VPN Software

I was feeling optimistic after seeing all of these protocols work so I decided to give Witopia's custom built software a chance. The download is quick and the installer opens up automatically.

Witopia's software gives a nice blue icon like airport in the menu bar. It takes up less space than Apple's built-in VPN. I tried the built-in L2TP and got some surprising results.

L2TP New York with Witopia client
ping 114 ms
download 8.43 Mbps
upload 6.86 Mbps

I'm still using this connection.

Here's what the interface of the Witopia VPN client looks like:

WiTopia application interface extras

Witopia application interface

Using either built-in or Witopia client software is fine. If I had to do it again, I'd probably just stick with OS X's built in protocols. I'd use PPTP as it tests out very fast. If you want to use a lot of locations, then Witopia's VPN software might be for you as you won't have to build all the locations by hand.

Round two: trying to get OpenVPN up and running with alternative Witopia account

When I got back to my chat, Tara had gone home. A gentleman named Shirin had taken her place. We spent a lot of time trying to resurrect the dead account.

More or less hopeless.

The main OpenVPN connection is very fussy. It wouldn't work with either the Witopia VPN client nor with Viscosity.

Once installed, to reinstall it you need to remove several .kext via terminal. Viscosity which did work at one point, won't anymore. The updater won't update Viscosity and you have to manually find and reinstall all the certificates.

What finally worked was uninstalling launch2netpremium and then doing a hand search for all of its files (a nasty respawn filled networking logs to the point that it was impossible to tell what was happening with Witopia). Next step was to install and reinstall the Witopia client with reboots.

The whole affair required three reboots to work and deleting kexts. You don't want to do this. Viscosity still won't work but for now with the Witopia client I can get on OpenVPN SSL internet.

I spent over three work hours painfully troubleshooting this by hand. Effectively Witopia stole $500 from my company while I did this unpaid work. All I got out of it was this article. Don't you be so foolish.

To be honest, I would not recommend a Witopia Pro account. The amount of time you will spend fighting with software and with cryptic errors just will not justify the small increase in speed and security which OpenVPN brings.

Not only that but a WiTopia Personal VPN account is just $40 (renewal) or $50 new account, while a Pro VPN account is $70/year and will cause you to lose hours with unnecessary tech support.

If you are in China or Iran or some place where you really need OpenVPN, go ahead and spring for it. But be prepared to spend a lot of time troubleshooting.

Resources

Here's a nice historic comparison of Witopia and HotSpotVPN with interviews with both company owners, Bill Bullock and Glynn Taylor.

Here's why you might want a VPN.

Answer number one: you are travelling and need to be sure your web access is not being logged (at least only by your VPN provider).

Answer number two: you need access to another server from a fixed and known IP. It's possible with a VPN.

Answer number three: you want to watch Hulu or listen to Mog or Spotify while outside the United States. If you don't use Facebook, your one choice is Mog.

Answer number four: you need to sign up for some papers or service from outside your home country. I wasn't able to complete a birth certificate request from Europe until I came in via VPN and made the order via VPN.

By Alec

VPN for OS X: Witopia 2012 review (from a three year user)

Post from: Foliovision

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Basecamp uses Textile as the main editor (well 37signals have added some kind of WYSIWYG editor lately but for those of us writing messages, comments and writeboards for the last seven years, Textile is in our blood).

So what I want to be able to do is write all my posts and drafts in Textile and then convert them to html for publication (saving the original in Textile for further editing).

For a while I used iTextile a wrapper around a Python script. It worked pretty well but was kind of ugly and not customizable. I gave up on iTextile due to ergonomics. When I went to fire it up again yesterday, it turns out iTextile is PPC only and requires Rosetta. On my most recent machines, I've managed to get rid of Rosetta completely so I was warned about installing Rosetta. I'd prefer not to have the emulator overhead hanging around waiting to steal memory and cycles, so I said no.

There is an interesting application called MarkMyWords from xelaton.com in Germany. MarkMyWords allows you to write in the mark up language of your choice (important ones include Markdown, Textile, BBcode and Wiki syntax) and get html out on the other end.

Preview is live which is very cool.

MarkMyWords does what it promises very well and even includes full screen and distraction free modes. If you are looking for a new text editor, MarkMyWords has a lot to recommend it.

MarkMyWords edit window

MarkMyWords Downsides:

• MarkMyWords is another application to install and maintain and learn across all your computers
• MarkMyWords requires a change in workflow (I write mainly in BBEdit and other people have their own text editor prefernces)
• The icon is fussy and ugly.

MarkMyWords icon

Textile Editing on BBEdit

At this point, I was thinking what I really need is to get Textile into BBEdit. I don't know why the BareBones guys have been so lazy about adding a Textile module themselves. Apparently there's been Markdown syntax for a long time.

I found a reasonably good article about how to add Textile to BBEdit but the explanations aren't very clear and one of the download links is broken and the other doesn't give the right filename when unpacked. [Update: dpkendal's original version was broken - our own Martin Vicenik has fixed it for you and uploaded it.]

So for non-programmers, here's how to get Textile editing working on BBEdit:

1. download our Textil.sh filter from Github.
2. unpack the very long file gist1348479-0d1929ba5ff2b3e2b4293dd63254604b72d62b58.tar
3. you will get a folder with a file with this name in it: "Textile.sh"
   

   Note:If the github ever disappears, here's a local copy. We found that this script has some bugs in it's current version (the constants are not properly added). Before this gets submited to Github.com download the fixed version here: Textile.sh.zip
   Our version also won't convert single and double quotes to HTML entities. This should be an option in the original version, hopefully our changes get into Github.com soon.
   

4. move this file to /Users/~/Library/Application Support/BBEdit/Unix Support/Unix Filters/
5. go ahead and write some Textile
6. open up the Unix Filters palette: Windows -> Palettes -> Unix Filters
7. you should see Textile.sh at the bottom
8. when you are ready to convert your Textile to html, just doubleclick the Textile.sh item. You can create a hot key as well (very useful)
9. as it's BBEdit you can see your html and get a preview of it and then just use undo (command-Z) to get back to the Textile version for further editing
10. when you save your file, make sure you save the textile version
11. for bonus points before posting into WordPress or even Basecamp run the html optimize filter on the result to get rid of all line breaks: Markup -> Utilities -> Optimize

BBEdit unix filters palette

Bingo, you now have full Textile writing inside of BBEdit at zero cost. Apparently this filter will work for other text editors which accept php filters (TextMate among others) but I can't provide step by step instructions as BBEdit 8.7.2 is my weapon of choice.

I may still buy MarkMyWords as I have something of a fetish for text and html editors (own at least ten of them) and earn my living writing and coding. $25 for another work tool is no big deal. But I wouldn't encourage it's adoption across our company as that would be $200 for what most people wouldn't use nearly enough. Our programmers will be much happier with a working php script. On the other hand, Textile.sh doesn't require me to change my workflow at all.

This article full of ordered and unordered lists was written in BBEdit and Textile.sh with no issues.

Marked does not get a review here as Marked is AppStore only. I will not sign into or buy anything from the AppStore or even let it run on my computers (the AppStore is effectively a back door).

By Alec

Textile Editing on OS X: BBEdit, iTextile, MarkMyWords

Post from: Foliovision

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It's called Backup Bouncer and like the bouncer in a bar Backup Bouncer is there to keep the patrons honest. It will let you know ahead of time if your backup system is letting you down in complex ways, like not copying metadata or is blowing out resource forks or resetting creation dates.

These are the sorts of things you won't notice until you've lost your original and for some reason your Aperture or iPhoto library won't run properly anymore.

Of course, even a defective backup is better than none.

I was happy to see that my main backup tool SuperDuper! passes the test with flying colours. (For full bootable backup, Mike Bombich's CCC (Carbon Copy Cloner) is back in the game as well, after a couple of difficult years, passing all tests as well - as a past donater, I guess I own CCC as well.)

That's great news as it means I don't have to test SuperDuper! myself . Indirectly I do test SuperDuper! by booting from my bootable backup after most backups and doing a bit of work just to be sure that the bootable backup really boots and really works.

But as good as SuperDuper! is for a whole drive bootable backup, is it (and CCC) awkward for backing up a directory or two. You need a second program to be moving image or music files back and forth between two computers. And this second sync program is a bigger problem.

My secondary tool is for syncing directories and moving anything from 500 MB to 50 GB of data around. I use a little application called MimMac which is very easy to use and inexpensive ($10/per computer).

But MimMac is a bit of a black box. We don't really know what goes on inside. Everything seems fine, but what exactly is MimMac copying and how well?

As the backups are not bootable, MimMac is more difficult to stress test.*

Here's the Backup Bouncer report to save you the trouble of setting it all up and running it yourself:

Verifying:    basic-permissions ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:           timestamps ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:             symlinks ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:    symlink-ownership ... ok 
Verifying:            hardlinks ... FAIL (Important)
Verifying:       resource-forks ... 
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok (Critical)
   Sub-test:  on hardlinked files ... FAIL (Important)
Verifying:         finder-flags ... ok (Critical)
Verifying:         finder-locks ... ok 
Verifying:        creation-date ... ok 
Verifying:            bsd-flags ... ok 
Verifying:       extended-attrs ... 
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok (Important)
   Sub-test:       on directories ... ok (Important)
   Sub-test:          on symlinks ... ok 
Verifying: access-control-lists ... 
   Sub-test:             on files ... ok (Important)
   Sub-test:              on dirs ... ok (Important)
Verifying:                 fifo ... FAIL 
Verifying:              devices ... ok 
Verifying:          combo-tests ... 
   Sub-test:  xattrs + rsrc forks ... ok 
   Sub-test:     lots of metadata ... ok 

Not bad. The failures in hardlinks and resource-files in hardlinked is similar to Apple's cp-copy command. Failure in fifo only happens in ditto. FIFO stands for first-in-first-out. As far as I can tell, FIFO is not mission-critical for personal/local backups.

What MimMac gets right that most of the other methods do not get right is metadata. So Benjamin is paying attention. Still not clear what copying engine he's using though.

What is good about MimMac is that it is very fast. What is not so good about MimMac is that you can't do a test run. Either you run your sync or you don't so you can't find out about conflicts or mistakes before you press go. The speed probably makes up for the risk.

I would like to recommend MimMac but can't due to licensing methods. MimMac relies on the esellerate engine for license verification and each license is tied to your specific hardware. If Benjamin goes out of business or just gets tired of MimMac and you upgrade your computer or your hard drive, you have no further access to the software. Full stop. Period. For core programs, I much prefer either open-source (commercial open-source is fine, it doesn't have to be GNU) or if not open-source, at least just a personal license code which will continue to work even if the developer decides to stop work. I've lost enough software over the years to developers leaving the business, that there is no way I want my core functions dependent on whether another person's whim or even health.

Moreover when you switch computers, all software which is tied to hardware either has to be unlicensed and relicensed (forget it!) or it requires emails and phone calls to the developer (one obnoxious developer once told me for his $25 utility as a courtesy he would allow me to license it on my new computer once, but next time I had to unlicense his utility or he wouldn't issue a replacement key - what do these developers think: their two-bit utility is one of five applications we own: this licensing system just doesn't scale and reminds me of the Lubyanka in Moscow).

The worst developer in Mac backup actually runs background spyware applications on your network full-time if you decide that you want to use his software. The problem is that the spyware not only spies but steals significant background cycles and is constantly pinging the inside of your network, creating no end of dead-end traffic. While the solution is speedy, slowing down my computer is not on. At this point, licensing this guy's software is extremely dicey: you need to give him special codes for your hardware (not even the standard ones) and if you're lucky it might just work. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. He's made using his software so painful that from being the best solution, he's become the worst solution - as well as the most expensive. I guess he's been taking lessons from the RIAA paranoid and self-destructive school of copyright.

So I am looking for an rsync GUI, paid or not. One rsync GUI can always be replaced with another in the worst case. Unfortunately rsync doesn't pass the Backup Bouncer test unless you do a special install which means you have to tinker on all your computers (slowing you down) and that a certain number of these GUI won't work as they will be defaulting to the built-in Apple rsync.

Here's a couple of candidates to save you the time of searching for rsync GUIs (there's a lot of abandonware out there):

• aRsync 0.41. I don't like that a simple rsync GUI is 4.7 MB - what are they hiding in there? I don't like the Pirate logo on backup software. This is the kind of software which could compromise your whole hard drive or send out your financial data. No to pirates or unknown entities. I don't like betas for backup or sync software either. This is an area where you need 100% reliablility. Moreover aRsync fails many tests including semantic links, hard links, creation date, fifo and metadata. Ouch.
• Simple Sync 1.1. I don't know how well SimpleSync works. Perhaps very well if you do follow the instructions for updating rsync. If not certainly it will work as well as Apple's rsync with. It's worth noting that Simple Sync is just 210 KB - that's about right for a wrapper - and that Kevin includes both his mobile number and a link to his main company's home page on the Simple Sync page. I'm feeling much better about using this script already.

Maybe we will build a self-contained advanced rsync GUI ourselves and release it so that we can get the right version of rsync and a GUI - and then we can share it with the world. For the moment, SuperDuper! and MimMac are keeping us safely backed up and synced.

Whatever you do, don't forget to backup!

At least once a week.

For those interested in specific backup strategies for Mac OS X for photographers and other media intensive users, I've written another article called The Backup Manifesto.

* MimMac is capable of bootable backups but I have more trust in SuperDuper! both for technical reasons and for licensing reasons as outline later in the article. On the other hand, if you are willing to accept MimMac's licensing you can probably take a pass on SuperDuper! and use MimMac for everything, saving yourself $28 to spend on a replacement whenever Benjamin decides to abandon MimMac or change his licensing and MimMac won't run on your computer anymore.

By Alec

Backup on Mac OS X: Testing MimMac with Backup Bouncer

Post from: Foliovision

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I'd downloaded a 600 MB disk image to use with Parallels. The disk image came wrapped in a .rar format.

Unpacking the .rar file was very difficult.

• StuffitExpander crashed
• Forklift couldn't handle it
• Archive Utility just wanted to compress it further.

Finally I was able to unpack it with IAarchiver, slowly but certainly.

After unpacking, I was offered a directory with three files in it:

• image.img
• image.ccd
• image.sub

Clone CD img ccd sub files

I had no idea Windows used the archaic Mac .img format. It turns out that Windows doesn't. What I'd inadvertently downloaded is what is known as a Clone CD image. I was unable to mount it on my Macbook. No known solution or software for Mac OS X can handle Clone CD images. BIN and CUE files are no problem, but CCD files - there's nothing out there.

• DiskUtility wouldn't do it (error mounting the disk)
• Toast 6 wouldn't do it (although Toast did make me a coaster with the file when I changed the .img extension to .bin and used Copy Disk Image)
• Burn also made me a coaster, even after I followed elaborate instructions on renaming files and creating a fake .cue file
• Firestarter was a non-starter. It didn't want to use my DVD burner at all. In any case, Firestarter seemed confused about what to do with the files.

If one had a Windows computer with a CD burner nearby, the logical step would be to burn the .rar file to CD, move it to the Windows computer, mount it with the freeware Virtual Clone Drive (download) and burn it as a disk and bring it back to the Mac as a ready made CD. I didn't have a Windows computer handy - and it seemed pitiful that my Macbook with 10.5.2 couldn't handle a foreign disk image format.

I managed to convert the Clone CD .img / .ccd files to an .ISO file in the end though.

How?

Command line. Those command line addicts over on the Linux/BSD side of the fence have written a lovely utility called ccd2iso. It's a single command.

Unfortunately, ccd2iso is not included out of the box in Mac OS X.

You have to install MacPorts (ccd2iso might also be in Fink). If you haven't got MacPorts installed it's a bit of a drama.

First, you need Xcode. Xcode is the developer toolset.

If you install MacPorts without Xcode, you will be able to install it, but when you try to update you will get nothing. With DarwinPorts you will get this error:

sudo port -d selfupdate
DEBUG: Error installing new MacPorts base: 
shell command "cd /opt/local/var/macports/sources/
rsync.macports.org/release/base && 
./configure --prefix=/opt/local --with-install-user=root 
--with-install-group=admin 
--with-tclpackage=/Library/Tcl && make && make install" 
returned error 1
Command output: checking build system type... 
i686-apple-darwin9.2.2
checking host system type... i686-apple-darwin9.2.2
checking target system type... i686-apple-darwin9.2.2
checking for sw_vers... sw_vers
checking Mac OS X version... 10.5.2
checking MacPorts version... 1.6.0
checking for gcc... no
checking for cc... no
checking for cl.exe... no
configure: error: no acceptable C compiler found in $PATH
See `config.log' for more details.

So install Xcode as you were supposed to (I have Xcode installed on another Mac and thought I had it on the Macbook as well).

Breaking news

There is a workaround to avoid installing MacPorts, kindly provided by Jolyon.

Once you have Xcode installed, first you need to bring MacPorts | DarwinPorts up to date:

sudo port -d selfupdate

This takes a little while and generates a lot of messages: you are installing about a one thousand open source components, including Gnome, KDE and X11. I ran the updater a second time just to make sure that everything was caught the first time.

You know you're okay when you get this message:

The MacPorts installation is not outdated and so was not updated

DEBUG: Setting ownership to root

selfupdate done!

The next step is installing ccd2iso.

sudo port install ccd2iso

And to convert the rogue .img to .iso:

ccd2iso image.img mycd.iso

The conversion takes about ten minutes with a 600 MB file, but I can confirm that my disk image works as a perfect self-contained ISO. The .iso can be mounted in the Finder with DiskImageMounter and can be used directly in Parallels.

ccd2iso finished ISO

If you've already got Xcode and MacPorts installed, you're golden. You are two minutes away from converting your Clone CD image to ISO. If not, you have a 1 GB download ahead of you (Xcode) and some tinkering.

I wanted to have access to MacPorts on this computer in any case. An open source drag and drop converter for the Clone CD format for Mac OS X might be nice though. It would have been faster!

More discussion

emuforums: pscx

By Alec

How to Convert a Clone CD Image to ISO

Post from: Foliovision

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