At some point I realized that the AirPort Express wasn’t able to keep up with the full speed of our internet connection. Here is a speed test using a direct connection to our cable modem:

Connected to our wireless network (802.11g, with 2 – 3 devices connected at a time):

So, we were losing a little bit of speed there. (I think the upload speeds were just a fluke in my not-so-scientific benchmarks… all subsequent tests showed more consistent upload speeds.) This may or may not matter to you depending on how you use your connection. As a web developer I’m downloading large files all the time, and I also like to try and gauge the comparable speed of our web servers against other websites out there, so having a fast connection is important.

If we upgraded to 802.11n, we needed an access point that was “dual-band,” since an iPhone and one of our computers only supports 802.11g. Without dual-band support, the entire network would slow down to support the lowest common denominator.

Setting up the Airport Extreme was easy. It even copied the settings right off our old Airport Express (same network name, security settings and passwords). After it was connected, I reconnected the Airport Express to use just to stream music to our stereo.

Here are the new speedtest results using the Airport Extreme:

As you can see, this is pretty close to connecting to our cable modem directly through an ethernet connection. The 802.11n band, at the moment, is much less congested and it’s a lot more resistant to outside interference (no more internet time-outs when microwaving!). Our older devices can still connect at their speeds without limiting the performance of the whole network.

Overall I think it was a worthwhile upgrade. If you are thinking maybe your wireless network isn’t so hot, try testing your connection to see if your router is to blame. If your computer supports it, upgrading your network 802.11n can definitely speed things up, and if you have older devices (or iPhones) using the same network, make sure you go with something that has dual-band support.

Update: Here was my result when I connected to the AirPort Extreme via ethernet. Obviously one test in each setup isn’t enough to get highly accurate results, but it was good enough for me. In this case, connecting through the APE with an ethernet connection added no latency to my internet connection, and was only slightly faster than connecting wirelessly.

My first attempt was to use PECL to install APC, but that didn’t work, so I had to rely on these instructions. They worked perfectly with my setup: OS X 10.5.8, entropy PHP Version 5.2.9 (release 7) running x86_64.

Apple – Support – Discussions – Entropy php5 with GD support and APC ….

Release Notes – Sequel Pro.

ack-tmbundle

via protocool’s ack-tmbundle at master – GitHub.

export SVN_SSH="ssh -p xxxx"

where xxxx is the port number. That works well if all of your SVN repositories that you access via SSH use the same port number, and if you *don’t* use svnX.

svnX doesn’t use your .bash_login environment variables before running it’s commands, so it’s doesn’t see you want to use a non-standard ssh. However, you *can* add custom ssh hostnames that use your non standard port, and then pass these to svnX as the path.

Open up ~/.ssh/config (or create it if it doesn’t exist) and add a host name like so:

host svn1
  Hostname svn.yourdomain.com
  Port xxxx
  ForwardAgent no
  ForwardX11 no

And then finally, when you put in the path in svnx, use “svn1″ as the hostname:

Path: svn+ssh://username@svn1/path/to/repository

svnX will now be able to access your svn repository through a non-standard ssh port.

I like to put new unix-y applications in /usr/local. I have mysql, svn, libpng, and now symfony in there too. So, let’s open up a terminal, and create the new directory.

$ mkdir /usr/local/symfony
$ cd /usr/local/symfony

Now it’s time to checkout the code from the SVN repository. You can checkout whatever release you want, but it’s probably best to check out the latest stable version. If you want to take a look at what’s available, you can visit http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/. As of this post, the latest version is 1.0.11. So, make sure you are in your new /usr/local/symfony directory and then type this:

$ svn checkout http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_11/ .

You will see a long stream of files scroll by in your terminal window. That is all of the symfony magic getting loaded onto your computer. After it’s done, you can verify you got everything with svn info and will see a little status report:

$ svn info
Path: .
URL: http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_11
Repository Root: http://svn.symfony-project.com
Repository UUID: ee427ae8-e902-0410-961c-c3ed070cd9f9
Revision: 7177
Node Kind: directory
Schedule: normal
Last Changed Author: gregoire
Last Changed Rev: 7177
Last Changed Date: 2007-01-20 09:22:33 -0500 (Thu, 29 Nov 2007)

Now, we want to set up the “symfony” command line tool. Rather than make calls like:

$ php /usr/local/symfony/data/bin/symfony [your command here]

…let’s add the symfony tool to our path so we can just type “symfony” and have that be that. Check to see if /usr/local/bin is in your path. If it’s not, you can add it. Here is what my path looks like:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin

There it is! First in the list. /usr/local/bin. If you don’t see it and want to add it to your path, open up ~/.bash_login with vi or your favorite text editor and add something like:

$ export PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:$PATH"

Now, if you had to add to the PATH variable, you close your terminal window and open up a new one to get the latest PATH variables. Last thing will be to create a link to the symfony command line script in /usr/local/bin to it’s real location in /usr/local/symfony/data/bin/symfony. Yes, we could have just added this full path to our PATH, but that seemed a little messy to me. I’d rather not have to mess with my PATH any more and continue to put new scripts in /usr/local/bin. Let’s make the symlink:

$ cd /usr/local/bin
$ ln -s /usr/local/symfony/data/bin/symfony symfony

Done! Now, you can type “symfony” from anywhere in the command line and it will run your shiny new SVN installation of symfony. If you want to go right into making your first symfony project:

$ cd ~/Sites/
$ mkdir shinyNewWebApp
$ cd shinyNewWebApp
$ symfony init-project shinyNewWebApp

When it comes time to upgrade, you can do this:

$ cd /usr/local/symfony 
$ svn switch http://svn.symfony-project.com/tags/RELEASE_1_0_XX

Feel free to share your experiences in the comments section.

Make the repository

Substitute REPOSNAME with the name of your repository (aka the project name).

$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/svn
$ sudo mkdir /usr/local/REPOSNAME
$ sudo svnadmin create /usr/local/svn/REPOSNAME
$ sudo chown -R www:www /usr/local/svn/REPOSNAME

Configure Apache

I used textmate to edit a new text file named svn.conf, you can use vi or whatever you want.

$ cd /etc/apache2/other
$ mate svn.conf

Inside /etc/apache2/other/svn.conf:

LoadModule dav_svn_module /usr/libexec/apache2/mod_dav_svn.so
<Location /svn>
  DAV svn
  SVNParentPath /usr/local/svn
</Location>

And now restart apache…

$ sudo apachectl graceful

Finally, check out your repository to make sure it worked: http://localhost/svn/REPOSNAME.

Final notes

You may want to secure access to your repository through a password file. In a nutshell, you can use something like sudo htpasswd -cm /etc/apache2/auth/svn USERNAME (you can create this file anywhere but I like to keep all my auth files in a custom “auth” directory). Then edit your svn.conf file and add these lines right before the closing ‘Location’ tag:

Inside /etc/apache2/other/svn.conf:

AuthType Basic
AuthName "SVN"
AuthUserFile /etc/apache2/auth/svn
Require valid-user

If you need more detailed instructions you should head over here.

1. Step 1: Backup current windows partition. To do this I used Disk Utility and an external USB hard drive.
   • I had some free space on this external drive, so under Leopard’s Disk Utility I created a new partition at 6GB called “Windows Backup” (without losing any existing data on the drive!). I used the standard Mac OS Extended (Journaled) format.
   • Once the new partition is finished, select your existing windows drive in Disk Utility, select the “Restore” tab, then drag the existing windows drive from the desktop into the “Source” field. Then, drag the new “Windows Backup” partition on your backup drive over to the “Destination” field. Don’t check “Erase Destination Drive” as that might give you an error. If you want to make sure there are no files on the backup drive, you can use the Disk Utility to erase it by selecting that drive in the list of volumes on the left and then using the “Erase” tab.
   • Click “Restore” to start the backup of your current windows drive onto the backup volume.
2. Once the backup is complete, run Boot Camp Assistant and use the option to restore you disk to a single Mac OS X Volume. Scary, I know, but remember you just backed up your Windows disk!
3. Once the Windows partition has been zapped, run the Boot Camp Utility again and create a new Windows partition. Drag the partition slider to the new size (I chose 32 GB, let’s hope that’s enough this time!). Insert your Windows installation CD, and then hit Start Installation. Restart.
4. Format the Boot Camp Partition in the Windows World.
   • When the Windows installer starts, Press Enter to continue, then F8 to agree.
   • The next screen is the file system format screen. Select “Format the partition using the FAT file system (Quick)”. You should use FAT in order to restore from the mac world because OS X can’t write to NTFS. After this is all over you can convert the file system to NTFS from within Windows later if you want.
   • Continue to format the partition as FAT32. Once this is complete, your computer will restart. Once it shuts off, as it’s booting up hold down option to boot back into Mac OS X. If you miss it and Windows is starting up, hold down the power button to turn the computer off and then power it back on holding the option key.
   • Source: here.
5. Restore Windows!
   • Open the new Windows hard disk from the desktop. There will be some windows files in there… delete them all. Drag them to the trash and empty it. Some files may reportedly be lockec, but click OK to continue.
   • Now, locate your windows backup location that you used in the first step, and copy these files from the root level of the folder to the new Windows hard disk: ntldr, NTDETECT.COM, boot.ini, and PAGEFILE.SYS. To do this I had to use terminal because I couldn’t see these files from the finder. If you can’t see them either, open up the terminal (in Applications/Utilities) and us the “cp” command.

     cd /Volumes/Windows\ Backup/
     cp ntldr /Volumes/NO\ NAME/
     cp NTDETECT.COM /Volumes/NO\ NAME/
     cp boot.ini /Volumes/NO\ NAME/
     cp PAGEFILE.SYS /Volumes/NO\ NAME/

     Once those are copied (my PAGEFILE.SYS was HUGE by the way, so if terminal seems to be ignoring you just let it run…), select the remaining folders and files and copy them to the Windows hard disk.
     Reboot into your Windows partition. Goto Apple > Restart and then hold down option, or go into System Preferences and select the Startup Disk icon to select the windows partition (the new one!).

   • When windows starts up, let it run chkdsk, then let it restart itself back into Windows.
   • Once booted into Windows, I got a notice that I had to re-authorize my Windows Installation. This is a huge pain in the butt, so I said “Later…” and hoped it would go away when I started Windows from within fusion.
   • Restart, holding down option to boot back into Mac OS X.
6. Now we need to get the new Boot Camp partition working with Fusion. For this I used the tips here.
   • Delete the VM config file (/Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/VMWare Fusion/Virtual Machines/Boot Camp/[your /dev/disk#]/Boot Camp partition)
   • Start up VMWare Fusion using “Boot Camp”. It will rebuild the VM file for you and then boot Windows. Hit cancel to avoid re-installing the VMWare tools (since they’re already installed).
   • Celebrate! Windows didn’t ask me to reauthorize my copy! Everything works great (hopefully) and you now have a 32GB Windows partition.

Hopefully this well help you along the way. If you run into any problems I probably won’t be of much help, but feel free to post here and hope others have solutions for you.

127.0.0.1       myproject

Now, any requests to http://myproject/ should be recognized as a local host and your DNS servers will no longer redirect you.