Introduction

Slicehost is a virtual private server (VPS or Slice) provider that is built on top of Xen Source. They have built their own management interface for Xen called SliceManager. Slicehost is SysAdmins’ Chronicles hosting provider and has been for the last three months. This article will review SliceManger, SliceHost as a VPS provider, and our overall experiance with them so far.

Cost

The currect costs as of October 29th, 2007 are:

Plan	RAM	HD	Bandwidth	Monthly Cost
256slice	256MB	10GB	100GB	$20
512slice	512MB	20GB	200GB	$38
1024slice	1024MB	40GB	400GB	$70
2048slice	2048MB	80GB	800GB	$140

Source: http://www.slicehost.com

SysAdmins’ Chronicles is currently using the smallest plan, 256slice.

If you have ever had an issue with System Preference Icons disappearing or changing to some odd looking icon then run the following command to reset you caches for the preference pane and it will rebuild the icons.

rm ~/Library/Caches/com.apple.preferencepanes.*

Introduction

In this post the main objective is to get the Terminal used in Mac OS X works with expected behavior as oppsed to the erratic behavior that it normally does. The cause of this erratic behavior is caused by the terminal type that Apple Terminal defines itself as. Luckily in Apple Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Apple has fixed the issue by creating profiles.

Setting The Required Variables

Mac OS X

Here is an example of my Mac OS X Client running the default terminal profile.

[rvalente]:[~]% uname -a
Darwin poseidon 9.0.0b5 Darwin Kernel Version 9.0.0b5:
Tue  Sep 18 20:47:38 PDT 2007; root:xnu-1207~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

Default Mac OS X Terminal Type

[rvalente]:[~]% echo $TERM
xterm-color

My Custom Terminal Type

[rvalente]:[~]% echo $TERM
vt100

Solaris

Here is an example of my Solaris Server. It is running Solaris 10 08/07

[rvalente]:[~]% uname -a 
SunOS zeus 5.10 Generic_127112-01 i86pc i386 i86pc

Solaris ZSHRC Configuration File

Here is my .zshrc on my solaris server to match the TERM variable with my Apple Terminal profile.

[rvalente]:[~]% cat .zshrc 
limit stack 8192
limit core 0
limit -s

umask 022

export HISTSIZE=1000
export SAVEHIST=1000
export HISTFILE=~/.history
export PS1='[%n]:[%~]%# '
export TERM=vt100

setopt autocd
setopt nobeep

source ~/.aliases

As you can see below that once that .zshrc is loaded when the login shell is started the correct value is set to the variable TERM.

[rvalente]:[~]% echo $TERM
vt100

Setting up your local profile (with pictures)

Open ther Terminal menu and select Preferences… menu. Select you current profile or create a new profile and set the following options as displayed in the picture below.

Put the folloing lines into your ~/.profile then run pman $APPLICATION to view the man page in Preview.app

 pman() {
    man -t "${1}" | open -f -a /Applications/Preview.app/
 }

This Tip of the Day is brought to you by MacWorld

To change your default login shell in Mac OS X Tiger and Leopard first we must find the options we have. This is done by

Prometheus$ cat /etc/shells 
# List of acceptable shells for chpass(1).
# Ftpd will not allow users to connect who are not using
# one of these shells.

/bin/bash
/bin/csh
/bin/ksh
/bin/sh
/bin/tcsh
/bin/zsh

Note: There are a few ways to actually go about changing the login shell, a few of these options are chpass, chsh, using dscl, etc.

For this tip we will use chpass and change our login shell to zsh.

Prometheus$ chsh -s /bin/zsh rvalente
Changing shell for rvalente.
Password for rvalente: 
Prometheus$

Enjoy using your new default shell