Useful Git config on Mac OS X

[From Git Configuration by Arthur Koziel] The two most useful that I was unaware of:

TextMate as the default editor:

git config --global core.editor "mate -w"

Opendiff (FileMerge) to resolve merge conflicts:

git config --global merge.tool opendiff

Reverse SSH forwarding

Two servers: remote1 and remote2. Remote1 is behind a firewall.

Situation 1: Port Forwarding

You want to be able to access remote2’s port 2222 as though it was on port 1111 of remote1. That is, telnetting to remote1:1111 will transparently connect you to remote2:2222. On remote1, type:

remote1:~$ ssh -L 1111:remote1:2222 user@remote2

Use this when you want to access services running on a remote server as though it was on the local network, such as accessing your iTunes share remotely.

Situation 2: Reverse Port Forwarding

You want to be able to access remote1’s port 2222 as though it was on port 1111 of remote2. That is, you want to be able to connect to the server that is behind the firewall, using the other server as a proxy of sorts, punching through the firewall. On remote1, type:

remote1:~$ ssh -R 1111:remote1:2222 user@remote2

Use this when you want to be able to remotely access a server that’s behind a firewall.

To ensure that its connection is restarted if it dies unexpectedly, you can type:

while true ; do ssh -R 8022:localhost:22 suso@my.home.ip.address; \
sleep 60 ; done

If you’re running this on a Mac, you’ll want to play around with the launch daemon, launchd and its magical XML files. I recommend just using Lingon instead.

Source

Many thanks to Suso’s SSH on Linux Tutorial. It goes over some other useful stuff, too.

Renice all process that match grep on Mac OS X

Fink is compiling and slowing my system to a crawl. UNIX systems come with a command-line utility called renice, which modifies the “niceness” of a process, where “nice” processes allow others to execute first. To make my system more responsive while fink is compiling, I would like to make all processes associated with fink ‘nicer’:

sudo renice +20 -p `ps ax | grep fink | grep -v grep | awk '{print $1}' | tr 'n' ' '`

Much better. +20 is as nice as they get.
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Create a compressed DMG

The quickest way:

hdiutil create -srcfolder "Source Folder" "File to Output.dmg"

Note that it uses “Source Folder” as the root of the DMG; you may want to put “Source Folder” into an empty, similarly-named folder and compress that instead.

Also check out EasyDMG, a Cocoa wrapper for hdiutil.

Watching video on an sshfs-mounted volume

Summary: Use the following options when mounting with sshfs: -o cache=no -o direct_io to avoid jittery video.
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