How to create a .iso image of a cd on a Mac OsX

As OsX is Unix based we have a lot of tools that came in the standard installation of our Mac.
To create an ISO file we have to use the dd command in our terminal.

Insert your CD-ROM into your CD-ROM drive, and then fire up your Teminal (Applications/Utilites/Terminal). Run this command to get the name of the device: drutil status

diegoMB:~ diego$ drutil status
 Vendor   Product           Rev 
 HL-DT-ST DVDRW GWA4080MA   BE39

           Type: DVD-ROM              Name: /dev/disk1
       Sessions: 1                  Tracks: 1 
   Overwritable:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Free:   00:00:00         blocks:        0 /   0.00MB /   0.00MiB
     Space Used:  336:26:02         blocks:  1513952 /   3.10GB /   2.89GiB
    Writability: 
      Book Type: DVD-ROM (v1)

As we can see here our drives name is disk1. To use dd we need to umount the CD-ROM:

diskutil unmountDisk disk1

Now we can use dd to create the iso file:

dd if=/dev/disk1 of=my_file.iso

after the iso file is created you can mount the CD-ROM with:

diskutil mountDisk disk1

;)

Howto: Share a directory between a Mac OS X machine and Ubuntu over NFS

Today I needed to share a directory between my macbook and a ubuntu virtual machine, I'll show you how. The main idea is to share the directory from my mac and then mount it in the linux machine. This is done using nfs, and here are the steps:

In our mac, open a Terminal and edit /etc/exports:

sudo vi /etc/exports

Add a line with the directory you want to share, and the network you want to grant access, in this case 192.168.0.0/16

/directory_to_share/ -network 192.168.0.0 -mask 255.255.0.0

Restart nfsd service (maybe you should enable this service with: sudo nfsd enable)

sudo nfsd restart

Check if everything is correct

showmount -e

After this you can mount that directory over nfs in another machine, to do this on Linux:

Check if you can reach the Mac and see the exported directories:

showmount -e my_mac_ip_address

If you see the directory in the list you can try to mount it:

sudo mount my_mac_ip_address:/directory_shared/ /mount_point/

Thats all the magic..