Google Apps is kind of pissing me off.

Well, as much as I like Google and appreciate the free hosting and email they are providing for domain, they have issues.

For some reason, I can't have Google web pages enabled for my domain and use a custom Blogger address. No matter what I do, www.spazthecat.com always ends up getting directed to my Google Pages site. It's really irksome. I've completely disabled Google Pages but things still aren't squared away. I'm not quite sure how to fix it but there are all kinds of posts about this issue on the Google Apps news group. Doesn't seem like Google is listening very well......

The old SpazTheCat.com is now fully switched over.

I finally got the old SpazTheCat.com website migrated over to my own server. The new site is Spazjunior.com.

It's running on an old B&W G3 in my basement for now. I got tired of paying a hosting provider for such a low volume site.

Cisco VPN client won't load on Leopard

Well, after applying the latest Security update from Apple, the Cisco VPN client won't load. It is "unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem". After a little investigation, I believe the issue is not the security update but the kernel extensions used by VMWare Fusion. When I disable them, the Cisco client startups just fine.

To fix the issue, I did the following:

1. Startup the Terminal

2. sudo pico /System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/StartupParameters.plist

3. Remove the line that says "OrderPreference = "Late";

It seems that allowing the system to have full control over the load order fixes it. At least it did for me.

Geeklog installed on my B&W G3

Well, phase II of my transition to Google Apps has begun. I'll be moving the old spazthecat.com site over to my own hardware. The address is http://www.spazjunior.com. I've got Geeklog installed and functional despite having numerous "parse" errors. That error is being caused by file corruption but I can't figure out why it is occurring.

If you head on over you'll find the server specs for the machine I'm using.

Google Apps and Blogger don't always play nice.

OK. I have www.spazthecat.com pointed to my Blogger site. I decided I'd activate Google web pages and point pages.spazthecat.com at that. Well, when you do that, www.spazthecat.com doesn't resolve properly and you get 404 page not found errors. I have no idea why, but changing the custom URL in Blogger and then changing it back seems to have fixed it.

Another thing I've noticed is that it takes much longer for www.spazthecat.com to come up if Google pages is active on my domain or if I'm using www.spazthecat.com as the Blogger custom URL. Changing the custom URL to blog.spazthecat.com causes the page to come up much quicker.

Very odd.

Transition to Google Apps has lingering issues

Aside from the Blogger specific issues, everything seems to be OK with one exception. I don't seem to be getting any email from websites like eBay. I also subscribe to a couple of discussion groups on various websites and I'm not receiving emails from them either. Emails from individual people appear to be getting through just fine.

The only thing I can figure is that the MX record changes for my domain have not propagated through to all the name servers yet. Which is odd, because I can use Dig or various other web based tools to check the MX records for my domain, and they all return the correct ones.

Another oddity I found is that the DNS servers at my registrar don't appear to be authoritative for my domain.

I've logged a support case with my DNS registrar. We'll see what they have to say about it.

SpazTheCat has moved to Google

Yesterday I moved spazthecat.com to Google Apps and Blogger. I figured I'm paying my hosting provider too much money for a pretty low traffic, low use website and email service that could be hosted for free on Google. While this sounds good, it hasn't been an easy transition. Blogger has been problematic and Google Apps has some limitations they don't tell you about.

The old spazthecat.com can be accessed here for now and webmail is here. I do plan on moving it off onto it's own domain in the near future and hosting it on my own hardware just to play around. The move off of the domain hasn't gone smoothly for my Geeklog install either. The site pretty much works except non of the images load and I'm not sure exactly why.