Recently I purchased a new Mac laptop. I moved my iTunes data from the old laptop to the new one. The first time I tried to sync my iPhone 6 it said I had to have encrypted backups. I have no idea why. I didn’t have that setting checked. However, that isn’t the main problem. When I first synced it asked me to authenticate with iTunes. When I declined it popped up a few more times and I declined repeatedly. Finally it started to sync. I was watching my phone and I noticed that my app icons started to disappear. At first I thought maybe this was normal, but after a few moments I realized this was a disaster. I pulled the cable out of my phone, but by this time the damage was done. I was left with 23 apps out of a previous 99.

I thought about the options, and decided rather then to sync with my old computer. This would not have brought back the data anyway. I decide to sync again with the new laptop. This time I authenticated. I noticed right away that it put all of my apps back onto my phone, even creating the correct folder structure. Problem was, all the the data in the apps that were deleted was GONE. I spend over 3 hours re-configuring my apps. I lost a lot of data. Including two games I had been playing for over 6 months. Along with all of my progress. I had backed up my phone not too long before with dropbox and other online services. So, extremely critical data was recovered, but not all.

I’m really pissed this happened. My wife kept asking why this would happen. I speculated that because I didn’t authenticate iTunes Apple thought me a pirate and therefore assumed I didn’t have ownership to my own apps. This is my best guess. My wife said she feels she is no longer in control of what happens with her iPhone when syncing.

iTunes didn’t even provide a warning before wiping out my apps. I don’t remember seeing a message that said, if you don’t authenticate, all of the apps from your phone will be deleted. That would have given me a chance and I would have clicked an enthusiastic NO.

I really like my Apple products, but I don’t know how this could happen.

As an aside, I’ve noticed when setting up iPhones and Apple computers more and more is dictating how your data is stored without giving the user a choice. It’s forces iCloud on the user, and it’s not easy to find the settings to turn all of it off. I know Apple wants to integrate services, but it’s doing it with a heavy hand. Unless the user is savvy they will not even know what’s going on. I’m an expert and I still wonder sometimes. I turned off a lot of iCloud services after they were defaulted to on, on my new Macbook.

As far as insisting to encrypt my backups, I’m lost. I have no idea why now it’s doing this. iTunes provides no reason, and no other option to move forward. I like encryption, but on my terms, not Apples.

Maybe it forces encryption because of health data. The option to uncheck is greyed out.

I would like to see Apple explain what it’s doing and why, and give users the chance to decide for themselves.

How to setup a Cisco router with multiple WAN IP address and forward ports to multiple VLANS.

The router I used was the Cisco RV220W. I believe other Cisco routers have this functionality, but I have not tested them. I suspect if it’s a Cisco router that has One to One NAT it can do this. The problem is in one to one nat you can only add one rule per WAN IP. It gives you three choices; forward all ports, forward a single port or sequential port range. For example you could not forward port 80 and 443. You would have to forward either 80 through 443, or forward all ports from a single WAN to Lan or Vlan. Here is how to forward multiple ports for each wan to a Lan or Vlan.

First I setup One to One Nat. Click on any image for a larger view.

This is where I added the rules. For this configuration to work I needed one to one nat. Simply adding port forwarding or firewall rules would not forward multiple WAN IP’s to multiple VLAN’s. For each WAN IP you can only add one rule, and once a single rule for one to one NAT is established a firewall rule with port forwarding starts working.

Note: you can forward all internet traffic to any internal VLAN or IP, but for security reasons I didn’t want all ports forwarding to a single internal LAN.

This is the detailed view of the rule. The range length specifies that a single WAN IP is used. For example if I had selected 2 for Range Length. This rule would have applied for two IP address: xxx.xxx.122.147 and xxx.xxx.122.148.

I added a firewall / port forwarding rule, the router was smart enough to add the rule to the list of port that were forwarded.

The OpenVPN is defined as a single port or a port range. I can’t remember, but either way it should work. The part at the bottom is important. Sent to local server (DNAT IP) destination nat. I added my VLAN IP here. I checked Use other WAN Destination IP and added the WAN IP that I wanted to forward the OpenVPN port.

Once I added the firewall rule it showed up in the port forwarding section.

Here is the details of the port forwarding rule. I guess it’s important to add the rule in the firewall section because it give you the ability to specify the VLAN and WAN IP address.

Remember: If you want to forward multiple ports on different external WAN’s to the internal network, VLAN or otherwise, you only need to add a single 1 to 1 nat rule. Do this in the one to one rule, (NATing a single port) then add your firewall / port forwarding rules to add additional forwarded ports under the Firewall setting.