I’ve finally found some time to write something, but instead of repeating everything here’s a link: google groups bbedit (I’m “diskerror”)
January 14, 2010
September 20, 2009
Snow job?
I’m having trouble with Aperture (2.1.4) running on OS X 10.6.1 on a new Mac Pro. Controls have stopped working like Crop and Retouch. Web searches show that many people are having trouble with Snow Leopard, mostly with iTunes and Safari. Nothing with Aperture. I installed 10.6 over 10.5. I’ll try doing a clean install later.
August 13, 2009
Debian
I’m sorry to say I had to give up on Gentoo. A couple of weeks ago I decided to take some of my studying and re-apply what I discovered and reinstall Gentoo on my HP server. I figured I was good at it now. The install failed. It started to boot then reported that a file was missing. Hm… Do I really have the time to figure this out. I suspect that files on the Gentoo site are changing often and that days “stage” or “portage” may have had bad files. My coworker is of the same feeling now. He suggested Debian.
There just isn’t time in a shop with just the two of use to coax along and tweak a Gentoo install.
For some reason the first Debian disk wouldn’t boot on the HP so I burned a second from the same image, suspecting it was just a bad burn. Once the install process was started it had trouble finding the CD drive it just booted from (a known problem mentioned in the literature), but selecting the rescan option worked just fine. Four minutes later it was ready to boot. It seems to be working fine. I noticed that the “i386″ install CD actually installed i686 code on it, which is what I thought the server was to begin with. Cool.
Yeah, a four minute initial install for Debian as opposed to 45 minutes for Gentoo. I haven’t completely given up on Gentoo. It’s just not right for us.
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August 7, 2009
HFS+ is not for servers
Apple’s HFS+ file system is not for servers. Your system disks will become corrupted and your system will crash after a few months of constant running. I realize this is a pretty strong statement. I’ve had four different hardware platforms running four different versions of the OS. The only one that didn’t crash was the first one because—as far as I remember—it was never running very long before a restart. These have been configured with basic LAMP services including AFP file sharing, and Darwin or Quicktime Streaming Server starting with the G4.
The systems were:
- G3Desktop at 300MHz with a 3.5″ 10Gig ATA drive running OS X 10.2 or 10.3 client version,
- G4 blue tower at 450MHz with a 3.5″ 40Gig ATA drive running OS X 10.4 client version,
- Mac Mini G4 (1.2GHz?) with a 2.5″ 40Gig ATA drive running OS X 10.4 Server,
- Xserve G4 dual 1.0GHz with the system drives configured with two 120Gig 3.5″ ATA drives in a software mirrored RAID running OS X 10.4 Server.
As I said, all but the first system had problems with the drive’s data corrupting. I would notice this because friends would tell me their email to me started bouncing. Many times the only way to fix this was to start up the computer and run DiskWarrior’s disk repair utility and rebuild the directory structure.
The last time this server, the Xserve running 10.4 Server, crashed was the end of November 2008. The drives were repaired with DiskWarrior. It’s been set to restart automatically every Sunday night and has been fine since then. File system checks are automatically performed each time a system starts up as part of a regular system start up and can only be performed on a boot volume when starting up or from another disk.
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August 2, 2009
Information Age
Most people say the information age started with the internet. I say it started 550 years earlier with the printing press. That’s when information came into mass production. Before that, books were written one at a time by hand. Yes, the Chinese and Koreans had movable type several hundred years earlier but opinions I’ve read suggest their ‘alphabet’ was a bit unwieldy to make the process work. There were a lot of years at this slow pace by modern standards when the two Industrial Revolutions of the late 1700s and mid 1800s made the presses more efficient. The invention of the internet did make the dissemination of information tremendously easier. Still, this is just another simple step in the exponential change that always happens with technology.
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July 29, 2009
Using a Maxtor OneTouch II USB hard drive with Solaris 10 x86
My wife uses Solaris as a home desktop system and worked this out: instructions. I hang with a great crowd ;-)
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July 27, 2009
EmulateIE7
I’d quickly grabbed the meta tag text from some web site a few months ago to make IE8 behave like IE:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=EmulateIE7">
but it didn’t work. There’s no trailing slash because the site I’m concerned about has the doctype:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">.
Only XHTML requires the “/>” at the end of non-closing tags. I was having our account reps (ARs) tell our customers we don’t support IE8; just IE7, Firefox 3, and Safari 3 & 4. The others might work, they’re just not supported. That’s enough testing for this small shop. I found the correct meta tag to save us from having to change a lot of CSS:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=7">.
It doesn’t seem to need to be at the top of the head as I read in a few places. I’ll be doing more testing to confirm and then we can add IE8 to our supported list. I think the characters “EmulateIE7″ were only used in one of the beta versions and now just “7″ is what is appropriate.
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July 20, 2009
Moon
If you’re over 45 do you remember where you where you were when we landed on the moon? I think it’s one of those moments where many of us remember it vividly. I sure do.
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April 6, 2009
twit
It’s time to give up on Twitter. I see that it’s too focused for my uses and too few people I know use it. For my usage it’s redundant to the status updates of Facebook and Myspace. I’ve heard of people carrying on long daily group conversations. I’m glad they found each other. Go have fun. I canceled my account.
January 30, 2009
local software update
It took a little digging but I got it to work and shared here to be sure working information is out there. The command-line command to be given to unmanaged Macs on a local network so they will look to a local OS X 10.5 Server for software updates is:
> defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL http://[local_domain_name]:8088/index.sucatalog
or
> defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL http://10.1.1.9:8088/index.sucatalog.
It didn’t need root access. It needs the “index.sucatalog”. It may or may not need the full path to “com.apple.SoftwareUpdate”, I didn’t test that combination. And the full path never hurts. It doesn’t need quotes around the URL. It needs the port number, in this case the default “8088″ was used. Either an IP address or a fully qualified domain name may be used.
We have an internal DNS server so we’re using a local domain name, just in case the IP address needs to be changed. That way the individual workstations don’t need to be changed.
Don’t you love it when the manual is wrong?
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2009-03-04 Another addition: I -really- do want good info out there… I found this explanation and it makes sense:
There are three options, depending on exactly how you want the preference saved:
1. defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL “http://update.server.address:8088/”
This writes the pref only for the user that runs the command, and only affects the GUI Software Update tool.
2. defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL…
Writes the pref system-wide, so any user who runs the GUI tool will get the specified server.
3. sudo defaults write com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL…
Writes the pref for the root user, so the command line ’softwareupdate’ tool will use the specified server.
The “index.sucatalog” is not needed.
This would explain my confusion about whether or not to use the full path. To be fair about the manual, it may have said elsewhere that the “defaults” command can effect the individual user or be system wide.
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