Glog

A few months ago, when Mac OS X Lion came out, I tried installing it on the Mac Mini in the living room. It failed. Miserably. After a couple of hours of trying different things (including making a bootable USB installation disk) I gave up, since it had thankfully not horked the Snow Leopard install. Life went on.

I had hoped that a newer release might have fix the issue, which was apparently related to having the internal disks in a RAID set. The symptom is that Lion would boot and get stuck with a rolling candy bar. With 10.7.2, I still had issues. I went brave and decided to nuke the internal drives (which required some diskutil CLI love in the form of having eraseDisk go on both internal drives for a few minutes, enough to remove the RAID metadata). Progress ensued.

But then got the cryptic, unhelpful, and decidedly generic “There was a problem installing Mac OS X. Try reinstalling” message.

What?!

Oh well, nothing the Googletron couldn’t take care of.

And so another Lion cub is roaming the house, stuck in the living room, restoring entertainment media.

A couple of weeks ago the Mac App Store featured a calendar app I had not seen before: BusyCal. It’s the gorgeous, customizable and very usable desktop calendar that iCal should have always been. Highly recommended.

With the deployment of the MacMini3,1 as an important box, I wanted to have timely backups and easy recovery, and that is one thing Snow Leopard does rather well with TimeMachine. Attach a disk, configure as a TimeMachine destination, and done, right? Not exactly: I noticed that TimeMachine was only backing up the system if there was a user logged in, something that’s rather rare on this box (in fact, there is generally no display or keyboard attached to it).

It turns out that this is normal behavior, as the system unmounts all external volumes when a user logs out, including TimeMachine volumes (this does not apply to network volumes, just volumes physically attached to the system). There are some edge cases that affect somewhat this behavior (such us when FileVault is in use), but it can be completely disabled:

defaults write /Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/autodiskmount \
     AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin -bool true

I went ahead and rebooted the system. TimeMachine now works even when users are not logged in.

A few months ago the aging Early 2009 Mac Mini in the living room was replaced with a 2010 model. The old one was having a hard time keeping up with HD content (mainly in terms of performance but also flat out refusing to display iTunes HD content after the upgrade to Snow Leopard) and the 1080p display over the DVI to HDMI adapter over-scanning issues were rather tiresome. The 2010 model did away with all that: faster CPU, more memory and native HDMI took care of those issues, which left a perfectly functional Macmini3,1 searching for a mission in life, a mission I had found even before I pulled the trigger on the new model.

Thus, the mission is defined: the Mac Mini needs to take over the services that run continuously so the other system can be powered off at will.

The migration is nearly complete: mail is flowing and the software repository is up to date. The wiki bits are still a work in progress, but those are not as critical, primarily because Evernote has largely replaced (and enhanced) the wiki use. None of this would have been possible without the MacPorts Project community, at least not as fast and seamlessly as it has been. So there is happiness in the living room and there is happiness in the office.

Safari 5 Reader it’s the shitznutz! I love it.

Although I am not a full-time developer, I do deal with a fair amount of information that benefits from the joys of versioning (including software I write). A lot of that work today happens in an IDE (Xcode), but a lot of it happens in other contexts, so having a pretty (and above all, useful) tool to navigate a repository is quite useful. I have been using Versions for the Mac since it was beta, and it has proven to be a worthy helper. Recently, I ran into Cornerstone, and I decided to try it out of curiosity. Both are solid apps, and either one will service your SVN needs nicely. Hopefully Git will get one in the near future.

Things. Rocks.

Today I installed CNET’s TechTracker and while I do love the concept, it’s likely to get uninstalled. Primarily, it’s not actually tracking the bulk of the software I would like to track because it seems to only pay attention to /Applications. In the fine tradition of sysadmin file system organization (or simply my own personal mental organization) I try to keep most of the apps away from the system’s /Applications directory, so I have a /Local hierarchy where I keep, well, local stuff (so there is such a thing as /Local/Applications where most of the apps I use live; there are exceptions for those that insist on living in /Applications, such as CS4 or Fusion). Looking into the preferences pane, there doesn’t seem to be an option to add other locations.

I realize most people install applications in the system location, which is fine. It simply means TechTracker isn’t of much use to me at this point in time.

I had been wanting to take Snow Leopard for a spin for some time, but software availability at home and time constraints in general had prevented me from doing it. I picked up a copy during my last visit to California, so all that was left was finding some cycles to install it and get going with it. Friday just sort of came up from nowhere and enabled the forcing function: disk.dieByClickNoise(). New drive, some minor surgery, and voilá: ready for Snow Leopard.

It has been running pretty well minus a couple of annoyances: it doesn’t seem to get along with my wireless at home all time and iPulse now asks for an admin password upon login (which, admittedly, I don’t do all that often, so it’s not enough to be obnoxious). Everything else so far works rather well. Having been running on the same Leopard image for nearly two years, I felt it was time to start from scratch (i.e., discarding old apps I no longer use, rearranging some things in my home directory, fully switching to Xcode) and, along the way, verify that things work as expected. I’d say I’m about 80% done, but even at that level, I’m fully functional for work (and blogging, but of course).

Given the starting point, I did push MobileMe a bit by having it sync most of the items it supports (mail accounts and rules, the dock, etc). Everything worked as advertised, so a lot of that work was fairly effortless (and contributed to the cleanup). I also went ahead and updated most of the seed files I keep on the server at home (i.e., the bare baseline of apps, configuration and initialization files, and other data that I share across all the systems I use, which, at last count, was too many). Yes, I do eat my own dog food, and at some point I will polish what I have written about said dog food and publish it.

Once the laptop is 100% done and I’m satisfied with it (say, a couple of weeks of heavy use of most of the work/photo/video stuff), the desktop will follow, although I am thinking that the Mac Mini at home will probably happen soonish given its primary purpose in life is to deliver media into my living room. Alas, this is the end of the line for the trusty PowerBook G4, which turns four in a couple of months, although its current user will continue to enjoy everything Leopard has to offer for quite some time (until the system dies of Leopard is no longer updated or usable in it).

Courtesy of bstreiff: Enabling Remote Disc on not-Airs:

defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser EnableODiskBrowsing -bool true
defaults write com.apple.NetworkBrowser ODSSupported -bool true

Context: we have an older MacBook with what appears to be a busted DVD-ROM drive, preventing a clean install of the newly arrived cat. After enabling CD/DVD Sharing on the “server”, nothing would show up on the “client”. After tweaking the above properties and restarting the Finder, it’s all good now. Install in progress.