OS X is a funny system. So many things are very simple and yet there are some things that are more difficult than they need to be. Take for example mapping or mounting network shares. In Tiger (10.4) you could mount a share and it would show up in the sidebar. With Leopard (10.5) this isn’t so, you have to manually add it. This addition to the sidebar will stick until you reboot the system. This is a bit annoying. I like having direct access to the root of my share.

Fortunately OS X ships with automator and either I didn’t notice this in the previous version or it really is new but you can now call shell and apple scripts directly. I was already using automator to mount all of the shares I want mounted on login but I needed a way to get them into the sidebar. Click through to see my solution.
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Well by now it’s no secret to any of my friends that I’ve become a bit of an Apple fan but I’m not so much a fan that I can’t criticize what they do. I’m not that rabid yet.

So it was with trepidation that I gave Leopard a try, twice no less, before finally making the switch to it permanently. I wanted to be sure the kinks were worked out and that it would work as well as Tiger did. I had read about and had my own issues with Leopard on my mini including poor animations, apps failing to start and just a general clumsiness to it that just was not what OS X should be like. While I’m not convinced it is quite there yet, the latest update has brought it a long ways in my mind.

The latest update, 10.5.3, seems to fix a lot of the big issues I was running into with Leopard. The biggest issue was actually with some iLife apps like iMovie. Either through luck or an actual fix iMovie now runs on Leopard. In previous versions I couldn’t get iMovie to open fully and when it did working with video was problematic and importing video was terrible. While I have yet to import video since installing 10.5.3 I’m fairly confident it’ll work much better than it has in the past based on how well it runs otherwise.

A while back I saw a post on digg.com that talked about some new software that was currently in an invite only beta test called Dropbox. Dropbox allows you to synchronize folders between computers and if you watch the video over at their site I think you’ll be impressed.

But as I said, it’s invite only. So what is a guy to do right now? Well believe it or not Microsoft actually has something very similar and it too works with both Windows and Mac. Now if we’re to believe everything the the Dropbox video shows us, Foldershare isn’t quite as robust but it is free and and more importantly it is available now. Check it out at http://www.foldershare.com/

In my previous entry I mention my Super Smash Bros. Brawl testing and one of the other tests I wanted to do involved determining how much data is required to play a four way game. My home network setup is a bit involved yet I couldn’t find a way to route the Wii through a device that I could measure network usage with.

To make a long story short, I found that you can configure your Mac’s wireless to “create network” and unlike a Windows PC that would setup an adhoc network, the Mac will act like a normal wireless access point or wireless router. This was fantastic because the Wii will not join an adhoc network. With my Mac set to create a new network I was able to join my Wii to it and determine that a four way game in Brawl requires at least 10KB/s of network traffic in both directions.

Early in March I decided to give Leopard another try on my mini. There have been a few updates, namely the graphics update and 10.5.2, that were rumored to fix the issues I was having. After a couple of weeks with Leopard, I again removed it in favor of Tiger (10.4). Either there are problems with Leopard or OS X is the most finicky operating system I’ve ever used (people tell me to reinstall).

I just can’t get used to the look of Leopard, the darker gray with the even whiter menus is just too harsh. I had apps that would crash repeatedly at random times. Thunderbird would sometimes crash while checking mail and Firefox or iTerm would crash when the system was resumed.

Ok, so iTerm, Firefox and Thunderbird aren’t Apple apps, people writing the software should make sure it works with Leopard right? Well it wasn’t just third party apps that went haywire on me. iMovie 08 would start, but nothing would show up. The menu bar would be iMovie, the app was running, but there was no actual window to work in. I reinstalled iMovie and it worked just once. Loading it again resulted in the same issue.

I also found that I ran out of memory far faster in Leopard than in Tiger. There *is* a lot more to Leopard but the difference was too much for me to handle. In the end, I’ve concluded that Leopard is either not right for me or it isn’t a good fit on the generation of Mac mini that I own.

I’ve been using my Mac Mini as what I’d call my “primary computer” almost from the moment I received it. While I have a laptop that I can use around the house or travel with, I use the Mac because it is so quiet, it’s hooked up to a 22″ screen and because I enjoy the OS X experience. Over the months I’ve managed to find a few software titles that help me get things done.

• iTerm – Nice terminal app that more closely resembles my favorite Windows SSH client, putty. Has tabs, etc
• Firefox – Who doesn’t know what Firefox is?
• Thunderbird – Mail just can’t compete with the speed of Thunderbird for IMAP accounts
• Gamepedia – I play games and I like to track them. There are other software options available, even some more generic but I just like this one
• Adium – Adium is a multi-protocol chat client using the same libraries as Pidgin
• Vienna – Great RSS reader
• Things – Simple way to track…things
• Mythfrontend – MythTV is my DVR of choice and I need a way to access it on the Mac, this it!
• Integrity – This is a simple link checker for OS X, similar to Xenu’s Link Sleuth. Xenu’s Link Sleuth is superior however.
• MacTheRipper – Best DVD ripping tool I’ve found for the Mac
• NeoOffice – This is currently the only way to run OpenOffice “natively” on the Mac. It’s slow but gets the job done
• Remote Desktop Connection – Sometimes you need to access a Windows machine. I use this primarily to connect to my XP VMWare guest running on my Linux server for web site testing
• Macfuse/SSHFS – Nearly identical to fuse and sshfs for Linux
• Transmission and Azureus – One bittorrent client just isn’t enough
• VLC – Great multi-platform video player. Perian is able to install many of the same codecs VLC will play but I have soft spot for VLC

Where I work, I routinely get a zip file that contains files for a website. It has multiple file and folders. I simply copy these files into the directory for the website but this time I thought I’d unzip the file first to see just how long it takes. I’ve heard Vista’s extraction is slow…but I didn’t think it could be this bad.

This system is pretty new, 10k drives, 2.4Ghz C2D processors.

One thing that a number of people overlook is that RAID is NOT a backup solution. That’s right, say it with me, “RAID is not a backup solution.” RAID is at most a data availability solution and nothing more. With that in mind it is always good to have a backup. This post will concentrate on creating a backup script and routine for my Linux server as well as my Mac. Since the Mac is UNIX based I can back it up in much the same way as I do my Linux server.

Please keep in mind that this method assumes a lot of things and should not be considered for a business environment where security is more important. My method involves creating a public/private ssh key without a passphrase and worse, the root password for my MySQL server is also coded into this script. Since this is all DIY, you can expand whatever you do to be a bit more secure.

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I am in the process of setting up a box for someone and I thought I’d document the software RAID portion of it a little bit, in case it is helpful to anyone else.

I’m a bit of a command line junkie so it should come as no surprise then that I prefer to setup my software RAID sets using the command line tools available. The system in question this time is a newly installed CentOS 5 box. In this article I’ll concentrate on creating a mirrored set.

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