Dustin Rue

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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After loosing a hard drive I thought it was time to look into upgrading a little bit. At home I run two systems 24×7 to take care of a couple of things. One provides me with a place to do the little bit of freelance work that I do. It’s an old Dell server running Fedora Core 6 on a single 40GB drive. The other one runs Ubuntu and is my MythTV/file server and is the system that lost the drive.

As I explained in a previous post, the plan is to replace the four 80GB drives with a pair if mirrored 500GB drives. I’d also like to cut back on the number of running systems in the house so this box will also either host my dev work directly on Fedora 8 or, by using XEN, run another instance of Fedora 8. I’m hoping that the new setup will still provide me with the network speeds I’m used to from the Mac Mini (~42MB/s) and provide the services I’ve grown used to while using less power. I usually look down upon the idea of spending money to save money but with one less machine running and three fewer drives spinning I should come out ahead by a good margin.

Late last week I found out that I had lost a drive in my striped RAID array. I had four 80GB drives setup as a striped set for speed. The array stored things like ripped DVDs, music, downloads and most importantly any video that I was editing on my Mac. I knew the risks of going RAID0 so I had backups of my most important stuff but it’s still a loss in time all the same.

I was originally using the four drives in a RAID5 set but performance was too slow for editing when combined with gigabit speeds. I also needed the space at the time. To replace the drive, I actually decided to replace all of the hardware as well. I’ll be moving from a P4 3.0Ghz to a Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz with 800Mhz front side bus. There are quicker options out there but this will certainly be an upgrade from what I have, while using less power most likely.

For drives I’ve ordered a pair of Samsung 500GB drives which I’ll mirror. I didn’t really feel shorted on space before so 500GB will still feel like an upgrade and I’ll be able to take advantage of mirroring to help protect the data to some extent.

I have an online photo album that, when a file is uploaded, will create a thumbnail size and an intermediate sized photo along with the full size version. I needed to copy the full size version of the file out while skipping the thumb and sized versions. I was able to accomplish this task using a single command:

[root@drue Wedding]# for I in `ls | grep -v sized | grep -v thumb`; do cp $I /var/www/html/pics/; done

This would have taken a lot longer using any other method. Using a GUI, say, Windows Explorer, I’d still be selecting which files to copy by the time the above command completed the work.

I’m a little slow on adopting the latest Internet trends. I have no idea why but I seem to get stuck on last years hot item and then I never seem to hear about the latest and greatest until it has created a lot of buzz. I also have a tough time seeing the value in some of the new items until some very smart and crafty people put it to use in such a way that it really reveals the power of, well, whatever is the hot button item.

RSS is one of those things for me that just didn’t really catch my eye outside of using del.icio.us RSS feeds to keep my bookmarks in sync between my computers at work and at home. In reality, I’m not even using del.icio.us correctly. At any rate, the value of RSS has hit me like a ton of bricks.

I browse a number of newsish sites related to Nintendo, Apple/Mac, digg.com and a number of blogs. I visit these sites just to see what is new. For a long while I’ve used Firefox’s Live Bookmarks feature to keep up on sites that had RSS feeds but now it has just gotten out of hand. I have too many sites and blogs I like to check.

Enter Vienna for the Mac. This thing is spectacular. It looks great, it’s very fast and it allows me to group RSS feeds into any arbitrary group I wish. Apple/Mac feeds in one group and Nintendo feeds in another. Reading feeds is simplistic though I opted for the ‘condensed’ layout rather than the default ‘report’ layout. In the condensed layout it’s very much like using a Microsoft Outlook with mailboxes on the left, messages in the middle and the full message on the right. Now if I could just find a comparable program for Windows I’d have my new RSS fetish fully satisfied.