I did not know about
command option i
in the finder. It can indeed be handy. Found here
Category: Apple
File servers. No big deal. I am dealing with kind of thing since more than ten years. And it works.
We tried OS X Server 10.2.8 a while back, and it was bad. Now I have to deal with it again: OS X 10.4.3
and it still is junk. It is broken. Things don’t work as they should. Apples way of doing things is
incompatible with everything. It is such a waste of time. If they add a guy then they should leave
the way things are done underneath as everybody would expect them. XServers get bought by people
for their shiny facade. Which is all ok for me. Just that the inner workings of it are simply rotten.
The non server version of OS X is much more consistent with having all features in the system preferences
sharing.
it’s all gory details. I don’t even want to go into it. It was broken with 10.2.8. With 10.4.3 it is still broken.
Fileservers are not THAT important that you want to waste your entire worklife administrating them.
And with Linux (or even SGI for that matter) you don’t have to. You learn the meaning of a few commands and
are done with it.
It really is bulshit. If you consider to get a server, don’t get an Apple one. They are too expensive and work not in a way that would make any sense …
Thinksecret has a wet media dream involving Apple (of course) and the download of media. Whenever somebody starts raving about ‘intel technology’ and how enabling it is I have to roll my eyes: Intel makes great CPUs and other things that other people make as well. I might be uttterly ignorant but I never saw that any of those Intel plans where either new innovative or sucessful for that matter.
Reading Apple’s media delivery ambitions it should be pretty clear that OS X 10.5 aka Lepard will be available for non Apple hardware also commonly known as ‘PCs’. If Apple makes money with media distribution they might as well give the OS away. They might charge for support.
When the OS X on Intel was announced people usually said that Apple would want to protect it’s hardware business. I think that is /bs/. I think it is entirely strategic, that Apple pretends to let OS X only run on Apple hardware. First of all it is a bargaining chip. Apple, flush with cash from the ongoing iPod sucess, can sit at the sidelines of the PC-market of 2006. Apple will close see how Longhorn is doing. Technically and in the market place. If they feel that Microsoft’s position is vulnerable enough then they make a move. Or they get a deal from Bill for not moving. One thing they don’t want to do though is to openly declare that they are going into the PC operating system market. But technically they can. Not they that would or need to, but they would have OS X running on 70% of all machines that Dell sells within a week. I am sure that Dell would like this as well: Competition changes the price. Lepard might be in a good position to take a big chunk out of the Longhorn market: The latest Redmond OS has significant hardware requirements. If people perceive the upgrade from whatever Windows they run now as a ‘switch’, then they might as well switch to another brand.
I can only agree with most of this lenghtly text.
That’s how I felt when I switched much from SGI to OS X for parts of what I do.
When you start learning unix then the ls command is probably one of the first ones you come accross. It lists files. You need that. Allot. It is pretty easy to overlook that there is much more to files these days then the information that the ls command will provide you with. For OS X you have these additional commands that you can try:
stat -x FILENAME
This is a standard unix command. Helpful if you are looking for modification or access times or simply need to know which inode a file is starting on.
/Developer/Tools/GetFileInfo FILENAME
The default filesystem for OS X is HFS+. This can store extended attributes with your file, and if you have the free developer option insalled then you can use this to read the extended attributes. /Developer/Tools might be worth a casual ls as it contains a couple of other interesting tools
ls -ls FILENAME/rsrc
HFS+ allows files to have a so called ‘resource fork’. By adding /rsrc after the file name you can use the ls and even the cp command on these parts of the file.
mdls FILENAME
With OS X 10.4 apple introduced a searchable file content meta database. The spotlight icon sits prominently in the uppper right corner of the screen. But also in a command line you can access the information via mdls and a couple of other tools.
All these commands have a man page in case you need to know some details of how they work.
Another exclusive windows ‘feature’ ‘event’ whatever you want to call it.
I might switch just to be part of these things. I really would love to share my computer and my (neighbourghs) internet connection with a couple of obscure organisations between here and Wladiwostok.
But no. This stuff simply doesn’t work on macs. In years of viruses and spyware there has not been anything like this of OS X.
Not many things in life are black and white, but few are, and it does not help to make them gray just because most of it is:
– there is no malware for OS X
– the President of the USA is not a smart man
– fossil fuels will run out
I really really hope that Apple keeps it’s OS clean. Again: There are no viruses or other scamware for OS X.
And I like that, since I can focus on other things. How can people still use Windows and keep up with this kind of ongoing junk?
what a weird hack! OS X comes with the sar command, which I found to be very helpful to look at what a machine is doing.
Just running
sar
Will look for todays performance. You have to collect it first. Traditionally this gets done via a cron job. OS X really likes to use launchd instead. But I need to get some work done, I don’t have the time to learn another propriatary solution for a very common problem: Running things periodically. So I stick with cron. Not sure why it is running on some of the systems and not on others. If you follow this make sure cron shows up in a ps ax | grep cron command. If it does then you could enable daily performance traces reportable by “sar” by adding
# run system activity accounting tool every 10 minutes
*/10 * * * * root /usr/lib/sa/sa1 1 1
# generate a daily summary of process accounting at 23:53
53 23 * * * root /usr/lib/sa/sa2 -A
to /etc/crontab. If cron runs then it will reread the file automatically. The remaining problem for me and under
OS X 10.4.3 was that sa1 overwrote instead of appended the performance data. A really terrible hack that fixed this was to change the lines in /usr/lib/sa/sa1 from
exec ${ENDIR}/sadc 1 1 ${DFILE}
to
exec ${ENDIR}/sadc 1 1 >>${DFILE}
This works, but generates error messages like:
sar: drivepath sync code error -4
when I retrieve the daily performance data.
This is good enough for me. All I am after is to find out what that 30TB Xsan has been doing.
in case you should consider to get an xsan I would recommend not to bother with the ‘Gui’ for the Xsan Admin utility.
While you still can break the thing make yourself familiar with ‘cvadmin’ in the terminal.
Once the thing is in use that so called ‘Gui’ will be just getting in the way. Much like the early OS X Server UI it is a bad hack that does not conform to the Apple UI guidelines. It will not give you any feedback if there will be an update or not on what you see. Managing terrabytes through a wacky interface is not even not fun, it is terrifying …
cvadmin is your friend. As much as Xsan can be your friend that is …
this is what is going on.
Nice to know in general. But especially if things get weird.