Disk Storage Devices Speeds & Feeds

Apple Server running in a VM

Well, today I downloaded and installed Parallels 4.0. What a major improvement!

At home, I run a Mac Mini with a couple of TB’s hanging off of it with OS X 10.5 Leopard Server as the OS. I actually use a lot of the features of 10.5 Server, such as the VPN, Open Directory, etc.

Since the release of Parallels 4.0 I can now create a a virtual machine of 10.5 server, which I did. This freed up the Mini and now I have the image running on my MacPro. I like this because now I have the capability of any Virtual Machine, such as snapshots, migrating, upgrades, etc.

Growing a VRTS Volume in Solaris

If you ever have to grow a Veritas Volume in Solaris, this could be a nerve racking task if you have not done it before. Especially if this is your first time or a production server.

The process is quite simple. However, you want to make sure that the volume is not at 99% or greater in capacity. This could lead to a deadlock situation.

In this example I demonstrate a Solaris 10 server with a zone called testzone which has a filesystem presented to it mounted in the zone as /test1. The filesystem is at 96% and I need to grow it before I run out of space.

The video walks you through all the steps I took to add an additional 300 MB of disk space to this filesystem.

Enjoy.

WPA Security Timeout

I personally use WPA (WiFi Protected Access) security for my wireless network at home as opposed to WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) because of the enhanced security. For instance, unlike WEP which uses PSK (pre-shared key) for all of it clients, WPA utilizes TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) which provide server / client mutual AuthN services and duplex layer dynamic key encryption.

That said – one of the benefits I like about using WPA, is the fact that I can set a timeout value for the key. For myself, I had it set to one day. That was too annoying because I will close my laptop and not use it for a day or so and the next time I open it up, I will be prompted to discover the wireless network and enter my key. I since changed it to a year, for now.

Keeping it all in Sync

I’m on the road a lot and have often found it quite time consuming to keep my laptop data in sync with my data on my desktop at home.

There are several types of data I want to keep in sync. This includes:

Data in my Home Directory (Documents, spreadsheets, etc)
Email
Email Rules
Calendar
Bookmarks
OS X Leopard Dock Items
Address Book
Notes
OS X Preferences
Dashboard Widgets
Keychains

Essentially I want my laptop and desktop to be identical. When I am at home, I will mostly work on my MacPro desktop computer. Before I leave town, I will like to have my Macbook Pro in sync with my desktop. When I get back home, I want to sync desktop back up from my laptop.

You can see how this can be a time consuming process.

I subscribe to Apple’s Dot Mac (.mac) service. This allows me to sync a lot of my system settings, such as my dock, widgets, bookmarks, etc. In addition, I also sync my Mail, Calendar and Address Book. One note on my Mail account, I set up folders on the server with rules, so all my email is saved on the mail server. So not matter what machine I am using, I always have a consistent view of all my mail messages.

As for my general data synchronization, I use a program called File Synchronization (http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/system_disk_utilities/filesynchronization.html)

This is a very simple, robust, point and click program to sync folders. I have a shared folder on my desktop that I can mount on my laptop. In the program, I set up a Sync Pair with these two folders. Its pretty cool.

So basically, no matter where I am, or what computer I am using, everything is identical.

Set Permissions Recursively

If you have several items in a folder (and folders underneath that top folder) that you wanted to set special permissions on it so that others could read and write for instance, you can do that very easily. Simply highlight the top level folder and get Info on it (Command – I). Set your permissions, then select the Action Icon (shown Above) and choose “Apply to enclosed items”

Browse Other Time Machine disks…

One cool feature in Time Machine is that you can right click on the Time Machine Backup icon and browse other disks that were used for Time Machine Backups. For example, let’s assume you have a desktop Macintosh computer with an external drive connected to it that you use for Time Machine Backups and you want to restore data from that drive to your Macbook. Simply connect the external drive to your Macbook and browse that disk. You will be able to perform a native restore as if you were connected to your desktop machine.

Understanding the basics of a striped filesystem

There are a lot of design considerations when creating filesystems such as RAID Levels, SCSI Q-Depth settings, filesystem block sizes, application or database write and read behaviors, journaling, storage cache, and so forth.

Rather than diving into a deep discussion on all of the factors you should consider when building a filesystem, I want to just explain the high level basics.

OS X Tip – Change Time Machine Backup Intervals

Time Machine, by default performs an incremental backup every 60 minutes. To change this interval, simply open up a terminal Window and type: (Single Line)

sudo defaults write /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-auto StartInterval -int 7200

UNIX Basics

OS X is built upon the UNIX Darwin kernel. Having a fundamental understanding of working the UNIX operating system can give you a great advantage of troubleshooting, tuning and general administration of your system. I have worked in many flavors of UNIX in the past 10 years which include SunOS, Solaris, IRIX, HP-UX, AIX, RedHat Linux, SUSE Linux and of course OS X. Each type of UNIX has its own uniqueness, different commands to manage system resources, etc. However, for the most part there is a lot of similarities among all these versions of UNIX. I wanted to list at least a couple of commands that may help you.