Category Archives: Lab

Create a Dual-Format Drive for Mac and Windows

It’s just come to my attention that it’s now fairly trivial to split a drive into two differently formatted partitions, one of which could be used for the Mac while the other could be used for Windows. This is not necessarily new, but there are a number of things that make it of particular interest [...]

Experimenting with DokuWiki

Wikis are just one more thing I’ve always wanted to play around with. And my job has, once again, afforded me the opportunity to do just that. We’re currently using an engine called DokuWiki, so I decided to kick its tires and see what it — and wikis in general — are all about. DokuWiki’s [...]

Portable Home Directories Part 3: Keychain Oddities

Hey, here’s a weird one: I finally got my home account back to working order after my experiment with PHDs only to find that iCal couldn’t open any of my online calendars. It kept saying the password was missing from Keychain, then refusing to let me add one, saying that the “Keychain could not be [...]

Portable Home Directories Part 2: Oh God, Make it Stop

Last week I began testing the Apple Portable Home Directories feature. I’d heard a lot of good buzz, but my experience was pretty terrible. Of course I was doing things my own way, and not the Apple way, which is always a bit dicey. Almost Proper Wanting to get PHDs working, I decided to try [...]

Portable Home Directories Part 1: What a Mess!

Now that I’ve tried it myself, I’ve very much enjoyed the advantages that having a network home account has offered. I’ve also rather disliked some of the disadvantages. Ultimately, the biggest drawback has been that when our production crew is doing a lot of rendering, my home account slows to a crawl and I can’t [...]

Division of Labor

One of the great things about my new job is that labor is divided among a much larger crew than I’m accustomed to. This means I get to do more of the sort work I like and less of the sort I don’t. In my old job, there were basically two and-a-half SysAdmins running the [...]

Taking My Own Medicine

I’ve long extolled the virtues of network-based home accounts, at least in some situations. And, of course, I’ve written copiously on how to implement such a thing in a lab setting. What I’ve never really done in any meaningful way, or for any length of time, is to use network home accounts myself. Until now. [...]

Abandonment Issues

Because of the recent departure of Apple’s Senior VP of Enterprise Sales, John C. Welch claims that “the Mac IT crowd” is wondering if Apple is abandoning the Enterprise. He then goes on to say that this depends on whether or not you thought “Apple was, or wanted to be, an ‘enterprise’ company.” Um… No [...]

APM Partition Boots Intel Macs

I’d thought that if you wanted to boot Intel Macs you needed to use the recently available GUID partition table, mainly because that’s what it says in Disk Utility when you format the drive. In fact, as it turns out (at least as of Mac OS X 10.5.5), using the Apple Partition Map (APM) boots [...]

Leopard umask

This is one of those I-keep-forgetting-how-to-do-this posts, so I’m writing it down. It’s certainly been posted elsewhere, but I’m tired of going looking every time I need it. So here it is. In Tiger a simple defaults command could be used to modify a user’s umask (a setting that controls the default permissions for newly [...]