So we had yet another calamity in the Systems Boy household last week: A hard drive failure in a four year old, 15″ PowerBook. Oddly, a workmate had the exact same thing happen to him within days of our catastrophe. In fact, there’s been all manner of hardware failure in recent days. I know that [...]
It’s been a bad couple of weeks for data loss in the Systems Boy household. Fortunately, it’s been a fairly good week for data recovery, so we’ve mostly broken even, minus the time lost recovering data, of course. Most recently, something seems to have taken a large (by which I mean everything) bite out of [...]
I just looked all over Hell’s half acre for this (okay, I performed a perfunctory Google search) and I couldn’t find a definitive answer. Now I know and I just wanted to make a quick note of it for posterity. In the olden days (i.e., a few months ago), in order to get any mounted [...]
There’s a common occurrence in the world of systems administration. Once I describe it you’ll probably all nod you’re heads knowingly and go, “Yeah, that happens to me all the time.” It happened to me recently, in fact. I was attempting to set a Linux system to authenticate via a freshly-built LDAP server — something [...]
So this is going great. I have a really solid Base OS Install, and a whole buttload of packages now. Packages that set everything from network settings to custom and specialized users. I can build a typical system in about 45 minutes, and I can do most of the building from my office (or any [...]
A while ago I wrote about the networksetup command, which provides a command-line interface to network preferences, as well as the systemsetup command, which provides command-line control over additional system-level preferences. In the past those commands were stored in the labyrinthian: /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Support Yes, inside the ARDAgent. Perfect. Finally Apple has put those commands in a [...]
Prosaic title, I know. But it’s true. Every now and then, copying to remote systems via Apple Remote Desktop fails inexplicably. Fortunately, the solution is a simple one: restart the ARD Agent, conveniently named ARDAgent. Said command will look something like this: sudo killall -HUP ARDAgent Ironically, you can also send the command to the [...]
It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to post anything of any substance. This has a lot to do with the fact that I’ve been super busy relocating our department and participating in the gut renovation of our lab. This has been an immensely stressful process, but in the end I find that [...]
Recently, for some odd reason, there has been a spate of solutions to the problem of creating new files in the Finder via a contextual menu. One involves a contextual menu plugin called NuFile. Another involves installing Big Cats Scripts and linking it to an Applescript. But honestly — and I’m surprised someone else didn’t [...]
So today, after downgrading my master server to 10.4.7, I kept getting an error on my replica. So I decided to reset the replica by demoting it to a “Standalone” role, and then re-promoting it to the “Replica” role. But even after doing this, the error message persisted. The message was telling me to check [...]