The Cat Convention

After a tremendous ordeal of trying to install OS X Lion on my January 2008 Mac Pro, I finally had a breakthrough. I discovered what appears to be a hardware incompatibility.

To properly tell this story we’ll have to go back in time.

In January of 2008 when this model of Mac Pro was available (version 3.1) it was definitely the cat’s meow. I bought a true boss of a system too. I picked up an 8-core 2.8ghz Mac Pro with 4gb of RAM. Later, I bought some third party RAM from Crucial to stuff it to the brim with 32gb.

I also visited Newegg.com to pick up three more hard drives. That was an easy decision. I picked up 3 more 750gb hard drives, all of them Seagate. When I was a PC guy Seagates or Maxtors were the only drives to buy.

I also picked up a Drobo. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know what happened with the Drobo. To replace the Drobo I eventually purchased a Promise DS4600 and 4 Seagate ST31000340AS 1 terabyte drives.

The Promise unit had issues. It was finicky and liked to drop drives out of the array for no discernible reason. Oddly enough, the drive that failed out of the array most often was whatever drive was in bay 4. It didn’t have to be the same drive. You could literally swap the drives in and out of bay 4 and eventually it would fail. It was really bizarre. I opened numerous cases with Promise.

Promise finally came back with the information that this particular model of Seagate drives were not certified to work with the DS4600. Okie, I can handle that. No problem. I reviewed the compatibility list provided by Promise and selected a set of Hitachi 2TB drives.

I then moved on to fight the DS4600 again to make it work over eSATA. Only this weekend did that finally get resolved. But that’s another story for another day. If you want to hear it, let me know and I’ll be happy to tell it.

Anyway, back to the Seagate drives. After all of that drama and switching around, I now had a set of Seagate ST31000340AS 1tb drives… four of them to be exact. During this time I was also experiencing regular S.M.A.R.T. failures in the 750gb drives in the chassis of the Mac Pro. Those drives were being sent off and replaced on a fairly regular basis.

As these drives were replaced and rolled around, I decided that maybe I should move the 1tb drives into the Mac Pro and get 250gb of extra space. That’s kind of a no-brainer decision, right? I ended up with the original 750gb drive that shipped from Apple and three ST31000340AS drives in the other bays. I had the bright idea of creating a RAID-0 and installing Lion on it. I just knew it was going to scream.

…except that Lion wouldn’t install.

The install would always start off just fine. It would write files and then reboot. Then, somewhere in the next storage of the install it would just die. An error message popped up claiming that there was a problem and Lion couldn’t be installed.

how can this be? thought I. There’s no way Apple would release an operating system that has an incompatibility of this nature with a 2008 Mac Pro. this is insane.

I lost many countless hours of sleep to install attempts. I would try to install. I would watch it fail. I would research a little more. I’ve spent weeks trying to get through this. Nothing… and I mean NOTHING would get through with the install…

…until one time, it did.

Immediately, my trust level of the whole installation was suspect of course. Why would it fail to install so many times and then just out of the blue… it would work? It didn’t make sense. I had tried reseating hardware. I had tried pulling out the BlackMagic Intensity Card. I had tried pulling out the eSATA cards. I tried putting the stock RAM back in place. I tried everything. Nothing worked… until this time it did. Weird. It didn’t make sense.

I ran with Lion on the RAID-0 for a few days and happily thought I would go about the installation of Carbon Copy Cloner so I could set up clone tasks for the operating system disk.

cue music. It started to happen. Everything segfaulted. I could literally open the Console application and watch the crash reports roll in like a riot was going on in the Grid and reporters were on the air. No program was safe. Every one of them blew up. Sync your iPhone? Bam. iTunes died. Sync your iPod? SLAM. VTPCDecoder (or something) explodes. yeah, this OS is suspect.

I decided to whack the RAID-0 and try the install again on a single ST31000340AS drive. Guess what? The install failed… again and again.

I booked a Genius Bar appointment. Obviously, my logic board was bad.

I’m not sure what made me think to try it, but I did. One of the 1tb drives had died at some point and I received a replacement that was a completely different model. Also I ran across information on the net that a lot of people were having problems with ST31000340AS drives and certain versions of firmware. Those versions were SD1A and SD15. I looked over the drives I had. All of them had one of those two firmware revisions.

interesting.

I took one of the drives Seagate sent back that was a different model number. For the record, the drive was model ST31000528AS. I slapped it in the chassis and formatted it with HFS+. I fired up the Lion installer and hit go. I asked it to give me a full, fresh install of Lion on this disk. It worked the first time.

Not only did it work, it has been rock solid. Nothing is crashing like it was before on the other drives. Lion has become a joy to use the past two days. I stored away the Snow Leopard volume and kept it for emergencies.

I cancelled the Genius Bar appointment.

By now I think you can figure out what my conclusion. There’s something wrong with ST31000340AS Seagate drives. Don’t try to use them with Lion. Something about the kernel in Lion disagrees strongly with that model of drive. If you read around on the net you will find many, many horror stories with those drives.

Beware.

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I forgot to mention this thought yesterday.

It’s clear that Apple feels they are making money hand over fist with iOS and devices. They’re making so much money in fact that they feel they can push the new software initiatives for almost no price at all. The proof is everywhere:

• Lion is practically free ($29.99)
• Lion server is practically free, compared to the cost of the server product in the past ($49)
• XSan is baked into Lion. Licenses for this product used to be quite costly. Won’t it be awesome when Mac Minis ship with Thunderbolt and you can add this to it?
• Apple had already lowered the price of Apple Remote Desktop. I wonder what they’ll do with it next?
• iOS 5.0 is a free update.
• iCloud is mostly free unless you use iTunes Match, which is $24.99 a year.

That speaks volumes about how they’re making money. It speaks about the strategy and how it’s working. It speaks to how they will grow into other markets where they have not typically been dominant.

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If you’re not familiar with Dropbox by now, you should be. Dropbox is what MobileMe‘s iDisk aspires to be one day. For now, it isn’t.

For the uninitiated, Dropbox is a fantastic cross-platform bit of code that synchronizes files across all of your computers. It also provides a look into the folders via a web browser if you should need it. They also offer an iPad app that allows you to browse and download files to local applications such as Pages.

Alas, Pages on the iPad, however, doesn’t speak Dropbox. It will allow you to edit the documents and export them to:

• An email
• iWork.com
• iDisk
• A webdav server

Dropbox is missing from that list. You could save your files back to your iDisk, but then you’d need to go to a regular machine and copy that file from the iDisk to your Dropbox folder. That’s pretty obtuse.

While we wait for Apple to purchase Dropbox and implement it as an iDisk replacement, we can use the magic of Apple Mail and Applescript to create a nifty workaround. Today I spent some time on a script that will do the following:

• Take the contents of an email message with a particular subject line
• Extract the attachment
• Save the attachment in a Dropbox folder depending on the keyword you use in the subject line of the message

Since Dropbox runs all the time on your Mac, it will notice the file change event and automatically sync the file to all of your computers linked to that Dropbox account.

Making an Applescript that will save an attachment to your file system is quite easy. Linking a mail rule to that Applescript is also quite easy. Therefore, the implementation of this is easy. What makes this script a little different is that you can specify keywords in the subject line and it will decide where to put the file inside your Dropbox folder based on the keyword. Editing those keywords are completely up to you.

To implement, download the “Save Attachment to Dropbox.scpt” file below. You should open /Utilities/Applescript Editor.app and modify the script’s keywords for the subject lines you plan to use. Save the .scpt file to your favorite location for AppleScripts. (For Mail scripts, I use “~/Library/Scripts/Mail”).

Next, create a rule in your Apple Mail using criteria to judge when to fire off the rule. In my case, I told it to look for messages that meet all of these criteria:

1. Messages coming from a particular email address
2. Containing a subject line keyword that starts with“-savedb”

The script will execute and look at the subject line of your email message. The subject line should start with “-savedb…” and have some kind of keyword in there. You edited the script to define those, right? Well, you don’t use the rule to define those keywords. Note that I said in the keyword to use “starts with” the string “-savedb”. The script will determine what to do with it based on what you code there.

I also recommend adding an action to move the processed messages over to a folder. In my case, I created a folder called “Processed to Dropbox” and told the rule to move the message there.

An important note: the script will overwrite any files that have the same name as the file. I felt that this was a safe thing to do since Dropbox automatically backs up 30 copies of the file on the site and you can retrieve any version you like. Deleted versions of the files are tossed in the Trash. They are not deleted completely until you empty the Trash. If you still do not like this behavior, feel free to modify the script to remove that action.

Now all you have to do is send yourself an email from the proper address with the proper keyword from your favorite app on the iPad and voila, it’s instantly synced to all of your computers and backed up.

Another way to use this is via “DropDAV” at http://dropdav.com. I was close to using that solution until I read more about it. I decided I wasn’t entirely comfortable with giving another third party my Dropbox username and password, so I developed this method instead.

I hope you enjoy this script and it helps band-aid the interruption in workflow until Apple purchases Dropbox. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments below.

If you want to encourage the developers of Dropbox to add WebDAV support, be sure to give them a +1 vote here.

Click here to download “Save Attachment to Dropbox.scpt”.

Related articles

• Dropbox – Features – Simplify your life (lirax.wordpress.com)

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The new iPad 2 has been revealed and there’s plenty of excitement.

There’s also plenty of hate as with any new Apple product that generates attention. If you need proof of the attention just take a look at the front pages of MSNBC and CNN. Steve Jobs, who said he “wouldn’t miss this moment” came on stage to introduce the iPad 2 to the world. It certainly woke up the press. Apple’s good like that. I’m sure other tech companies are salivating, wishing they could generate that type of excitement.

Anyway, the iPad 2 is what we’re here to talk about. It’s a “totally new design” and yes, it is, but it’s a new design that is rather evolutionary instead of revolutionary. It makes a magical device all that more magical. I love my iPad, but I’m not so enthralled with this product that I want to get an iPad 2.

As with any Apple product, however, if you’re supporting it in the field, your users will start picking it up right away. There are users with a lot of disposable income and new users. You’ll be supporting both iPad 1 and 2. The good news is that the iOS will be pretty much the same on every device. From a troubleshooting perspective that’s important.

Really, what stood out to me was Apple’s desire to bring content creation to the iPad. The first iPad was characterized as a consumption device only. With the introduction of iMovie and GarageBand I believe Apple is saying that they believe it’s more than a consumption device. Actually, I believe it’s more than a consumption device as well. It’s primary role is consumption but it’s also a great device to have around for brainstorming. Perhaps you could say it’s a “germination” device. It’s where your ideas can begin. They can begin there and flourish later on your desktop/laptop or they could begin there and die.

In the end I cannot really justify an iPad 2 for myself. If the iPad 1 could no longer run future releases of iOS that’s probably where I’d jump off. But for the current evolution of the product, I think I’ll skip it for now.

Those of you supporting these devices in the field (such as me) will be encountering them soon anyway.

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MacNN has a report from the Enterprise Desktop Alliance that indicates owners of XServe’s are planning to keep them as long as possible.

Other facts include organizations that own XServes are more likely to have Macs in their environment. Who would’ve thought businesses actually want a full Mac lifecycle?

The report from MacNN can be found here. They link to the original report from EDS as well. EDS is expecting to have a webcast to discuss this survey and options moving forward to Mac Pros or Mac Minis, which still makes my stomach hurt a little.

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Apple has discontinued the Xserve. Their recommendation is to purchase a Mac Pro or Mac Mini server.

That’s fine from a software perspective, but if you were planning to:

• Run a storage area network with no single point of failure
• Run a green-focused datacenter with lower power consumption
• Cramped for rack space but need the horsepower

…then you’re shit out of luck.

Info here:

http://www.apple.com/xserve/resources.html

I can only hope they have something new in the cooker.

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Here’s a Thursday morning question for you.

For those of you in the media business (specifically small business)… what offsite backup solution do you use? Why?

The Achilles heel of offsite backup is gigantic media files that are gigabytes in size. If you’re into the terabyte range, how do you handle offsite backups of that data?

I’m interested to hear your feedback. Please comment below.

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It’s been two weeks since Steve Jobs came on stage in front of the media and gave us a short rundown on what they’ve been cooking up for the Mac. It’s probably time I get this off my chest.

I was underwhelmed. Underwhelmed but hopeful.

I shouldn’t expect much in the way of announcements for OS X Server or under the hood improvements in OS X… yet. This was clearly a speech aimed at the consumer and let’s face it, they may not be ready to talk about those hidden improvements yet. I get it. I’m fine with it. Really. Deep breath.

iLife 11

This was perhaps the most underwhelming portion of the event. Normally I love the iLife suite and I’m happy to plunk down the money in a heartbeat. This time I just didn’t see the point. iWeb and iDVD did not receive any love at all. I can understand iDVD getting lost in the shuffle, but iWeb needs a little bit of attention. I know people who still use that one, man. iWeb is also an important selling point for people who are looking at a Mac for the first time.

The improvements in iPhoto, iMovie and Garageband do seem quite nice but I do not make enough use of these tools to get all that jazzed. I manage photos with Aperture 3 and edit video with Final Cut. I do work on family home videos with iMovie but I haven’t felt that iMovie 09 was missing anything. GarageBand… ugh… let’s just say that program is a complete mystery to me anyway.

My wife might get a little more excited about iPhoto. Frankly though, I doubt she cares.

Underwhelming. I’m sure I’ll buy it anyway.

Thinking back on this it would seem that Apple threw a lot of resources at the iOS business and let iLife ride. Hopefully they won’t give iWork the same treatment. I’m quietly wishing for some competition from iWork in the Office apps arena because Office 2011 for Mac sucks bad. There’s a clear opportunity there. Let’s hope Apple takes it.

OS X Lion

This was the most exciting portion of the presentation to me. Yet when it became clear where they were headed I started to cringe. I wanted the rumors of iOS integration to be false. I really did. I was hoping this was one last vestige where OS X could be the strong and powerful operating system that I was used to running.

As the demonstrations began I started to panic. No, really. Then I took a deep breath and remembered that Apple has invested a tremendous amount of funds in OS X Server and the architecture in general. I had to put aside the silly hysteria and accept that the iOS stuff coming back into the operating system makes sense from a halo effect perspective.

As long as they do not replace the operating system with iOS I’m quite okie. I actually do not see myself using the home screens on my Macs, but we’ll see.

Mac App Store

I’m pretty excited about this. I think this is a huge development for small developers and users alike. It’s a win. I also think it’ll be interesting to see Apple’s applications carved out of bundles.

There’s not much else to say about this. It’s a win all around. I don’t think anyone disagrees on that.

FaceTime

What a neat little app. It’s simple. It’s clean. It works well.

It duplicates effort.

Why isn’t it part of iChat? I suspect we’ve not seen the last chess move on this one.

Macbook Air

Wow. What an awesome feat of engineering. This is clearly where Apple wants to take the laptops. Fast, mobile, durable and no moving parts. I suspect we’d already be there if there wasn’t a flash memory shortage.

One More Thing…

I’m intrigued by the reports surfacing today regarding iOS 4.2 and how it appears to link your Apple ID with MobileMe. That is very, very interesting. It bears much watching.

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Greetings fellow implementers and users…

I know many of you out there have implemented Apple products like iCal, iPhones and iPads within Exchange 2007 and 2010 organizations. I’m seeking information on a very specific problem that rears its ugly head on occasion.

Have any of you witnessed a “meeting hijack” problem with your device? Namely, you are an attendee on a meeting and suddenly you find yourself the organizer. Usually you find this out when you send a decline for whatever reason.

I’m trying to reproduce this issue in a lab environment to document the problem but we’re having a hell of a time pulling the data together. If any of you have data to share, please do so in the comments. Thanks!

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