Category Archives: computers

upgrading the playstation

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Well finally borrowed an USB disk big enough – though the actual backup of the playstation ended up at 8GB it complained about fitting on my USB drive. So aside from a simple backup of the old drive via the XMB tool. Replace the old 40GB 2.5″ SATA drive with a nice shiny 320GB model (and then restored from the USB drive)

Quite a few guides on the interweb about how to do that, but I’m still slightly shocked that Sony are using standard parts these days!

Time taken: 2 hours (mostly waiting for backup/restore)

growing disks in macos

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I have 4 disks that are currently :-

320GB macos boot disk
320GB time machine
500GB mirrored data
500GB mirrored data

Running out of space on my mirrored data volume, so just upgrading it with a pair of 1.5TB drives, and so a little bit of a shell game… well I’m cheating and using ZFS as well, so here’s what I’m doing:-

$ diskutil disk1
$ sudo zpool replace disk0s2 disk1s2

wait for resilver to complete

greebo:~ mike$ zpool status
pool: pool1
state: ONLINE
status: One or more devices is currently being resilvered. The pool will
continue to function, possibly in a degraded state.
action: Wait for the resilver to complete.
scrub: resilver in progress, 20.39% done, 3h9m to go
config:

NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
pool1 ONLINE 0 0 0
mirror ONLINE 0 0 0
disk2s2 ONLINE 0 0 0
replacing ONLINE 0 0 0
disk0s2 ONLINE 0 0 0
disk1s2 ONLINE 0 0 0

Move boot disk onto newly freed up drive using ASR

greebo:~ mike$ sudo asr restore --source / --target /Volumes/greebo/
Password:
Validating target...done
Validating source...done
Validating sizes...done
Copying ....10....20....30....40....50....60....70....80....90

swap original boot drive (320GB) with a new 1.5TB drive and then repeat the zpool replace command

sudo zpool replace disk2s2 disk3s2

wait for the final resilver to complete and then export/import the pool to grow it.


$ sudo zpool export pool1
$ sudo zpool import pool1

Now we have spare space!

# zpool list
NAME SIZE USED AVAIL CAP HEALTH ALTROOT
pool1 1.36T 407G 989G 29% ONLINE -

shining a light on spotlight

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Show the status of spotlight on volumes:

$ mdutil -sa
/Shared Items/Public:
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/Time Machine/Shared Items/Backups:
Indexing and searching disabled.
/Users:
Indexing enabled.
/Volumes/pool1:
Indexing and searching disabled.
/Shared Items/Backups:
Indexing enabled.
/Groups:
Indexing enabled.

I was recieving a few errors when trying to spotlight for applications (well they didn’t appear) – running

$ sudo mdutil -i off /
Error, no index found for volume.

What worked to fix this for me was to move the main volume into the privacy section of spotlight and reboot (though i’d expect restarting fseventd might have the same effect) and then remove the volume from Privacy, 10 minutes later and disk has re-indexed and spotlight is working correctly.

social networking

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Hmm, I’ve always had some trouble using social networks – how much of that is because I’m not, and never been, much of a diarist I don’t know; as a little aid memoire I’ve scribbled together the following diagram of the interactions

socialnetworks

EEeeek, err – maybe I should just stick to 1

configuring a macos server network

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So installed Leopard server over the weekend and here’s some notes and annoyances I’ve hit (and overcame)

services fail to start – basically forward/reverse DNS must match

greebo:~ localad$ sudo changeip -checkhostname

Primary address = 172.16.10.196

Current HostName = greebo.snarc.co.uk
DNS HostName = greebo.snarc.co.uk

The names match. There is nothing to change.

So I cheated and am running split horizon DNS, I’ve not done the following – but is here as a reminder (and if I ever have enough disk space)

Changing clients to use your new server (running Software Update)

sudo defaults write /Library/Preferences/com.apple.SoftwareUpdate CatalogURL http://greebo.snarc.co.uk:8088/

And trigger an update from the command line using

sudo softwareupdate –install –all

Time Machine

It’s just easier to start with workgroup mode and use serveradmin to run the machine without converting it.

Things left to do

  • Network home directories
  • Portable home directories

playing with mercurial

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Well, been playing with opensolaris and they use mercurial as a DSVN – and another benefit of that over git is that the command set is very much similar to SVN/Subversion – which is important for us people who /don’t/ use it every day.

Migrating was straight-forward:

$ mkdir ~/svn && cd ~/svn
$ hgimportsvn https://dubdubdub.co.uk/svn/mike
$ find . -name .svn -type d | xargs rm -rf

One thing to note when using – which took me a bit of reading to realise – it’s distributed, so if you’ve your own local copy – you have to commit and then push/pull changes out!