Pete Lacey’s Weblog

My PowerBook came back from Apple on Friday (I had put it in the mail on Monday, so not bad), and I’ve been trying to make it mine again since opening the box on Saturday.

The machine came back fixed. One of the problems it had (has), was that the battery would go from full to empty in about 20 minutes. Apple doesn’t replace batteries, even with their extended warranty, though they agreed that the “battery no longer has the capacity to function at a level necessary for optimum operation of your unit.” Apparently, the fact that all batteries suck means that PowerBook/iBook users have to shell out $130.00 every 12 - 24 months. Which is what I did last night after the following experience.

I had to put my Mac down to tend to the toddler who had just woken up from his nap. Several hours later I returned to find the PB screen dark as expected. I hit return to wake it up, but there was no response. I hit shift. I clicked the mouse. Nothing. I pushed power, and it booted up. Hmmm, why did it power down instead of just going to sleep?

Here’s a clue: when the PB finally booted to the desktop, OS X informed me that my computer’s clock was set to 1969 and this might cause problems for certain applications—which it did. I reset the clock, rebooted, and now all is well.

Here’s my guess as to what happened. The PB got separated from wall power (it happens, the connection is loose courtesy of the aforementioned toddler who finds no end of excitement making the little light go on and off), then the battery ran down before the machine had a chance to go to sleep, the backup battery (which keeps the clock running and provides just enough juice to allow you to swap batteries while working) soldiered on for a minute longer before it too gave up the ghost. No electrons, no computer—and no power to drive the PRAM (the Mac equivalent of a PC’s CMOS). Lets hope this is it, anyway. I don’t want to have to replace the backup battery as well.

While I’ll never know exactly what the repair department did to bring my Mac back to life, one thing they did was replace the hard drive. Oddly enough, they didn’t put it back to a fresh-from-the-factory state, instead there was already a user named “a” created on the machine. That, and they installed OS X 10.3.4. I suppose it’s fair not to install Tiger, they don’t know I own it, but why not 10.3.9. Maybe ’cause it sucked.

To reclaim my Mac I first had to access my secured WiFi network. I couldn’t remember my password, and I had to look it up on my wife’s iBook. Then I installed Tiger on the PB using the “replace and install” option of the install media, and I installed Xcode too. Software Update informed me that I had a 130MB of updates to install as well, and then I had to download (forgot to back them up) and install all of the “little” apps I’ve paid for and can’t live without. To wit:

• LaunchBar. Spotlight before Spotlight was cool, and much more versatile.
• NewsFire. The “Angelina Jolie” of news readers. (hint: NewsFire keeps your subscription list in ~/Library/Preferences/org.xlife.NewsFire.plist)
• TextMate. A text editor for programmers.
• Skype. You know.

And some big apps too:

• Oxygen. A Java based XML editor with XML Schema and XQuery support.
• IntelliJ. An intuitive Java IDE. (I spent $500 dollars on this two years ago as Eclipse on the Mac sucked at the time, but now I never use it.)
• iLife.
• PhotoShop.

And even though I own a copy of MS Office, I elected this time to go without, and installed NeoOffice/J. I’ll let you know how this turns out. It seems to work, but it takes a full fifteen Mississippis to start up.

A note about mail.app. Maill.app may be ugly, but the junk mail filter is fantastic. I’ve barely trained it at all, and it’s flagging like 99% of the junk that comes my way. Someday, though, I’ll have to set up server side filtering on my mail server.

I copied my working files over from back up, my Safari bookmarks, and Keychain too. I had to reauthorize iTunes to play my ITMS music. I’ll have to call Apple soon and have them deauthorize the previous incarnation of this laptop. What else? I disabled Dashboard, removed everything from the Dock excpet Finder, set LaunchBar to start at login, paired-up my BlueTooth phone, restored my wall paper, ran through all the system prefs, and now my Mac is nearly mine again.

I’ll need to reinstall Ruby on Rails and ActiveLDAP for a project I’m working on. Someday I’ll have to recompile and re-install PostgreSQL, but I’m not using it right now. There were a handful of command line utilities I used Fink to install, but I can’t remember what they were. When I do, I’ll have to replace them too. Oh, and I have to set up the printer.

There’s probably more, but for now I’m home again.

I’ve been a Unix guy ever since my first job out of college tending to a handful of Microsoft—yes, Microsoft—Xenix-based Altos computer systems. In my time I’ve played or worked on them all: Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, and so on. Of course, my work-a-day machine was Windows-based, and I ran Linux at home (RedHat, Suse, etc.). On occassion I would have access to a Mac, I’d click around some, maybe lust after a Cube a little, but just not getting what all the fuss was about. Until OS X.

After that my lust began in earnest, and in January of 2004 I bought myself a 15″ PowerBook G4 (and my wife a 12″ iBook). It was love at first sight. It truly did everything it was supposed to do: a Unix-based OS, with a “lickable” UI, that just worked. I even liked the dock (mostly). I was an instant fanboy, converting the great unwashed and annoying those who actually preferred Windows (although, interestingly, they always attacked first).

But by the end of the 10.3 cycle of releases, my Mac was suffering from some serious bit rot. Hey, that wasn’t supposed to happen! At the same time my wife’s iBook blew out its hard drive and had to be sent back for service. By the way, AppleCare is highly recommended. If this was a Windows laptop, it would have been tossed in the dustbin and replaced. But you spend good money for a Mac, and, frankly, grow a little attached to it too, so repair is a better option.

Now my PowerBook has joined the choir invisible.

Here are the symptoms. When the PowerBook goes into sleep mode and is unplugged from the wall for an unknown amount of time, it won’t wake up. All I get is the spinning beachball of death, and I’m forced to shut it down the hard way. However, on restart, I’m presented with the grey screen of death (followed by the swearing of death, the walking-away-in-disgust of death, and the cigarette of death). I don’t get the apple image and I don’t get the spinner, just a grey screen. This has been happening for the last few weeks. If I then leave the machine plugged in and alone for a while, it will boot up just fine. A “while” is around 12 hours, i.e., overnight. If I leave it for just a minute or even a few hours, no dice. Once working, however, it will keep on working forever, going in and out of sleep mode and everything. That is, until I repeat the sequence of removing the power while the PowerBook is sleeping, and then it’s the SBOD/GSOD combo.

I’ve been all over the Internet and Apple’s message boards and support pages looking for answers. There are all sorts of proposed solutions: resetting the power management unit and PRAM (no effect), repairing the hard disk (disk healthy), uninstalling non-Apple drivers (none installed), sacrificing a kitten (wife wouldn’t let me), but none of them work.

Finally, earlier this week, the PowerBook shuffled off its mortal coil completely. I called Apple, had a more-or-less pleasurable experience with support, and arranged to send the ol’ boy in for surgery. I’ll send it to Apple tomorrow, and expect to have it back in a few days. So, yes, the bloom is off the rose. Macs are just computers after all. But when my PowerBook is returned to me, it will once again be my machine of choice. Because, despite these tales of woe, OS X still runs circles around Windows and Linux.

If you’re not a geek, the title of this post refers to “small office/home office network attached storage.” It’s something I’ve been researching for about a year now, looking for just the right product. I think I may finally have found it, which is good, as I was this close to building one myself.

First, a NAS device is little more than a bunch of hard disks accessible from the network. In many ways it’s like having an external USB-based drive that can be more easily shared with others. If you’re in the market for a NAS box, and you run only Windows in your SOHO environment, then there’s a wealth of choices available to you. However, in this household there are two Macs, three Windows machines, and one Linux box, and that, well, that complicates things.

The reason for these complications is that (nearly?) all SOHO NAS devices offer only SMB/CIFS as the means of accessing the device and almost as many use FAT32 as the filesystem format.

Let me explain.

When a hard disk is made ready to use by an operating system it needs to have a filesystem layered on top of it as something to organize the contents of the disk. From a high-level perspective, it is the filesystem that allows for directories and files to exist at all. It’s also the filesystem that controls permissions (if any) on files and directories, that is, who can read/write/delete them. It’s the filesystem that dictates how files can be named, e.g., whether there can be spaces in a name, whether case is meaningful, the maximum length of a file name, whether non-ascii characters (like this ß) can be used, etc. The filesystem does much, much more, but that’s enough for now.

Turns out that FAT32, the filesystem in use for Windows 95, 98, ME, is not much of a filesystem.

In many ways, however, though not in my case, the filesystem in use on a NAS box is immaterial to the user as they never access it directly. Instead a layer of software is in place to export that filesystem onto the network. There are a number of different software products and standards that accomplish this task, each in their own way. One of these is called SMB/CIFS (SMB is the old name, CIFS is the new name). This is the protocol that Microsoft uses. It’s the software that makes “Network Neighborhood” work for you, and mapping remote drives to drive letters, and using printers installed on someone else’s machine or on the network directly.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with CIFS (well, I hear there is, but I don’t know things at that level), except for one important fact — it’s a very Windows-centric technology. While most other operating systems can make use of CIFS this is due solely to the programming and reverse engineering talents of a dedicated group of programmers who have created the open source Samba project. Now don’t get me wrong, Samba is a great piece of technology — some say better than Microsoft’s own implementation — but in the end, it’s not truly native to all of the OS’s I use, and that forces some compromises that I’d rather not need to make.

Other protocols for exposing remote filesystems on the network are:

• AFP: What Apple uses.
• NFS: What a lot of Unix-like systems use, including Linux.
• WebDAV: Using HTTP to expose the filesystem underlying the web server.
• FTP: A standard for reading from and writing too remote filesystems regardless of what type it is.

In my not-so-humble opinion, any NAS Box that claims to address a mixed OS environment needs to support at least CIFS, AFP, and NFS. It should also support WebDAV, FTP, and rsync. If it only supports CIFS, then it’s meant for Windows usage only. Trouble is, most NAS vendors proudly tout their support for OS X and Linux without ever stating that this support is through Samba only.

While having a single disk accessible on the network is good, having multiple disks is better. Why? Because with multiple disks it is possible to configure them as a RAID array. And for those who don’t know, RAID is a means of using multiple disks to speed up and/or make redundant the file write process. In particular, RAID Level 5, which requires three or more disks, provides both speedy writes (striping) and fault tolerance (you can lose a whole drive, slap in a new one, and all of your data will survive).

So here are the things that were important to me in a NAS device:

• Support for SMB/CIFS, AFP, NFS, WebDAV, and rsync
• Support for a non-FAT32 filesystem, preferably a journaling filesystem like ext3 or XFS.
• Support for RAID Level 5
• Copious amounts of storage
• Halfway decent documentation
• A responsive vendor
• Small footprint (not rack mounted)
• less than $1,000 US

Well, after a lot of trolling through this Interweb thingy, I found a device that meets all of the above requirements: the Infrant Technologies ReadyNAS X6 (site foolishly uses frames, this link goes directly to the product page), and so far so good. There’s a similar model, the ReadyNAS 600, that is really just as good. The primary difference is that the X6 uses a proprietary technology that allows you to add disks incrementally and have the device simply “do the right thing.”

I ordered my X6 from Eaegis.com. They’re obviously a small time operation, but their price was great and I’d read good things about them during my research. I want to stress here that those good things are true. The box was delivered in a timely enough fashion with all the drives pre-loaded. When I needed some tech support on a Friday evening, they contacted me right away and continued working with me through Saturday. Recommended.

The X6 supports gigabit Ethernet, which, while not on my “must have” list, is certainly nice to have. So I also picked up an SMC8508T 10/100/1000 Ethernet switch. I picked this product because it got better write-ups from end users than comparable switches and it supports jumbo frames (good for moving lots of data), which the X6 does as well. My old 4-port 10/100 Netgear hub went in the closet. Oh, and I got a 50 foot length of CAT 6 cable (CAT 6 to handle gigabit Ethernet), this allows me to periodically connect my GigE enabled PowerBook to the wired network and get blazingly fast performance.

Finally, at Infrant’s recommendation, I picked up a uninterruptible power supply, the APC Back-UPS ES 350. It’s pretty generic, but it’s all I need. It’ll provide about 50 minutes of power to the X6 should the power fail.

So is it all wine and roses? Not quite. I had a problem unrelated to the product. I ordered my device with four 250 MB Seagate ATA drives (about 650 GB of usable space after RAID formatting). However, one of the drive’s power cables came unseated during transport. Once corrected for and rebooting (and another few hours of RAID synchronization) all was well. Also, the ReadyNAS devices ship with a Java application called RAIDar. It’s supposed to work cross platform (and probably does) but I couldn’t install it on my Mac. Turns out that the “universal” installer in use (I forget which one) presents a very Windows-like installation scenario, and aftering answer all these un-Mac-like questions, it threw - of all things - a division by zero exception. No worries, though. RAIDar is handy, but not essential, and I installed it on Windows just fine.

The final problem I had concerned interaction with the UPS device. It seems that the air conditioner - in another room but on the same circuit - would draw enough power every time the compressor came on that it would cause the UPS to think that power had disappeared completely - however briefly. The UPS told the ReadyNAS, the ReadyNAS told me (via email), but the ReadyNAS never noticed the “power’s back on” signal, and eventually shut itself down - politely. I posted this issue to the active and helpful Infrant bulletin board (monitored by knowledgeable Infrant employees), and was quickly told to download the latest (beta) firmwaren, which indeed solved the problem. Four weeks later, and it just keeps on humming.

In short, if your looking for a truly cross-platform, RAID enabled, NAS device that doesn’t break the bank, take a look at Infrant’s products. As the Tom’s Hardware review says, they won’t win any beauty contests but they do work.

Next, configuring automatic backup for Windows and OS X.

I installed Tiger last weekend. I won’t bore everyone (well, okay, no one) with my review of the new Apple OS, but I have to get a few things out.

I’m underwhelmed. If I were new to OS/X, I would be as overwhelmed as I was 18 months ago. But, frankly, Spotlight, Dashboard, and Automator does not a new OS make.

Dashboard is more or less intersting — certainly cute. I hope apple goes a step further and adds a means for Dashboard utilities to respond to events and let those events poke through to the main UI.

Spotlight is also intersting, but desktop search doesn’t mean a lot to me. I’m not a pack rat when it comes to digital content, tending to put things where I can find them again anyway. Besides I have had similar functionality with Launchbar for a long time — not as integrated, of course, but similar. Too early to tell if I’m just being stubborn, but so far - ehh.

Automator may be neat. I’ll let you know when I automate something.

Like everyone else, I think the Mail.app UI sucks, but I’ll live in with it.

For the install I performed an upgrade of 10.3 rather than a new install. Unlike many people I experienced no major issues. It was all pretty smooth really. I only had two issues: iChat forgot who I was and Keychain lost a certificate I had imported into my X509Anchors. That last could be significant to a real company, but I simply reimported it.

Yesterday, I needed to use a few new Perl modules I downloaded from CPAN. When making them I got this error:

make: *** No rule to make target `/System/Library/Perl/5.8.6/darwin-thread-multi-2level/CORE/config.h’, needed by `Makefile’. Stop.

If you find yourself with this error, it’s because this file and (apparently) other Perl development files are part of the XCode install. This was easy enough to Google up, but don’t make the same mistake I did. When going to install the new XCode 2.0, I went to Applications -> Installers -> Developer Tools and clicked Developer.mpkg. Of course, that’s the installer for the XCode 1.whatever from Panther. The new XCode 2.0 installer is on your Tiger DVD.

Other than that, everything works. Kudos in general to Apple, but I’m not sure Tiger was worth the price.

It’s been a while since I’ve posted. I’ve been distracted by work and by a simple social-networking experiment.

I’ve owned the laceys.org domain since 1998, but I haven’t done much with it. This weekend I pointed the domain at my web host, Rimu Hosting, updated the VirtualHosts table in Apache, and installed a Wiki. In particular I installed PmWiki with the FixFlow skin.

The intent is that members of my immediate family will flesh out the site with information about our parents, our neighborhood, and themselves. I’m hoping that it doesn’t become a dry recitation of facts, but a place for stories and anecdotes. But that’s really besides the point, as I expect that only a dozen people in the world will be interested in reading it, and six of them are me and my five siblings. The real goal is simply to get the family to participate on a project. I suspect it will be a spectabular failure as I am the only one of us with any technical bent at all. Honestly, on a scale of zero to ten, where, say, Ken Thompson is a ten, and my mother, who literally refuses to be within a few feet of a computer, is a zero, my brother and sisters probably average out to about one. However, wikis aren’t that hard, and PmWiki is nice, so we’ll see.

But mostly, I guess I just did this for grins.

Oh, and I locked down the site so that only my family members can edit it. I did this with the UserAuth plugin to PmWiki.

Back in August the family moved into a new house, and that meant getting Comcast to run some new cable and Verizon to add two new phone lines. Long story short; Comcast did exactly what they were suppose to do - no muss, no fuss. Verizon, however, drop the ball completely. Shortly thereafter my Vonage equipment arrived.

I had Vonage installed and working in minutes. Some number of days later, though, my Internet service started degrading and then gave up the ghost entirely. I rebooted all of the networking equipment, which brought it all back to life, but a few days later the same thing happened. Then it happened again. At that time a whole bunch of things had changed in my setup. I’d received a new cable modem, I’d replaced my Linksys wifi router with Apple’s Airport Extreme, and I got the Vonage box. What was the culprit? I didn’t nail it down right away, but it was the Vonage box.

You see, the simplistic Vonage installation instructions really encourage you to install the device directly behind your cable modem/dsl line, which I did. Problem is, as I discovered after inordinate amounts of Googling, is that the router built into the Motorola VT1000 VoIP equipment is for the birds, and after a certain amount of usage the internal routing tables get all out of whack. This may be true for other devices that Vonage resells, but I have no way of knowing.

The solution is straight forward enough; arrange to have your Vonage box behind your router. You do have a router don’t you? Even if you only have one computer? Even if you’re not using wifi? If you don’t, click over to Amazon and get yourself one.

Putting your Vonage box behind your router is a simple matter of plugging it into the router as explained here. What those instructions don’t mention is that you will almost certainly have to set up port forwarding, though Vonage does explain how to do that here. And what those instructions don’t tell you is how to give your Vonage box a static IP address. You’ll need to do that too. Instructions can be found here. Of course, the address you use isn’t random, but must be part of the IP range in use on your internal network. Probably something like 192.168.1.xxx. Also note that the final, xxx, octet should not be in range of the addresses handed out by your DHCP server.

The long and the short of it is; if you are using Vonage, then do not let your VoIP equipment (at least the VT1000) also be your router/NAT/firewall/DHCP box. Instead use something better suited to the job like a Linksys, Netgear, or Airport router.

The Good Bit

However, if you are using an Airport Extreme (and maybe others), did you know that you can hook a device up to it, but put it in front of the firewall, thus skipping all the port forwarding stuff? That is, you can put a single device into a mini DMZ. To do this, you’ll have to give the Vonage box a static IP address. Then go to the Airport Admin Utility, select the main Airport tab, click “Base Station Options,” select the “WAN Ethernet Port” tab, and check the “Enable Default Host at” box. The first 3 octets of your internal network will be there, just fill in the final octet with whatever you set for your Vonage box. Now you have the Airport doing all that good NAT/router/DHCP stuff for you, and the Vonage box with a direct connection to the Internet, without port forwarding. You’ll lose any of the packet shaping (call quality) abilities of the VT1000, but we’ve been running this way for months and haven’t noticed anything.

I understand it’s possible to do this the other way round too. That is, to have the VoIP box downstream from the cable modem, and place your router in it’s DMZ. This will resurrect the call quality features of the VT1000. But my configuration seems more natural to me, and my call quality is fine.

If you’re a complete IP neophyte, then most of that didn’t make much sense. Leave a comment and I’ll help you if I can. Otherwise, find yourself a guru and have him/her do it for you.