Tag Archives: mac

G-RAID, Time Machine, and Spotlight Headache

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A few days ago, of course right before the “Money Back Guarantee” expired on our G-RAID 8TB Time Machine drive at work both my S3 and I were battling with a rather nasty pernicious bug that was plaguing this device on our new fancy Mac Pro Server running OSX Mountain Lion.

The problem was this, you plug the drive in, using Firewire 800 and Time Machine sees it and starts backing up files. That works just fine. After say 1TB of files get backed up Time Machine works gamely for about three or four hours and then the drive suddenly goes deaf. What I mean is that the drive is still connected, the icon is on the Desktop, but you can’t do anything with it. It gives you a fusillade of meaningless errors, vague ones like “Unspecified error with file system” and the like and Time Machine is stuck and can’t do anything at all with the drive. It’s not really a headache for us currently because the server is brand-spanking-new, but still, it’s a concern for us. You have to eject the drive, and not a plain eject either, but a Force Eject. When you move it to another computer and plug it in and do a fsck on the drive everything pans out fine. Everything is hunky-dory, journal is fine, structures are peachy, the works. So annoying.

So off to Google we go. Turns out there MIGHT be a bug in the “Turn off Hard Drives when possible” in the Energy Saver preference pane in System Preferences. This strikes me as a wee bit of bullshit, the drive should go to sleep and wake up elegantly like anything connected to a Mac should (and almost always does!) so, fine, turn that off. Testing. Ah, failed. So next stop was to try to irritate the drive with constant actions. To that end I created a script:

!/bin/bash

while true
do
touch /Volumes/G-RAID/keepalive
sleep 60
done

So what this script does is touch, which is a Unix command in the Mac that just runs out and accesses a file, it’s size is zero, it just runs the most basic of file operation on a drive. If you touch a file on a sleeping drive, it should wake it up. If the drive is counting down until it goes to sleep, this operation will reset that counter. Then the entire thing takes a nap for a minute and does it again, and it does it over and over forever.

We tried that, and still ended up with a failed Time Machine backup and a drive that’s gone deaf. The exact error you get in Time Machine is “com.apple.backupd: Error: (22) setxattr for key:com.apple.backupd.HostUUID … ” So, still no solution to our problems. We finally figured out what the silver bullet was, and it came from an unexpected source. We added the G-RAID drive to the Privacy pane of Spotlight in the System Preferences on the server and voilà! Magical solution!

Since I did that, the drive has been working happily since I made the change, it’s been about a week. My working theory is that mds (which runs the Spotlight service) either locks a file or does something sneaky with this extended attribute on the HostUUID object and that, somehow, ruins access for the entire file system on that drive. It’s not that the file system is damaged, it’s just not working.

So, where’s the bug? Is it in mdsworker, mds itself, backupd (Time Machine), Firewire 800, the Firewire 800 cable, or the G-RAID drive? The answer is a definitive YES. Somewhere. Something is causing it and the only solution seems to keep mds’s muddy hands to itself and pester the drive every minute with a meaningless file operation via touch.

The upside is the damn thing works, so we’ll keep going with it until it stops working. I wish there was something clearer than this Error 22 from backupd to go on, but alas, this seems to be a valid workaround and frankly I don’t really need Spotlight to go futzing about on the drive anyways. There won’t be any searching done on it anyhow, just the indexing that Time Machine needs and that’s it.

I guess in the end, all’s well that ends well.

Installing a HP LaserJet 1505 printer on Apple OSX Mountain Lion

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What a problem this was! We had a user with a MacBook Pro that had a new copy of Macintosh OSX Mountain Lion 10.8.2 running on it. Plugged in a rinky-dink HP LaserJet 1505 and nothing. Even though there was the exact same printer installed before, from the user’s home, the system refused to reuse the connection for the printer at work. Obviously that has to be because the system notices it’s a different device and refuses to play along, which I find stupid.

Plug in the printer, try to add it, and the Add Printer function goes out to Apple Software Update to look for the driver and then comes back and tells us that nothing is available. Then commence zombie debugging via muzzle flare, wandering around in the dark trying to fix what shouldn’t be happening but apparently is beyond all logic and reason.

So how you do diagnose a Mac? Here’s a handy-dandy guide which anyone can use to fix their Macs. I seriously doubt any issues ever survive this particular procedure:

  1. Clear PRAM – Turn off computer, turn on computer while holding down  Command-Option-P-R. The computer will restart and you’ll hear the startup chime twice. Let go of the keys. ~ For this, just do it. It doesn’t matter if you don’t think doing this will fix your problem, it will. Just shut your pie hole and do this. If you don’t do it, I don’t want to hear about your problems. It’s magical. I don’t care if Apple says it won’t do anything. This thing DOES EVERYTHING IN CREATION – apparently. That and it cannot hurt. Lots of fluids and plenty of bed-rest. 
  2. Repair Disk Permissions – Start Disk Utility, find your “Macintosh HD” and click “Repair Disk Permissions” and wait. Do this. Often. Regularly. Lots. Weekly. Now.
  3. Download Onyx. Pick which version of OSX you are using, download it, install it and use it. I recommend skipping everything it wants to do and going right for the Automation button. Uncheck “Repair Permissions” and “Display of folders content” and check the rest. Click Execute and wait. When the system asks for a reboot. Reboot. Everyone should do this weekly. Think of it like vitamins for your Mac. Plus, it can’t hurt.

At this point your system should be all spic and span and whatever niggling bit was bothering you should be dealt with. Of course, for the problem I had to deal with at work, there is one little thing extra, one thing more. Open Finder, click Go on the Menubar, then Go to Folder… and type in /Library/Printers and click Ok. You’ll see a list of folders. In this list find the folder named “hp” and KILL IT WITH EXTREME PREJUDICE. Y’arr! This !@#$ folder is at the very center of my hatred for all that is Hewlett-Packard. I’ve started to unceremoniously refer to them as Fudge Packard. Bastards. Anyways, killing the folder does the trick, it clears everything up and Mountain Lion can download software from Apple again for the HP Drivers – blah blah blah. I’d rather just get a sledgehammer and pound the HP LaserJet 1505 into foil, but hey, you have to cope or have some sort of attack. I regret buying HP. I regret the LaserJet 1505. What a piece of crap. Steaming.

Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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Fake installer malware makes its way to Mac | TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

When it comes to installing things on your Macs I often times advocate a rather carefree attitude. One thing that has always been true, and this article just nails home the point, is that even the most secure system can fall if the person holding the keys is tricked or cheated into opening the door.

I have said to many people whom I’ve given computer advice, if you have doubts, please contact me and I can look at it and give you advice. It’s free, and I’d rather help in the vein of “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

Making Windows 7 My Personal Bitch

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There are some situations at work where I have no choice but to use the hated and reviled Microsoft Windows 7 “Operating System”. These situations are few and far between and mostly come down to Microsoft Access or having to trudge into Windows in order to provide some sort of technical support to people who are stuck using this gross abomination masquerading as a real OS.

I hate Microsoft, and I hate Windows.

But, there is a way I can use this system without having to deal with any of the obnoxious bullshit that comes with Windows. Specifically, I want to run Windows dangerously, as Administrator, without a password, no antivirus, no Windows Update, no UAC, no defragging, no malware, none of it. As much of the bullshit as I can trim away from Windows itself and what I need to make it do for me.

To do this, I used a few pieces of technology that I already have that I do enjoy using, and configuring all of it to make my life in Windows at least minimally acceptable:

  • Macintosh OSX Mountain Lion (Home Sweet Home)
  • Windows 7 Installation DVD
  • VirtualBox
  • DropBox

I installed VirtualBox on my Mac and created a new guest for Windows 7. I installed Windows 7 and set up Microsoft Office Pro 2010 in the new guest image and once everything was set just the way I need it for that appliance I shut it down. Part of the setup of the guest image was establishing my Dropbox folder on my iMac as a permanent machine shared folder that was set to “Auto Mount” so the guest OS will always have a drive letter pointing to my Dropbox. I did it this way, instead of installing Dropbox on the guest because of what I did to make this entire setup work for me. I tested the guest so it logs in without asking for a password (Administrator without a password) and I turned everything that I could get my hands on, off. Firewall, Antivirus, UAC, you name it. I trimmed that OS right to the ground. Then, once everything was right where I wanted it, I released the VDI file (this file is the “Hard Drive” for the Windows 7 installation) and reconfigured it to be “Immutable”. Then I reattached the VDI file back to the Storage setting for my Windows 7 guest entry in VirtualBox. When I start the Windows 7 VirtualBox, VB creates a new coded VDI file (it’s got a hex name that I don’t care about) and everything that happens to that copy of Windows 7 doesn’t go off to the root VDI file, but instead goes off to the “snapshot” VDI file. Each time I start the Windows 7 guest, the old “snapshot” VDI is truncated and builds from scratch once more. For each and every start Windows 7 starts in the EXACT SAME PLACE each and every time. Pure and clean. Uncomplicated by use.

I’ve said that Windows is such an awful operating system that it is always a victim of entropy, like a tightly wound spring. At first Windows is snappy and works well, but over the months of use it starts to unwind, showing little bits of strange behavior. Windows XP was much worse at this than Windows 7, but once bitten, never going to happen again. So using the system this way ensures that each time I start the Windows 7 guest, it starts as if no time has elapsed since I made the VDI image immutable. As far as that image is concerned, nothing has ever happened to it, while I’ve been using it as a tool the whole time along. This gives me some really great feelings when it comes to using this horrible OS.

As I use the guest, anything can and should happen to it. It could get infected, it could get loaded up with malware, anything and everything could possibly attack it. I don’t care. When I shut the guest off whatever was going wrong in the OS evaporates as if it never happened at all. Another thing that I have eliminated is proper Windows shutdown routine. I just click on the VirtualBox control panel, and press Command-F. That powers off the guest, no shutdown, no prep, nothing. Because the VDI is immutable there is absolutely no damage for doing this. I just don’t care. I also no longer have to worry about fragmentation in the file system, since any fragmentation evaporates when the snapshot VDI file is truncated. Because this is the ultimate sandbox and this system is fully unsecured, I could willy-nilly click on any infected links and let the malware or virus just go bonkers until I click on the Virtualbox control panel and tap Command-F. The freedom from having to worry, from shutdowns, from Windows Update, from Antivirus scanning – it’s almost as pleasurable as using OSX Mountain Lion, except you know, it’s Windows.

By drawing in my Dropbox using a Machine Shared Folder I am able to leverage the Dropbox client on my Mac to do all the syncing in one place and I don’t have to worry about the immutable image always having to play catch-up with my most contemporary arrangement of Dropbox contents. In this way, I have a very comfortable doorway carved in Windows 7 so I can have my cake and eat it too. File persistence without risk. I am having my cake and eating it too and it’s making me downright giddy.

All you need to make this work for yourself is VirtualBox, Windows 7, Dropbox and a Mac. It’s really quite nice and gives me a way to wish a hearty “screw you!” to Microsoft while making it’s pride and joy lick your boots. That’s it bitch, make ‘em nice and shiny!

Biff! Bam! Bash!

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At work I’m trying to automate how I do some of my regular office tasks. So far everything is going swimmingly. Part of the deal is finding the most recent file in a list of files, because they are all named very similarly and only really differ by date, and I want the most recent one. At first I started looking at perl to do this, but then a few seconds later I realized I was over thinking it and I could use bash instead, since that’s the shell I’m using on my Mac anyhow. So with that figured out next I had to move on to mounting Samba filesystems to my Mac using bash. I’m used to the bash shell command-line so I knew what I needed from memory.

So there is a server I have at work, it’s been added to the Active Directory system here at Western and as such, it’s part of a domain. Classically I’ve always run my Windows Servers without mucking about in domains. Yes I know, there are management features I’ve missed out on, but the less complex a Windows Server is, the more reliable it is as well! So now I have to connect to a Samba share off a domain’ed Windows Server. I start with this command:

mount -t smbfs //domain;user:password@IP/mount /Volumes/mount

Which blows up in my face. The Mac can mount it using the GUI, but I don’t want to do that. The GUI would require human intervention and I don’t want that. And yes, for the pedants out there, storing the password in plaintext is a security problem, but frankly my dear, I’m not worried about it in this context, so fef. The error I got from bash was “No such file or directory” – gah! Nice and cryptic, thanks.

And then it hit me like a brick. It’s the stupid !@#$ semicolon! Come on guys! Why would you use THAT character to mean that!?! To bash, a semicolon is a statement terminator, it tells bash “We’re all done, move on to the next thing.” but it’s rarely ever used. Statements conclude on their own because the semicolon is optional. It’s optional, so nobody thinks about it, it’s still floating around in there, so now we have a condition where the mount_smbfs command, called by the mount wrapper command gets unacceptable input because bash is trying to follow it’s programming and being a right twat about it! I can’t really complain about bash, it’s been around since forever, so… right after I discovered the WTF semicolon and how it was upsetting bash I remembered that double-quotes come to the rescue. Yes, so now it’s:

mount -t smbfs “//domain;user:password@IP/mount” /Volumes/mount

Not too ugly. But this is a clear case of a bunch of human beings all working in parallel with each other but not really talking enough to each other. It’s not really a bug, but it is an annoyance. Why not use periods? Or underscores, or hyphens, or backtick symbols instead?

All’s well that ends well. The wrapped-in-quotes command worked, so hooray for that.

First Look at Mountain Lion OSX for Macintosh

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I purchased and downloaded the newest version of Macintosh OSX codenamed Mountain Lion. The download took a brief amount of time and once established I didn’t have a problem handling it. The first step was creating an independent system installer using a USB memory stick. I found some instructions that I remembered from when I did this with OSX Lion and the instructions worked well, up to a point. I was able to find the InstallESD.dmg file and I set up my 16GB memory stick with the proper format settings, specifically Mac HFS File System with Journaling and GUID partition map. The first issue I ran into was a strange memory error, that while restoring the dmg file to the USB memory stick, after the Mac was done really, in the verification step it failed with this odd arcane “cannot allocate memory” error. I went immediately to Google to look and found that if I mount the InstallESD.dmg file first, that *that* is the magic bullet. Turns out, it was.

Now that I have Mountain Lion on a USB memory stick I got a stock 24” iMac out of storage and set it up. Plugged the USB memory stick in, then the mouse and keyboard, main power, and while holding down the option key, turned it on. Everything worked as I expected it to! So far so good.

Once the system was up and running and in setup it prompted me to connect to a Wifi system, which was not a problem since I share Wifi from my primary work iMac (long story for another day) and it seemed satisfied. Then I ran into my first problem with Mountain Lion. During initial system setup I could not successfully log into any Apple ID. My personal one, or the one for work, either one didn’t work. The system allows you to continue without it and so that’s exactly what I did. Once I moved on to setting the time zone, this also failed, but I suspect it has everything to do with my shared Wifi coming from my Snow Leopard iMac and not something endemic to Mountain Lion. Instead of Mountain Lion successfully setting the time zone by it’s location I set it by hand. Not really a problem.

Once I got the system up and running, idle at the desktop everything was as it should be. My next step was to try to connect my test iMac up to my Apple ID. So logically I went first for System Preferences, then to Accounts, and there set my Apple ID. I was half hoping that setting it there would have had a chain reaction and set it everywhere else, but that didn’t happen. I noticed that iCloud wasn’t set up properly, so I found it in System Preferences, it wasn’t a problem, just a very weak annoyance. Then I tried the Mac App Store, had to do it again, same for iTunes. The only real irk that upset me was fiddling around with “Back To My Mac” feature which asked me to turn on sharing with a button that lead to the sharing panel. I was lost in there (no, not really, but I was in the headspace of an end-user) and it took me a while to notice that Apple did tell you where to go to set things up, so my one tweet about this being a problem is wrong, I was just hasty. I must say that much of this I will pin on me being in the “end user headspace” and not as an Admin, which I would have been much more careful and slow with in my approach to Mountain Lion. If you read and aren’t hasty, this isn’t a problem.

Every app that I’ve used worked well, some needed Java to be installed but the OS prompted to fetch it and install it for me without a problem so that was fine. Of the apps that work that I’ve tested, at least in that they open up are:

* Aqua Data Studio 11.0
* Dropbox
* iSquint
* KompoZer
* MarsEdit
* Miro Video Converter
* MPlayerX
* Music Manager (Google Cloud)
* OpenOffice.org
* Photo Wrangler 2.1
* Picasa (needed update)
* Postbox
* Seashore
* Spotify (needed update)
* The Unarchiver
* Transmission
* VLC
* What’s Keeping Me?
* XTabulator
* Zipeg

Of course, all the apps from the Mac App Store I assume work well. Dropbox was a non-issue, 1Password was smooth-as-glass, as I expected. But what really surprised me was Postbox. I recently fled Sparrow as an email client when they announced that Google was acquiring them. Postbox was my alternative. When I copied over Postbox and started it for the first time it offered to collect the settings form Mail.app which I didn’t think anything of and let it go ahead. Postbox seamlessly captured my iCloud email account and after I typed in my Apple ID password, I was up and running! For some strange reason, that really pleased me.

So, what is next? So far everything seems to test fine in Mountain Lion. There are some goobers from Lion that I still need to work out – such as secondary monitors in full screen mode being stupid, that sort of thing, and also to see if VirtualBox will work, but for the most part I’m satisfied that this new OS is exactly as Apple bills it, and they have done a very good job. There are some small irky bits and on my Twitter I’m sure it came across as being ranting-and-raving, but actually it’s quite good.

Next steps at work are tallying up all the people interested in Mountain Lion and figuring out how we’re to pay Apple for the licenses, then helping everyone set up Apple ID’s on their own. There is going to be a headache with all these new very independent and unmanaged Apple ID’s floating around in space, but if you want the Bright and Shiny you have to swallow a seed or two.

Google Drive Failure

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Google Drive is a failure.

Google Drive was released yesterday, and I clicked the button on the website letting Google know I was interested in their product. I received an email late last night informing me that my Google Drive was ready. This morning, on a lark really, I went to the Google Drive website and clicked on the download link for the sync application to add to my work iMac. I downloaded the DMG fie without a problem and opened it up. I copied the Google Drive app to my Applications folder, like you are supposed to with Macintosh, and then I sat back and marveled at it. Google Drive, finally.

I’ve been a loyal Dropbox customer for years and back in January I sprang for the $100 a year expansion of my Dropbox up to 50GB. Everything I use connects to my Dropbox via the Dropbox API and just for the record, I am totally in-love with Dropbox. There is no reason for me to leave them as a customer. But even if you are loyal, it doesn’t mean you can’t explore. I have a professional account with Box.com through my work, and we arranged that after drop.io was consumed by the wraiths at Facebook. I have a personal Box.net account with 50GB but I don’t use it because Box only allows sync with paid accounts, so it’s not worth my while. Google Drive was just along these lines, just another option to look into.

So I started Google Drive on my iMac and I was asked to authenticate, something I expected. Then nothing. I started the app again and nothing. I opened up the Console app and here is what I found:

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e2ba80 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e37440 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e332f0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e32600 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:45 AM [0x0–0x221c21a].com.google.GoogleDrive[22481] 2012–04–25 07:17:45.119 Google Drive Icon Helper[22488:903] Inject result: 0

So, it’s broken. This isn’t the first time a new app was built that failed horribly on my iMac. If anyone cares, and perhaps if anyone from Google is reading, this is a standard 2009–2010 iMac running Mac OSX 10.6.8. The only thing different about this particular Mac is that the account has it’s home on an AFP-connected OD-domain’ed Apple xServer. A network home. This causes headaches for Adobe Acrobat Reader so it’s probably the reason why Google Drive collapses on startup.

Since I can’t run the application, and since it wasn’t designed elegantly to take into account those people who have network-based computers like mine – unlike Box.com’s sync app or Dropboxes sync app, I can only state that Google Drive is not ready for prime time. Google Drive is not ready to compete in the marketplace and Google has to go back to the drawing board and try again.

Flashback Trojan on Mac OSX

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Apple makes some marvelous products. In this case, I’m talking about Apple Remote Desktop. With ARD I was able to scan every single one of my client Macs to check to see if any of them were infected with the Flashback Trojan Horse. Before my scan I would have sworn on whatever-you-like that none of my systems that I manage here at WMU were infected. Turns out I was right.

Macs really aren’t susceptible to viruses and the biggest threat comes from Trojan Horses. To scan a mac for infection you just open up Terminal and run these two commands:

  • defaults read /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/Info LSEnvironment
  • defaults read ~/.MacOSX/environment DYLD_INSERT_LIBRARIES

If you get an error from both of those commands, you are in the clear. It’s quite easy to do, mostly just opening up Terminal and copying and pasting and getting the errors and being satisfied. The removal instructions are straightforward to follow, so even removal of an active infection should be a snap.

If you try these commands and don’t get errors, don’t panic. Just let me know and I’ll find a way to help you out.

Review of Macintosh OS X Lion

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This past Wednesday I was prompted by some coworkers in regards to some news that had leaked out of Apple regarding their new Mac OSX Operating System codenamed “Mountain Lion”. This new operating system was supposedly going to take more of the riff against iOS that OSX Lion took, including a new version of iChat called Messages which integrates the iMessage framework into the desktop experience on a desktop computer.

It’s very clear to me the path that Apple is taking. They have a very good mobile operating system in the guise of iOS 5.0.1 and they are trying to establish themselves as a end-to-end digital experience purveyor. I don’t wish them ill for that, it’s a very valuable pursuit and frankly as I see it is the way the entire industry is starting to bend. There was a time back in the late 80’s when the rage was thin terminals, then when the 90’s came the pendulum swung the other way and computers got fat again. Now that the network is the centerpiece, we’re seeing that pendulum swing back to thin terminals once again. Computers are just appliances that you use to manipulate resources on the network, nothing more, nothing less.

Now we have Mac OSX Lion. I started this on Thursday, purchasing a copy from the Mac App Store for $29.99. I’ve never been one for “in-place upgrading” and I find great value in the “blow away and reinstall” method of installing a new operating system. To me the complete zeroing out of a hard drive means that you start form a position of known cleanliness. There isn’t a gremlin hiding in some deep dark directory folder waiting to spring out and catch you when you need your computer the most and then ruining your day. So I downloaded the 4GB file and followed instructions on the net for opening up what Apple provides to get at what you need to copy the data onto a external FireWire hard drive for speedy installation. This copying of the OS to a FireWire hard drive is something that I witnessed once when I was at a Genius Bar at an Apple Store, so I knew for a fact that it was an accepted Apple canon procedure. Once I had what I was after, and dear reader, please note a very distinct new flavor is entering into the Apple experience, that of “sidestepping the mothership” in order to get what you want accomplished done. Apple is no longer thinking ahead of the end user, making provisions for easy this-or-that, but rather making a popular installation method as annoying as possible. There is a darkness here that I will breach later on in this story, so keep your eyes peeled for it, you’ll know when you reach it.

So once I had Mac OSX Lion on a FireWire hard drive, specifically the affectionately termed “piece of shit” Iomega FireWire drive, named so because unless the drive is using FireWire 400 or FireWire 800, it’s a giant flaming hunk of shit – I’m looking at you retarded USB. Yes, if you plug this drive in using a USB cable it is a sorry piece of shit. FireWire, ahh, but I digress. So plugged into a test machine I was able to get Lion installed relatively quickly. I ran into my first small nugget of dismay. Unlike the previous big cat (Apple OS’s are named after big cats, so the previous one to Lion is Snow Leopard) there was no delightful animated movie with a catchy song that had a great hook. I was half hoping for the renowned Apple spit-and-polish and I was let down. No big bombastic “Welcome Message”, nothing like the Discovery channels boom-de-yada or anything like that. The nebula featured in the Snow Leopard installer was thematically replaced by the Milky Way Galaxy. Apple could have done something adorable perhaps even a powers-of-ten “Welcome” presentation at the outset but they chimped out. Missing this made me sad, but I was willing to soldier on.

The installation worked well, more polished than Snow Leopard in that it presents you with Disk Utility instead of making you go fish for it yourself. Lion started well enough and dumped me into a fully functioning Mac computer, right at the desktop, a picture of the Milky Way making me grin like a fool. I started in on some of the big features first, like Mission Control and Launchpad. Here are some big changes that Apple has made, and Mission Control is the most elaborate change you can see right off the cuff. Older big cats had Expose and Spaces. Lion merged these metaphors together into what is called Mission Control. A central vignette featuring an expose view of all the apps on that screen and then a parade of Spaces-based extra Desktops along the top of the screen. Apple engineered this interface quite well, especially with randomized wallpaper pictures on desktops and multiple monitors. Launchpad is the first patch of dull tin that you run into with Lion. Everything Apple makes is shiny. It’s white, it’s chrome, it’s polished and thought out and developed until it screams and moans with exhaustion. The interface has always been like this, when you expect to catch Apple with their pants down you find out that to your glad chagrin that they did develop even out into the edge-use-case that you find yourself accidentally exploring. This is why Apple succeeds and wows the cranky like myself, because they spend the time to flesh out all the possibilities and in so doing leave the user breathless. I’ve grown used to this particular feeling around Apple technology and have grown to assume that it will always be present. Launchpad is the first place where this feeling of polish and shiny appears to have gone out for a protracted lunch and left a “Back in 5 minutes” sign behind. I know why Launchpad exists, it’s a crib off of the menu launcher for iOS devices set as an optional interface on the desktop metaphor. It’s extra, it’s meaningless, it’s ignorable. The venerable Dock DOES THIS ALREADY and so Launchpad is for all real arguments a kind of iOS-inspired afterbirth. Nobody likes it, it sickens most people and the only people who appreciate it are the pedants who have hope that it may turn into something compelling down the pike. It’s jarring in that it’s express function is so extraneous. Who cares? I certainly don’t! I couldn’t imagine myself ever actually using Launchpad, so right off we’ve got a feeling of meaningless feature-creep that is reminiscent of… well, we won’t go there just yet. Bear with me for a while longer, please.

After these two big features were plumbed and found moderately compelling and extraneous in turn, I started to explore some really important and in-depth system requirements. My use of Lion is to support the use of a specific set of applications, one of which is Aqua Data Studio to fulfill my professional needs as a DBA for a SQL Server 2008 database at work. ADS requires Java, so when I first started it Lion informed me that no Java was installed with it’s basic install but it would help me get a version to install from the network. Lion then promptly gave me a terse error stating that Java was unavailable to get at that time. So I opened up Safari and did a Google search and found the Java installer for Lion and downloaded it and installed it. ADS worked well from that point forward. But that indicates another glaring problem with Lion. Why is a Java Runtime Environment not shipped by default with the operating system itself? Why is it a secondary download? To keep the OS slim and tight? Come on, that is no excuse. It is stupid and softheaded and it’s something that you’d expect … ahh… getting closer to it, but still not yet. Bear with me a fair bit more, please.

The next big thing I need is to bind workstations to an Open Directory domain hosted from our Mac OSX Leopard server. Yes I know it’s an old server, but I cannot accept the risk of trying to upgrade it and losing user data. In a way this server is a basket with all the eggs in it. If you keep all your eggs in one basket, as Mark Twain said, you keep your eyes on that basket! So I have an Open Directory domain and I want to make an authenticated bind to it from a workstation. This act is required so that it correctly registers the computer in the OD domain so I can then assign it parameters in the domain to manage it easily. Anyone who manages domains, OD or AD knows that this management makes the world far easier to manage when it comes to client computers. On Snow Leopard this is a non-issue, it takes about 2 minutes to do and is very straightforward. On Lion I progressed the same way as I would on a Snow Leopard installation except this time, and to my now-aching chagrin it turns out that Lion refuses to establish an authenticated bind on an Open Directory if it’s run under Leopard. Even still, at this point I was willing to imagine ways to compensate for this shortcoming and still move forward with Lion. Life could go on without binding to OD in the way that I wanted. This feeling of coping and compensating is something I’m very familiar with when it comes to… ahh… again, wait for it, please.

I continued forward with Lion and discovered to my chagrin that the previous installation of Server Administration Tools for Leopard are grossly incompatible with Lion. So my remote Server Admin toolkit that I use almost daily is a dead duck. I can cope, as I can use ARD to control the server itself and use the tool kit there. It’s not as graceful as it was on Snow Leopard, but. I. can. compensate. At this point in the game I have switched over to my own iMac from the test one and I’m trying to make Lion work for me. Even saying that stings if you are used to Apple products as of late, but I digress. Once I got Lion up and running and past all these little problems I installed the Messages beta and tried to get it to work. I logged into my user account which still had the Library from Snow Leopard. Lion accepted this as gracefully as a panicking albatross accepts having hot tar thrown at it. Nothing worked. Messages was a Force Quit bonanza, along with iCal, Mail, Addressbook. Every app caught a whiff of my Snow Leopard Library and flipped it’s insides with it’s outsides. So, in the spirit of filthy wretched attrition I compensated by ditching my Snow Leopard Library and creating a new blank one. Lion was very happy to fill the new empty Library with everything that it needed and so I had the unenviable position of having to re-authenticate to everything I use on the network, all over again. I did get everything to work finally and Messages did start and work well up until I started to fill the iCloud settings panel with all the accounts that I use on a daily basis. Five email accounts, six calendar resources, and four chat clients including iMessage. Lion handled iCloud services like a champ and the rest were acceptably easy enough to set up except for IMAP resources which disgracefully belly-flopped the user back into Mail.app to polish off the setup there each time you wanted to set up an IMAP account. I was on the road to getting Lion up and running and then I tried to set up Evernote, at first my Snow Leopard copy of Evernote was a flaming mess, and then I dumped the Evernote bits from the Library and downloaded Evernote from the App Store and tried again. Evernote struggled for HOURS and never really was a success on my Lion installation. Another application that I use a lot is Dropbox, and this too also suffered for Lion and was an agony through struggle-town. Dropbox never got off the ground either. The only application that worked very well was iCal. The experience was devolving faster and faster and was pounding headlong towards resembling… yeah… not yet.

As I was struggling along with Lion I noticed some other rather nasty developments that Apple brought to this big cat. I was puttering around my home folder and suddenly felt very strange as I couldn’t locate my ~/Library folder. It’s in Library that many settings and caches are kept and it’s the first place that a IT guy goes to look to resolve application problems. I couldn’t find it however when I used Terminal and issued the command ls -lah I could see it just fine. Something was hiding it from the GUI. It turns out that Lion aggressively issues this command every time it starts: “chflags hidden ~/Library”. This application, chflags adds an extended attribute to whatever file it works on, turning on or off various fine-print features. In this case, the “hidden” attribute hides a file or folder from the GUI but not from the filesystem. So what Apple has done is actively hidden the Library to keep people out by not letting them see it plainly. This is what an asshole does to piss off IT guys. Yes it’s fine to pull this shit on end users but what if you know more than Ma and Pa Kettle? Go fish! This was the first time that I felt Lion resembling… no… not yet. Don’t worry, it’s coming.

Along with this little Library gem I found what Apple did to the Finder to be abominable. They took a system that worked well and hammered out it’s ankles so it just hobbles around. This intentional hobbling of the file management subsystem is exactly what… grimace. No. It’s not time yet. What else is there? Ah yes, the vaunted gestural operating system! In Lion various gestures done with a Magic Trackpad or a brand new Apple Mouse do a host of new things. I happen to have a Magic Trackpad and I like it quite a bit. The gestures? They hurt my fingers. Okay, what else? Scrolling. Lion flips the sense of scrolling so that you scroll the same way that you would on an iOS device, with the direction of scroll instead of against it. This is supposed to be more natural but in practice causes confusion and upset, as users have been scrolling in a certain way for so long that the brain just can’t correct for this new 90 degree flipflop. It’s supposed to feel natural, it feels horrible – like someone is forcing me to wear my left shoe on my right foot and my right shoe on my left foot! What else is broken in Lion? How about Trash removal? I tried in vain to remove Trash, even Securely, to get rid of 17 items. I let it chug away for two hours and no good. I eventually had to “sudo rm -rf ~/.Trash” and that only temporarily solved the issue, once I put more things in the Trash removing them became a waste of effort. I let the system try to remove 50 items OVERNIGHT and it could not accomplish it. I tried to set up network attached printers. Apparently all the CUPS drivers for all the various printers, HP and Savin that we use at work all went out the window! Nothing like a good firm cavemanesque regression to really catch someones attention! So it’s either generic PostScript or generic PCL. Whatever.

Then we get to the why of Lion. Why bother with this wretched pile of insipid monkey spit? Apple would have you believe that iCloud is reason enough. iCloud is supposed to tie all their devices and experiences together so that your iPod Touch, iPad, iPhone and Lion-based computer all have the exact same information on them at all times. That your contacts and your email and your calendars all will jive from system to system to system. This is the holy grail of cloud computing, which is to say making user data available everywhere and on everything they use. It’s what iCloud was designed to provide. Is it compelling enough to switch to this big cat? Absolutely NOT. I am angry. I am angry at Apple. They released iCloud and then in a fit of pique they actively sandbagged all their customers who were using Snow Leopard making using iCloud on the desktop experience something you can only get with Lion. The argument is, you can surely afford $29 to get Lion, so why not upgrade? Meanwhile Apple hands Windows 7 customers an application to add iCloud to their OS for free. What if you are an Apple fan using Snow Leopard? Tough shit, Sherlock! You’re fucked six ways to Sunday! This is the modus operandi of… ahh… now we can get to it.

Apple, through their expression to people like me of their newest operating system called Mac OS X Lion is turning into Microsoft. They are turning OSX into Windows Vista. This is what Microsoft does. This is how Microsoft let explosive diarrhea and ignorance of the smell lead to a squishy and repellent end-user experience. This is the first time I’ve been savaged by an Operating System and felt as frustrated as I did when I fruitlessly scrabbled at the abomination that was Microsoft Vista! This Operating System, this Lion, this is crap and is NO GOOD, APPLE. If I had such struggles, and I know what I am doing! Then what the hell will the end users do? All the fancy chrome parts that you spent all your time shining left all the other parts you forgot about to lie in the dark, festering. What you did to Finder was HORRIBLE, what you did to scrolling is an abomination in the eyes of God! The fact that the system reaches an idle state at all after installation is a miracle!

And so we get right to the heart of it. Apple has peaked. Much like Microsoft did with Windows 2000, a product I wish they would have grabbed, and really refined and made that their flagship product instead of the insane clown paint and bullshit that became Windows XP and later on Windows Vista and Windows 7; Apple should have refined what was in Snow Leopard and not followed Microsoft’s well worn path of throwing insane clown paint on what is an excellent Operating System! I wish Apple would take Lion back. Give everyone their money back and offer to help them downgrade (nee upgrade) back to Snow Leopard and express to everyone how sorry they are and how they are going to go back to the drawing board and refine Snow Leopard into the proper next-big-cat we should be getting instead of this flea-ridden abomination known as Lion.

This experience fucking breaks my heart! I had such hopes for the next big cat! I was hoping for a kinder more gentle Apple now that Steve Jobs is in the ground, but it’s apparently not in the cards. Apple is turning into Microsoft and that my friends is a very nasty slope covered with axle grease and human shit. It may be that Apple’s greatness was just how a later-in-life Steve Jobs shined through it. Now that he’s gone, we see this awfulness start to bubble up from beneath us all. Apple should be ashamed of Lion. The way they have treated their Snow Leopard customers should be a shame in and of itself. Turning your backs on half of your installed service base as Lion wasn’t as hot-to-trot as you hoped it would be will come back to bite you Apple, and more than the little chunk missing from your logo!

I cannot recommend Macintosh OSX Lion for use in enterprise settings where there are domains, a pre-existing user base, or any other situation where an upgrade path is indicated. There is no compelling reason to switch to Lion, the technologies included do little for the end user that basic training and responsible computing shouldn’t already be able to address.

Worst Case Scenario / Sleepless in Kalamazoo

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My night was going very well. I was very pleased with how practically flawless my afternoon progressed. At work I have two very small computers in a very public setting and they are performing as usual, wonderfully. Around 2am I woke up with a start because a nagging feeling that I was forgetting something hit me square between the eyes in that fuzzy zone between being awake and just falling to sleep. I had exposed two of my machines into the cold dangerous world without getting their MAC Addresses or Serial Numbers!

In many ways my work computers feel a lot like beloved pets. I care about them and look after them, and in this case worry about their safety. They were rather far away and in a particularly exposed condition where it’s terribly infeasible to go to them, flip them over, and get the information off their cases.

ARD to the rescue! Once again Apple Remote Desktop saves the day and quiets my worried mind. I opened my MacBook, connected to my workplace VPN, opened ARD, found my two little ones happily chugging along and remembered that ARD has some rather good reporting features baked-in to the software. I clicked on the first machine’s icon and went to Reports. I asked for Serial Number and the MAC Addresses for both the Airport wireless network adapter and the wired Ethernet adapter. I did this for both machines and printed the results as ‘PDF To Evernote’. Now I have all the information I forgot to get earlier stuffed into my Evernote archive.

Now, if, light-forbid my two exposed machines get stolen I won’t be sitting there facing the police with my pants around my professional I.T. ankles utterly unable to conjure on the spot Serial Numbers and MAC Addresses.

Now perhaps I can get some sleep!