Now that I’ve shown over the years how to setup an Xsan and iSCSI targets on Mac OS X I am starting to get a number of questions about how to set these up in such a way that Time Machine can backup to them. Since they’re not your typical disks in a lot of cases there’s a small command that you’ll need to run to make it work: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 Essentially, once you’ve run this command you’ll be able to back up to anything that appears in /Volumes and then some (for example share points on your local network might appear even if you haven’t yet…
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Customizing the color and icons in the Dock
So I had a request that involved something I had never actually thought or bothered to do: customize the finder icon in the dock… I figured it would just be an image and therefore that it couldn’t actually be that difficult. And I was correct. Remarkably, the icon is actually called finder.png (you may have noticed that smaller iPhone and OS X images are almost always png files these days): /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/finder.png So I renamed it to finder.old using this command: sudo mv /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/finder.png /System/Library/CoreServices/Dock.app/Contents/Resources/finder.OLD Then grabbed a new png icon and threw it in the same place with the same name (in this case the logo was called UGA.png before and…
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Computing for Good
While I despise Georgia Tech with every fabric of my being, following the loss to them in Georgia’s final game of the season, I do have to give them props for setting up a course to allow 17 students to do something good for humanity leveraging their skills in the IT industry. The Computing for Good (C4G) course, resulted in a teaching web portal in one of the lower income schools in Atlanta, a database for United Way staffers to allocate and search for beds in Altanta without having to call around and tool to help monitor blood in African countries. Given that a lot can be done with…
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SANS Offering Free Penetration Testing Mini-Course
SANS is offering a free preview of their Penetration Testing course on-line here. I would check it out.
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Startup Items Gettin' Ya' Down?
I was recently (er, a few minutes ago) monkeying with some software and jacked up my user profile. I knew it jacked up my user profile because I could login as other users on my computer, always an important step in troubleshooting… Anywho, turned out it was an item to mount my TimeMachine that my account was trying to start automatically at login. I had just drug it into the Login Options in System Preferences like a simpleton. The offending file to fix it: ~/Library/Preferences/loginwindow.plist Why this file isn’t com.apple.loginwindow.plist has always made me wonder, but alas it isn’t. You could theoretically just remove the offending part of the file,…
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Nortel Bankrupt
Not quite? But the fact that they’ve been seeking legal advice on bankruptcy really isn’t a good sign. Nortel claims not to have any debt maturity until 2011, but with 2009 right around the corner and company financials not looking spectacular (although not bleak by todays standards) I don’t know that they’ll dig themselves out of their upcoming debt. However, they have taken a move to do so by putting in place a plan to unload their Metropolitan Ethernet division. As one of the industry leaders in Metropolitan Area Network switches (if you look at the Wikipedia page for Metro Ethernet you might notice that their gear is in the…
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Iron Mountain for the Mac
Iron Mountain will be offering network backup for the Mac in early 2009. While the service is fairly similar to what companies like Mozy are already doing, it does have the Iron Mountain name and existing customer base and could end up being a very popular solution, especially for organizations looking to bundle this service with other offsite backup services they may already be leveraging.
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How to Use Xsan with iSCSI
Using iSCSI targets with Xsan… Don’t do this one at home kids. It’s just silly and not going to be supported by anyone… But if you are like me then you can do it if you must. So to get started with iSCSI check out this article. When you have a LUN that is connected don’t yet assign it a file system (or if you have partition it back to free space). Now install Xsan but don’t yet create a volume. Once you’re done, you can go ahead and fire up your trusty Terminal app from /Applications/Utilities. Type in cvlabel -l which should show you all your available LUNs. Next,…
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How to use iSCSI on Mac OS X
iSCSI is a network storage protocol that allows sending and receiving of SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. This allows you to leverage Ethernet, a low cost network medium to get SAN performance and network based storage. While you can use pretty much any Ethernet switch, I’d recommend that if you’re going to use iSCSI that you dedicate a switch to it, or use quality switches and build a dedicated VLAN for your iSCSI traffic. Recently, I’ve recently been seeing a lot of traffic about whether or not you can use iSCSI with Mac OS X. The answer, yes. As with Xsan, to get started with iSCSI you’ll need an…
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New Utility Scripts
Er, mostly… So if you click on the Tools tab of this site you will be taken to a page that allows you to ping, traceroute, find DNS information about a host and run a WHOIS and perform subnet calculations. So, check out the tools here and I hope you like them.