• Mac OS X,  Ubuntu,  Windows XP

    Dell Mini 9 and Mini 12 -> Hackintosh

    The Dell Mini 9 comes with a small solid state drive, not a massive amount of firepower and running Ubuntu, but for $199 starting you can change all that (and the color) and still get away with an inexpensive and ultra-light system for less than $500.  The Mini 12 starts closer to the $400 range, but comes with a lot more features (and weight).  Why should this matter much?  Well, they’re now on the hackintosh list, meaning you can install 10.5.5 on them. Imagine a less pretty, less flashy MacBook air, 64 GB solid state drive, 2GB of RAM for about $400 (plus Leopard license).

  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server

    More on Retrospect 8 Utility Scripts

    My last post showed how to do grooming in Retrospect 8.  There were a ton of questions about what exactly grooming is.  Think about it this way, Retrospect backup scripts use snapshots.  If you do a backup without a recycle 20 times, then you have 20 snapshots.  If you changed a 1 gig file every day then you’ll have 20 gigs taken up by that one file.  Now let’s say that you groom away 10 of those backups by setting a grooming policy of 10.  Now you have only 10 gigs taken up by that file.  So any file not required for the 10 last backups will be removed from…

  • Mac OS X

    Retrospect 8 – Grooming

    One of the things I’ve loved about Retrospect for Windows over the years is the ability to groom a backup set.  Grooming is essentially taking the old data that doesn’t need to be in the set and removing it, providing there’s still a copy if the file is still resident on the source.  I’ve always felt that for clients with Retrospect for Mac the lack of grooming left them at a serious disadvantage.  Well, in Retrospect 8 the Mac should end up with this same feature.  When you go to Scripts you can add a Utility Script.  In this case, we’ll select Groom.  You then check the box for each…

  • certifications,  VMware

    VMware vExpert 2009

    So the nominations were in, VMware did their thing, and John Troyer sent me an email to let me know that I’m one of the recipients of the vExpert Award for 2009 – so if you were thinking you might get a vExpert Award check your mail! I don’t know whether the white paper I did for Fusion Mass Deployment or the posts that I’ve put up here and the TechJournal really mean I deserve it but thanks to whomever nominated me. Speaking of nominations – there are much more deserving people with thousands of responses to community posts and code/script contributions and all kinds of fun things out there.…

  • Uncategorized

    Website Changes

    I removed the ads for now. I was looking into where those speed issues were coming from and it was the stupid ads. Temporarily, they’re gone. I also cut down the number of articles that show when you first hit the site. Result: site loads waaaaay quicker. Now I’m off to bed.

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security

    Open Source Forensics for Safari

    SFT (Safari Forensic Tools) is a collection of command line tools that can be used to analyze information from Safari. The tools include parsers for Safari history, downloads, cookies, bookmarks, icon caches, and other information. They’re easy to use and can aid you in learning a bit more about what kind of information you leave behind on your own system… Find out more on SFT here.

  • Home Automation,  Mac OS X

    Z-Wave and the Mac

    Z-wave is a meshed fabric technology that enables devices with a Zensys chip embedded in them to be controlled from a Z-wave gateway.  In other words, Z-wave is fast becoming the standard in automation.  There are dimmers, light switches, garage door openers, power outlet fixtures, motion sensors, microphones (so you can say what you want to happen rather than using a remote or a computer), remote controls and other items in for the home and office that you can install and manage using Z-wave gateways.  I’ve always been a bit bummed that I have to use a Linux box to manage Z-wave devices and honestly it’s been a bit of…

  • Mac OS X,  Unix,  Windows XP

    SMB: Name Mangling

    Windows 3.x and earlier used what was known as an 8.3 naming scheme, meaning that files had eight places for a name, three for an extension and a dot in the middle.  Name decorating is programatically how Windows 3.x and DOS clients interact with files that have more than 8 characters followed by a dot and then three characters for a file extension.  Those of us who can remember doing mass migrations of data from Windows 3.x to Windows 9x and/or NT will remember well the naming changes that had to happen to maintain backwards compatibility during this trying time.  Especially if we had been using *nix boxen to store…

  • Business,  Unix

    Revenue and the Big Boys

    I have been known to be a little harsh towards Sun.  This is because I expect so much from them, not because I don’t love ’em.  Quality products that are truly enterprise scalable are not a commodity and few understand this as well as Sun.  Given how I’ve given them crap, I should also give them kudos.  Between Q2 of 2007 and Q2 of 2008 they experienced 29.2% in revenue growth.  During that same time span, that’s almost more the aggregate of the other four big boys (from a percentage standpoint), Dell (14.2%), EMC (19.7%), IBM (2.6%) and HP (who actually lost revenue at -1.2%).   So while I still…

  • Mac OS X,  Mac Security,  Windows XP

    Lo/Jack

    It’s Friday and I’m feeling fairly non-technical after a call earlier today with actual end users (I’d forgotten we had those).  So I’m going to talk about Lo/Jack.  Tangent time: One of the great parts about being involved with MacWorld is the schwag.  The speaker bags are full of stuff that, to be quite honest, I would almost never think to buy myself.  Not that the vendors who throw crap in there don’t get me hooked on their phonics.  But one of the few things that have caused me to think about security strategies from that bag is LoJack for Laptops.  The thing is, I don’t really need it for…