A number of videos I’ve been working on for Snow Leopard Server topics. My first time experimenting with YouTube playlists so please be gentle if it’s weird looking… They’ll be posted individually into the 318 TechJournal shortly. These are mostly covering the new features of Mac OS X 10.6 Server, although some of the older videos might be on other topics.
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Comic on Backing up Final Cut Server
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Article on Directory Services Plug-ins on AFP548
I published an article up on AFP548 on how directory services plug-ins work. If you’re curious about directory services plug-ins or just unable to sleep and need something to knock you out, this should be an interesting read.
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Creating a Master DeployStudio Image
Once you’ve completed the setup of a DeployStudio server you’re going to want to use it to start imaging systems. In most cases you’ll want to start off with DeployStudio Admin, found with it’s brethren in /Applications/Utilities. When you first open DeployStudio Admin, you’ll be asked for a server address, username and password. Go ahead and log in as one of the (or the) user that you setup as an administrative account during installation, enter the address of the server (followed by the port you used with the DeployStudio Assistant – you can always rerun the assistant if you need to). By default the connection information should be available in…
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Getting Started with Amazon's EC2 Cloud
Yesterday I did a quick review of the various cloud offerings from Amazon. Previous to that I had done a review of using S3, the Amazon storage service, with Mac OS X, primarily through the lens of using S3 as a destination for Final Cut Server archives. Today I’m going to go ahead and look at using EC2 from Mac OS X. To get started, first download the EC2 tools from Amazon. Next, log into Amazon Web Services. If you don’t yet have a login you will obviously need to create one to proceed. Additionally, if you don’t yet have a private key you’ll need one of those too –…
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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…
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Xsanity: Using Removable Media with Xsan
I posted another article on Xsanity. This one started out as an article on how to label LUNs from the command line, but ended up something completely different. It still explains how to do it from the command line, but since I wrote it while flying it ended up being more tailored to doing it on a USB jump drive since they don’t allow me to take an Xserve, Qlogic 9200 and a Promise RAID to my seat on the plane with me. Which is really a shame ’cause I could get SOOOO much done that way. Anyway, the article can be found here.
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Installing and Using MacPorts
MacPorts is an application that allows you to install and remove software packages, referred to as ports (thus the name). It’s fairly straight forward. To get started, first download the latest version here. Once downloaded run the installer. At the first screen, click Continue. Next, read the ReadMe and click Continue again. Next, read the license agreement at the License Agreement Screen. Click Continue and then Agree if you agree to the license agreement. Finally, choose the location of your install or just click on the Install button to install it into the standard location (/opt/local). Once the installer is finished click on the Finish button to close out the…
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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…