By default, most computers come with one partition and one volume on that partition. Well, in OS X there’s also a recovery partition, but that’s hidden so we’ll pretend like there’s just one. You can create additional volumes, which are useful for a number of different scenarios. The operation of creating partitions usually involves resizing a partition. That can be somewhat dangerous, so make sure to backup your Mac before doing so. To create an additional partition (and by default an HFS+ filesystem on that partition), first open Disk Utility from /Applications/Utilities. Note that by default, the boot volume is highlighted. You can’t create a partition inside a volume or…
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Don’t Use bless To Change Startup Disks Any More In OS X
For a long time, we used the bless command to startup systems to a specific volume in OS X. Back in 2009 I started using the systemsetup command for more and more tasks. These days, I’m being guided to replace all of my bless options in scripts to systemsetup. The easy way to configure your startup volumes using systemsetup is to list the available volumes, set one as the startup volume and then check to see which one is the current volume. The first task is to list the available startup volumes, using the -liststartupdisks option: sudo systemsetup -liststartupdisks You can then set the disk as one that was listed…
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Setting up CHAP on LeftHand w/ CLI
LeftHand Storage uses the cliq command line for configuring their devices. cliq isn’t necessarily interactive and so we end up needing to specify the username, password and IP of the device with each command (although you can setup a key as well if you’re going to be doing automated tasks). One task that I’ve found to be pretty common is to use cliq to enable Chap authentication for volumes. To do so you’ll use the assignVolumeChap verb. Along with the assignVolumeChap verb you will need a number of options, each with an = for the payload of the option and delimited with a space between them. When using the assignVolumeChap…
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Changing Volume Silently
When you turn the volume on a Mac up or down you end up hearing a tone indicating the volume level. If you hold down the Shift key while you’re changing the volume then you won’t hear that tone. Kinda’ fun. Also, if you hold down the Option key when you change the volume level you will bring up the Output tab of the Sound System Preference pane.
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Xsan: Fragmentation
Xsan volumes can get fragmented. This can cause the performance to move to a grinding halt. Dropped frames, slow copy times, even volume corruption are common side effects. So, to defrag the volume you can use snfsdefrag. This command-line tool will defrag volumes or files. You can even specify what to do with the fragmented data, giving you a way to move data between storage pools…