I have to admit, the all nighters I’ve pulled in my career probably netted me more in terms of serious “in the trenches” know-how than anything else I’ve done. But boy they can wipe you out. Those holiday weekends can be the hardest. With Xsan volumes reaching into the hundreds of terabytes now there just isn’t much of a good time to do a migration. But when things go a little funny, you have a finite amount of time to complete a given set of tasks. Often, those holiday gigs were planned months in advance given the severity of the upgrades and if you can’t shoehorn all those bits and…
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Mac OS X Deployment: Lists
Here are some pretty good list-serv’s for people doing a lot of Deployment work: http://lists.psu.edu/archives/macenterprise.html http://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo/system-imaging https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/radmind-users
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Checking your Backups
The other day I had a client call wanting to restore four files from a Bakbone backup server I installed almost two years ago. Now, I was skeptical but elated to see all but one of the files were able to be restored. It just so happened that the client had deleted the original folder specified in the script and created a new folder without altering the scripts. There were failure reports in the logs that the source was not acceptable for about 4 months prior to the call. The lost file really only cost the client about 2 hours worth of re-editing but I still felt bad about the…
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Mac OS X Server: Directory Services Just Stops working
In Mac OS X Server occasionally the Directory Services daemon will just stop working. To term it you can just run the following command: killall DirectoryService
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Auditing Local File System Events
For years we’ve been heavily leveraging Tripwire to perform localized HBIDS: http://www.tripwiresecurity.com/ But more recently we’ve been experimenting with the Open Source and versatile Samhain: http://www.la-samhna.de/samhain