• Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  sites

    Moodle 2.0

    October 29, 2009

    I’ve been experimenting with some of the new developmental stuff in Moodle 2.0. The first thing that struck me was that the navigation is much better. It’s uniform throughout the pages and it seems like a lot of attention was made to make the menus and how blocks appear and are laid out look and feel much better. There are also a number of new features for managing courses and blocks, including: Tagging Built-in Progress tracking Forced paths through a course Conditional course completion Enhanced testing and grading systems Built-in RSS aggregation Built-in blogging tool A backup program that was actually able to backup my whole Moodle environment Updated wiki…

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  • Mac OS X,  Mac OS X Server,  public speaking

    Speaking at MacSysAdmin 2009 in Sweden

    August 23, 2009

    MacSysAdmin 2009 will be held in the Burgårdens Konferenscenter in the center of Göteborg, Sweden. I’ve just been added to the roster of speakers, effectively bringing down the average Knowledge of speakers by at least 1d6. But I’ll try and keep ya’ entertained at the least. Hope you can make it and thanks to Tycho for the opportunity!

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  • Mac OS X

    Suppressing Time Machine on Disk Mount

    June 29, 2009

    By default, when you are using Time Machine in Mac OS X, every time you insert a drive the system will ask you if you would like to use that drive as a Time Machine backup destination.  If you are like me and you swap drives around a lot then this can get annoying.  So to stop it you can actually just disable a launchd System Daemon, com.apple.backupd-attach.  To do so, simply move the /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-attach.plist to another location and viola, on the next restart when you attach a disk Time Machine won’t ask you if you wish to add the disk to your Time Machine destinations. /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.backupd-attach.plist While this is one…

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  • Mac OS X,  Xsan

    TimeMachine Over Xsan and iSCSI

    December 21, 2008

    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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  • Xsan

    Xsan: Backup

    December 5, 2007

    OK, RAID 5 is not a backup scheme.  Even with Direct Attached Storage you have to back it up.  But even more to the point, if you have a bunch of RAIDs strung together as an Xsan and you’re not backing it up then you are taking life one day at a time.  Stop.  The cost of a backup is probably nothing compared to the cost of loosing all your data.

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