One of the new features that was introduced in OS X Lion is automatic application termination. This feature stops any applications that haven’t been used for awhile and then when you start the app back up, it fires up using the saved application state. But some processes shouldn’t be stopped. I’ve recently run into 2 cases where I needed to disable automatic termination. To do so is pretty straight forward: defaults write -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination -bool TRUE Once run, read the key back from the global defaults domain to verify it was run correctly: defaults read -g NSDisableAutomaticTermination The output should just be a 1. Provided it’s correct, now test that…
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RAMdisk on MacBook Air
I can’t remember where I picked up how to get a RAM Disk mounted in OS X, but it’s a great way to get some unbelievable speeds on your Mac for those minor IO intensive processes that don’t need persistent data. It should be mentioned that the contents of RAM disks are erased, once ejected, but the speed of processes while they’re running can be pretty phenomenal on systems with fast RAM. The best example is a MacBook Air, where the memory is surface-mounted QFP and so really fast. Let’s say you have 4GB of memory and you want to run a process that isn’t going to take more than a…
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Beyond Portable Homes
Portable Homes allow a user to disconnect their system from the network and continue working. But Mobility, Portable Home Directories and other network sync accounts have a major shortcoming: they have to communicate with a server. Mostly because they rely heavily on directory services and the data that moves with a user needs to synchronize between computers that the user moves to. In the event that users have large home directories or a lot of multi-media content, this can create a lot of network saturation. In large environments where there are no limits on how big these directories can get, this can also be cumbersome to storage. Apple recently released…
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Xsan Monitor Widget Released (kinda')
I am releasing the Xsan Monitor that I've mentioned as alpha code. There are still some updates I may do but for now I'm putting it out there for those who feel this is the kind of thing they can take use of. Basically, it's a Dashboard Widget that can run on an Xsan client or metadata controller. When running it will display the CPU and RAM statistics of the Xsan processes. If it's the kind of thing you could use then please feel free to give it a test drive and let me know what you think at cedge@318.com or krypted@mac.com.
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Mac OS X Server: Minimum Requirements
Banging your head against the keyboard trying to figure out why you can’t get this install to complete… It’s a headless server, but that shouldn’t matter… Hmmmm… Well, before trying to install a system remotely, be sure the server includes 1 GB or more of memory, a G5 processor or 867 MHz or faster G4 processor (or an Intel of course). But what was killing me on this server upgrade? The 20GB hard drive requirement. OMG – is it really possible that the server had previously blown out the drive that came with it and gotten one of those old Quantum Fireballs from back in the day? Really? Who’d a thunk…