In OS X Lion, Apple has released a tool called Lion Recovery, that lets you repair disks or reinstall OS X Lion without the need for a physical disc. But a lot of administrators and other users have had concerns over how to build a custom recovery disk so they can have physical media handy to perform such restores. Today, Apple has released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant, which allows administrators to build such physical media. Lion Recovery Disk Assistant will install a recovery partition on a USB-attached volume (you can always clone from USB later if you really want it to be a SCSI or Fibre Channel volume). This partition doesn’t…
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Making and Using an Installer Disk for Lion
When I got my MacBook Air, I thought that little USB disk was the coolest. I took it immediately to another computer, popped it in and booted. As many of you probably know, it didn’t work. I think the idea of diskless restores will take me a little while to get used to. I also think I like to have a DVD for every OS I use. Many of my customers also have policies that they have to. Now I know you can boot holding down Command-R and go into recovery mode (boot to that awesome, hidden restore partition). And I know that you’re basically running a bless command on…
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Xsan Addendum
Some time ago, I did a little article for Xsanity on using Xsan with removable media. The other day, while helping a friend prepare to give a talk on Xsan I learned a nice little tidbit. It’s just a little addendum to that that brings a smile to my face and makes me a little thankful: If you tell Xsan Admin to flash the LUN so that you can identify which LUN you are labeling the USB drive lights up. Sometimes it’s the little things, man…
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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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Blackberry 4.5 Update
Been updating Blackberries in Exchange environments from 4.2 software to 4.5, mostly so they can view Free/Busy times on the devices. For the first few, I’m doing it manually by connecting the device to the USB port and updating it from within Desktop Manager, but I’ll be doing the rest OTA (over the air). For more on the update, check it out on the crackberry forums.