2009 March

Mar 29

Solving Unresponsive Mac OS X Server Tools

Posted in: Mac OS X Server by Damien Barrett No Comments »

The problem: Suddenly, your Server Admin and Workgroup Manager applications are unresponsive or extremely sluggish, taking many seconds to simply switch between tasks, or up to a minute to launch.

The solutions & explanation: While this issue existed sporadically in Tiger Server, it’s really come to the front with Leopard Server because the latter is now much more picky about having properly-configured DNS for your server. If this is happening to you, here’s a checklist to help you solve the problem:

1) Have you recently changed IP numbers on your server? If so, did you use the changeip command? (man changeip to read about this tool). Run this command to determine whether anything needs to be fixed on your server:

sudo changeip -checkhostname

If your DNS is configured properly, the result should read something like:

Primary address     = 209.250.250.98

Current HostName    = macshelf.com
DNS HostName        = macshelf.com

The names match. There is nothing to change.

If you get anything other than this match, you’ll need to run the changeip command to get the configuration on your server aligned.

If you’re not hosting your own DNS, then you may need your ISP to create a PTR record for your server’s domain name so that both forward and reverse DNS lookups are valid. This is especially important if you’re hosting email on this server, as many email servers are configured to reject mail coming from a server without 100% correct DNS.

2) Ok, so you’ve verified your DNS settings are correct. If you had to execute the changeip command to make changes, make sure you’ve rebooted the server.

3) If you’re still having issues with Server Admin and WGM being slow, try removing their preference files (com.apple.ServerAdmin.plist and com.apple.WorkgroupManager.plist) that reside in ~/Library/Preferences. When you relaunch Server Admin and/or WGM, you can re-enter your server’s address (either its domain name, its IP number, its local Bonjour name, or its loopback address (127.0.0.1); they all will work)).

4) If you’re still having problems with unresponsive Server tools, try unloading and then reloading the servermgrd process.

sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

sudo launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.servermgrd.plist

These are the steps I followed in resolving this issue on several of the Mac OS X Servers that I manage. Your mileage, of course, may vary. I culled most of this information from the Apple Discussion Boards and the Mac OS X Server and MacEnterprise mailing lists. Good luck!

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Tagged with: Mac OS X Server • Server Admin • Troubleshooting • Workgroup Manager

Mar 28

Adobe CS5 Installer to use PKG Installer

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett 2 Comments »

adobe_updater I almost can’t even believe it. Adobe has indicated that the next version of Creative Suite (CS5) will have installers that are in pkg format. This will, of course, make it much easier for those of who administer and deploy Macs to manage Adobe’s software. And if that weren’t enough, they’ve also said that the next verison of Adobe Acrobat (version 10) will not have the obnoxious “self-healing” functionality anymore:

[William Smith writes]: I’d like to hear something from Adobe about plans for Acrobat and their installer. On the Mac side, Acrobat seems to be a stepchild of Adobe’s installer technology and I don’t understand why.

[Adobe staffer answers]: The Acrobat installers are actually completely separate from the suite installers. Its more of an organizational issue than anything else. The Acrobat installer and the Reader installer are completely different technology and a completely different team.

That said, the Acrobat installer for the next major Acrobat release plans to be completely PKG for the Mac. In addition, the self-healing functionality should be gone (that is the technology that tries to do further setup after first launch.) They planned to get rid of self-healing in Acrobat 9 but couldn’t quite get to it. For the next version it is already removed so really should ship without self-healing.

Adobe finally seems to be listening to the screaming coming from their customers. I have spent so many hours struggling with Adobe’s installers and their ridiculously bad updater software, and I know I’m not alone. Someone even created DearAdobe.com, where people have been griping and voting for months about the poor quality of Adobe’s installers, updaters, and softwares.

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Tagged with: Adobe • CS5

Mar 28

Robert’s Day with the Mac OS (1995)

Posted in: Apple by Damien Barrett 1 Comment »

roberts_day_with_macos Rummaging around in my old computer boxes sometimes yields some interesting stuff. I found a promo CD from Apple from 1995 called “Stepping Into the Future: Robert’s Day with the Mac OS”. Of course I had to watch it!

It’s cheese-ball city, but if you can remember what computers were like in 1994 and 1995, you’ll realize exactly how far ahead Apple was. At this point in time, Microsoft’s best offering was Microsoft Bob. Shudder. What’s surprising is that a Google search for this Apple promo resulted in little info about it. Lest this gem pass into extinction, I used Snapz Pro to record it to a .mov file and put it up on YouTube for everyone to watch. Enjoy this piece of Apple History.

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Tagged with: 1995 • Apple • History • Nostalgia

Mar 26

Router-based Worms

Posted in: Hardware by Damien Barrett No Comments »

netcomm It doesn’t matter what operating system you’re running if the attack vector targets and/or infects your router or other infrastructure device. This interesting report from threatpost.com, a new malware-tracking and news site run by Kapersky Labs.

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Tagged with: Security • Viruses • Worms

Mar 25

Mac OS X Trojan Seen in the Wild

Posted in: Mac OS X by Damien Barrett 5 Comments »

mac-os-x-trojan Sophos has captured video of a fairly legitimate-looking website that’s nothing more than a front that tries to get you to install a Mac OS X trojan horse. Normally, I wouldn’t highlight the OMG! nature of such a thing, but this is truly newsworthy. Trojan writers are finally targeting Mac OS X, probably because the marketshare has been steadily increasing. It should be noted that this is not a virus and that Mac OS X remains fairly innoculated from the scourge of viruses and worms like Conficker that’s about to make a splash on April 1.

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Mar 13

Redux: It Doesn’t Have to be This Way

Posted in: Mac OS X by Damien Barrett No Comments »

classic2 OCTOBER 17, 2004:

Right, so I’m a Mac guy. I have been a Mac guy for a long time, so long that I can actually remember thinking that System 7.1 was a good update to an operating system. Even back then, Apple was giving us an easy-to-use operating system. Yeah, it wasn’t super stable, but it certainly allowed me to very productive through college. I even spent a few years as a Mac technician supporting Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. When Mac OS X came along a few years ago, I was actually quite scared. My technical background was not Unix, even though I had toyed around a bit with MUSIC on my school’s mainframe and actually once installed Apple’s AUX on a Quadra 700. I was resistant in the beginning. I didn’t want to see rendered unusable my years of learning the intricacies of Mac OS 9.x troubleshooting. Like most good Mac techs, I had learned the purpose and function of every single extension and control panel. I could troubleshoot preferences files at lightning speed. I knew *all* the Finder keyboard shortcuts. My poor clients watching me troubleshoot or cleanup a Mac OS 9 machine would literally get dizzy trying to follow what I was doing. I’d developed a rigorous optimization routine for the machines I visited. It was a good job, even if Mac OS 9 wasn’t as stable as it could’ve been (had Copland ever seen the light of day, for instance).

But Mac OS X is an entirely different beast. Despite my early reservations, I’ve come to very much love this operating system. I love its inherent stability, its protected memory, its multitasking capabilities. The interface changes a bit with every major OS release, and it’s getting better in stages. According to rumor, Tiger is set to have less of a brushed metal interface and more of a platinum interface, a bit more like Mac OS 9. Just as Panther’s brushed metal was a better interface than the stripes of Jaguar, I believe Tiger’s platinum will be better than Panther’s brushed metal. With luck, Apple will finally give us the option in the OS to change the interfae between the several themes. Microsoft may have picked a Little Tykes Fisher-Price interface as default for WinXP, but they at least allow users to switch to a different interface without installing 3rd-party software. Continue reading »

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Mar 12

Solving Postscript Printing Errors with IP-networked Printers

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett No Comments »

hp_1320jpg [Originally posted February 18, 2005 on my old blog, MrBarrett.com]

For many years, I argued against abandoning support for the AppleTalk protocol on networks because of the problems presented by printing postscript data over IP (instead of AppleTalk). Mostly, I was right; printing postscript data over AppleTalk is easier and more troublefree. However, even Apple doesn’t fully support AppleTalk anymore. The world has moved to IP, and you should move along with it. But moving your network printing from AppleTalk to IP can be a headache.

How many times have you printed a document with postscript data in it and gotten many pages of several lines of gibberish code instead of your document? Yup, me too. It rarely happened when you were printing your postcript documents to your HP printers over AppleTalk. Now it happens quite a lot. The technical reason for this is that most of the print drivers from HP don’t fully support printing postscript data via IP. All of the design programs I know (Quark, Photoshop, Illustrator) default to sending their postscript data in binary format. HP’s printer drivers don’t understand this and will not parse the data correctly, resulting in reams of wasted paper (unless you catch it in time and cancel the job). The good news is that there’s a solution. The bad news is that the setting you’ll need to change is in a different place for each program. Continue reading »

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Mar 05

Must-have iPhone Apps for Mac SysAdmins

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett No Comments »

Without a doubt, my iPhone has completely changed how I manage my Mac OS X Servers. It used to be that I had to carry around a laptop if I wanted to be able to access my servers while away from my desk. The power and flexability of the iPhone allows me to monitor and administer my servers from just about anywhere. Here are the iPhone apps I use regularly to do so:

Bjango’s iStat. ($1.99). This is my favorite app. It allows me to see the health and status of my servers at a glance. Yes, I could install Simon, Lithium, Nagios, or a similar type of monitoring software and access their status pages via Safari on the iPhone, but this is much easier.

Server Admin Remote. ($4.99). This is another must-have app. Server Admin Remote allows me to toggle services on my Leopard servers, check services statuses, and most importantly, read my log files.

Zinger-soft iSSH. ($3.99). Quite simply enough, this allows me to SSH to my servers. I’m still searching for the best SSH iPhone app. I’m moderately happy enough with iSSH but am on the lookout for a better replacement. For now, it’s adequate.

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Mar 04

Migrating Leopard Wiki Server to Another Server

Posted in: Mac OS X Server by Damien Barrett 1 Comment »

Today, we had a catastrophic data failure on our Wiki server, hosted on a Mac OS X Server. We had two backups, a Carbon Copy Clone from over a year ago, and a Retrospect backup from a few weeks ago. Clearly, the CCC backup was pretty much unusable (ancient content), and so we pulled our newest Wiki content from the Retrospect backup, and suddenly hit a wall. I needed to slip the “new” content into a freshly-restored Leopard server. But how?

Unfortunately, Apple’s Leopard Server documentation doesn’t say much about migrating from one Wiki server to another, but it turns out that it’s not such a difficult process. I found this Apple Discussion post that helped me to understand the process for restoring the content into a newly-rebuilt Leopard Server OS. Here are my notes from doing this:

Reinstall Leopard Server OS. Rebuild Users & Groups, rejoin to ODM, if necessary.
Pull Wiki content from Retrospect backup.
Turn off Web services, if you haven’t already done so.
Move the restored content into /Library/Collaboration
chown -R _teamsserver:_teamsserver /Library/Collaboration
Rename index.db to index.bak on each workgroup/wiki. Each index.db will be rebuilt when you restart the Web services.
Turn web services back on. Verify that index.db is rebuilt for each workgroup/wiki
Load your wiki in web browser and voila!, all your content is back.

And that’s it. I was pleasantly surprised at how easy this was to restore a wiki from backup. Migrating a wiki from one server to another would use this same process.

Note: Retrospect doesn’t honor perimssions during a restore process, which necessitated step number 5 above. Normally, you’d just be able to tar or zip your content and cp or ditto it from one location to another, which would preserve your permissions.

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Mar 04

The Trouble with Twitterific

Posted in: Software by Damien Barrett No Comments »

twitteriffic My first foray into Twitter was using Twitterific as a client. I hadn’t ever used the web interface and there weren’t that many other options when I started tweeting last year. As a Twitter client, I suppose it does its job, but I found it far too distracting to use on a regular basis. I actually stopped using Twitter entirely for several months because I found Twitterific so distracting to my focus. I’ve since gone to reading and updating Twitter via their web interface. Yes, I need to experiment with TweetDeck.

For what it’s worth, I have a similar issue with Growl and its interaction with some of my programs. I haven’t turned it off yet, but have tweaked its settings to be less intrusive.

On a related note, this is an excellent post from Chris Hedgate on using Spaces and Quicksilver to help him focus on tasks at hand not be distracted.

More »

Solving Unresponsive Mac OS X Server Tools

Adobe CS5 Installer to use PKG Installer

Robert’s Day with the Mac OS (1995)

Router-based Worms

Mac OS X Trojan Seen in the Wild

Redux: It Doesn’t Have to be This Way

Solving Postscript Printing Errors with IP-networked Printers

Must-have iPhone Apps for Mac SysAdmins

Migrating Leopard Wiki Server to Another Server

The Trouble with Twitterific

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