THE HARDWARE
First, you’ll need to get an external, bus-powered hard drive. I really like these cases from OWC, but have used the WD Passports (see my note at the end of this article) and the SmartDisks also with good success. Know that PPC Macs can only boot from Firewire and Intel Macs can boot from either Firewire or from USB 2.0 (some Intel Macs like the latest MacBooks and the MacBook Air do not have Firewire). I like the OWC cases because most of them have both Firewire 800 and USB 2.0, allowing me to boot virtually any Mac from my Utilities HD. My bag also contains a plethora of cables: Firewire 800 to 400, 6-pin to 4-pin, and so forth.

PARTITIONING
For many years PPC Macs used a partition mapping called Apple Partition Map (APM). An APM-formatted drive can boot both PPC and Intel Macs. The newer Intel Macs have a default partition mapping as GUID. A GUID-formatted HD can boot only Intel Macs. For this reason, I recommend you format your Utilities drive as APM and not GUID, so to be compatible with the largest number of Macs possible. To switch formats, you simply need to select the “Options” button at the bottom of your partitioning window in Disk Utility to be presented with the following.

I generally partition my Utilities HD into three partitions:

1. a 9GB partition for a dupe of the Leopard Retail installer (now at 10.5.6).
2. a 20GB partition for a Leopard install with all my software tools installed.
3. the remainder of the HD as a data store for .dmg’s of my software installers.

You can adjust these partitions to your liking. You may choose to have a larger “Tools” partition if you know you’ll be installing the Developer Tools or other space-intensive tools. I’ve found that 20GB, for me, is sufficient.

MAKING THE LEOPARD INSTALLER DUPE
This is very easy to do. You’ll want to make sure that you’re using a retail copy of Leopard. If you attempt to use a DVD that came with a Mac, you’ll find that it won’t boot any Macs other than the model it came from. Sometimes, models are close enough that you can switch installers around between them, but more often than not, the Installer DVDs that came with a Mac are tied to only that model. The most recent retail version of Leopard is 10.5.6 and it should boot just about any Mac out there, including the newest MacBooks and MacBook Pros. Once you have your retail Leopard disk, use Disk Utility to make a .dmg of the installer, as if you were going to dupe it to another DVD. But instead of burning back to DVD, simply use the “Restore” option in Disk Utility to restore your just-created Retail Leopard DVD .dmg to your “Leopard Installer” partition. When done, you’ll have a partition on your Utilities HD that can boot virtually any Mac and install the retail copy of Leopard many times faster than installing from DVD media. An additional bonus is that a HD partition can never get scratched in your bag.

REGARDING A TIGER INSTALLER PARTITION
If, for some reason, you need to make a Tiger installer, you’ll need to know that the only universal (Both PPC and Intel) versions of 10.4.x are the ones for Mac OS X Server, namely Mac OS X Server 10.4.7. Because of this, you’ll need to make separate boot HDs for your PPC and Intel Macs. There are some hacks out there to make a universal 10.4.11 bootable drive but since Leopard is already universal, it’s just simpler to use the new OS. Creating a universal 10.4.x installer or boot HD is outside of the scope of this document; but it can be done. I remember finding instructions for doing so in the Bombich forums.

THE SOFTWARE TOOLS I USE:
There are many software tools on the market. Some are excellent, some are not. Below is a list of the best tools that I’ve found for maintaining, managing, and fixing Macs:

• Alsoft’s DiskWarrior – the king of Mac disk utilities. It really just does one important task, but it does it better than any other tool on the market. DiskWarrior repairs and rebuilds a volume’s disk directory. Think of a disk directory as a giant, cross-referenced table of contents for the data on your drive. If that index becomes damaged or corrupted, the OS can have a hard time even operating. Files can become lost, overwritten, or damaged due to a damaged disk directory, resulting in a non-bootable system or data loss. DiskWarrior fixes this for you by scanning your volume and building a new directory to replace the old, possibly damaged one. DiskWarrior also lets you “preview” a read-only copy of your HD. On many occasions, I’ve used this feature to pull data from a very damaged hard drive, as it allows me to mount the volume that would otherwise be unmountable and unreadable by other utilities.
• Disk Utility. Apple’s built-in utility, great for executing fsck or repairing permissions, or partitioning / formatting a drive.
• ProSoft’s Drive Genius 2. A bit flashy for my tastes, but it does what it does fairly well. Drive Genius can do a lot, including initializing and partitioning drives, but I mostly use it for it’s optimization (or defragmentation) feature. While it’s true that there is disk defragmentation built into Mac OS X (10.3 and higher), there are a few occasions where I’ve found defragging a drive to be useful. For instance, I spent a great deal of time building a customized PPC 10.4.11 image for some ancient eMacs and iMacs and needed the system to be as lean and fast as possible, and so after stripping out all the language files, unnecessary fonts, and Intel code (using Xslimmer), I defragged the master eMac’s HD before making an ASR image. This helped with the speed and responsivemess on these older Macs quite a bit.
• ProSoft’s Data Rescue II – another fairly essential tool. I use this for recovering accidentially deleted files, or for scavenging files from a failing HD.
• Stellar Phoenixs Data Recovery – a newcomer in the Mac market, their Data Recovery product has found a place on my Utilities HD after recovering data that Data Rescue could not. Otherwise, it’s a very similar product.
• Micromat TechTool Pro – this tool has been around forever (anyone remember it’s predecessor, MacEKG? Eventually I’ll get around to installing that ancient software on an ancient Mac and get the sounds and record the functionality for the nostalgia of all of us ancient Mac techs.). I keep this one installed mostly because I find it’s hardware diagnostics useful.
• Apple Developer Tools – Far too many to list, but I find most useful File Merge and Property List Editor.
• Carbon Copy Cloner – the original and still the best disk cloning app around. Still free.
• NetRestore & NetRestoreHelper – now discontinued, but I keep them around, particuarly because of the latter’s ease in generating ASR images.
• Coriolis System iDefrag & iPartition. I once used the latter to dynamically expand a cloned AppleTV system, that was cloned to a larger HD for greater capacity.
• memtest – use this to test RAM. Does a great job of detecting “bad” RAM.
• SubRosaSoft’s OfficeSalvage & FileSalvage – haven’t really used yet, as the other data recovery softwares have always proven successful (or completely unsuccessful because of a hardware failure of the drive).

This list is not complete. There are many other freeware and shareware tools I’ve installed, such as: Eavesdrop, KisMac, iStumbler, X-Ray, Super Get Info, TextWrangler, Batchmod, and Apache Studio.

INSTALLERS
The third and final partition of my Utilities drive is reserved as a data store for Installers and updaters. The Mac OS X 10.5.6 combo installer weighs in at around 600MB and a Final Cut Pro Studio 2.0 set of DVD images is about 50GB. Installing from a HD, instead of from optical media, is many times faster and you don’t have to worry about scratched media or losing serial numbers. When I was consulting regularly, I’d convinced many of my larger clients to allow me to build an Emergency HD in this manner that had on it CD and DVD backups of all of their installers with their serial numbers in txt files. This allowed them an excellent tool for rolling out a new workstation and also helped in cases of disaster recovery–for instance, when one client had to relocate from offices near the WTC to mid-town, in the weeks following 9/11.

I love that I’m able to build such a verstatile and powerful set of tools all self-contained inside a 2.5″ bus-powered HD. Ten years ago, I was building bootable CDs in a similar manner, with Mac OS 8 or Mac OS 9 and a suite of tools and I’d have to restamp a new CD every month or so. Now, I simply update my drive(s), as necessary.

I hope that you’ve found this article useful and welcome any feedback. Perhaps you have a favorite utility that I’ve not included. Happy troubleshooting!

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve recently discovered that the WD My Passport Studio edition hard drives, which have both a FW800 and USB port, will not boot from the Firewire side of the drive, which makes it farily useless as a boot drive for PPC Macs. Don’t buy this model HD if you want to boot PPC Macs with it. Stick with the OWC cases or the Lacie Rugged Disks. If you know you’ll only be booting Intel Macs (which can boot from USB), then the WD My Passport Studio drive will work for you.

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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.

But here’s the gist of what I’ve realized. Mac OS X is enabling me to grow my technical abilites in ways that Mac OS 9 never would have. For instance, I’m slowly learning shell scripting (not having much of a programming background, scripting isn’t easy for me to learn). Apple’s adherence to open standards is allowing me to finally understand (not to just think I understand, but really understand), the protocols on which the Internet runs. Because I’m using Mac OS X, I have a better understanding of TCP/IP, DNS, Apache, Sendmail, and more. And unlike a Microsoft platform, often when I learn how to do something using Mac OS X, I’m learning how to do it on multiple platforms: other Unixes, Linux, etc. Apple has lowered the bar for me and *nix is no longer the scary, indecipherable mish-mash it once was.

Every now and then, the siren of Microsoft calls. I think that perhaps I should start to know Windows better. I’m a very good technician and know my way around Windows out of necessity, but I am by no means an expert. I can maintain and update my relatives’ Windows machines (those that have ignored my advice to buy a Mac anyway), and my roommates’ and girlfriend’s PCs. Perhaps Windows isn’t so bad, I think. Perhaps I’ve just been too hard on Microsoft. Look at all these people who use it every day! It can’t be that bad! This was my line of thinking….that maybe I just needed some more exposure to Windows…that I might actually like it if only I could know it more. That was my line of thinking until Friday morning.

I work as a Mac specialist at a large university in Manhattan. My job is to build and deploy Macintosh computers to our many labs and classrooms, and then to maintain them. It’s a great job and I get to learn and deploy exciting tools like Radmind, ARD 2.0, and ADmitMac. I get that all-important experience in working in a large-scale environment, an environment that’s malleable enough to hone those new skillsets I’m acquiring. My job is not a help desk technician. There’s another department at our university that is responsible for helping students with problems with their personal computers. This department also maintains the network in our dorms. Last week, some fast-spreading viruses completely shut down the network in the dorms. They went into triage mode and set up an emergency virus-removal clinic. My department was called in to help out. As a result, I’ve spent the lion’s share of this weekend running anti-virus software and spyware-removal software on our students’ personal computers. This process takes about an hour per computer but varies according to the speed of the computer, how many files/programs are installed, etc. There were times where I was working on six computers at a time. This has been a truly eye-opening experience for me. About 50% of the computers I scanned had one or more viruses on them. And every single one (without exception) had some type of spyware installed. Most of it was just data mining cookies (relatively harmless) but there were some real nasties there as well. One unfortunate student had over 20,000 (yes, that’s twenty thousand) instances of spyware on her computer! And after working on dozens of Windows laptops, I’ve come to realize just how lucky I am to have fallen into the world of Macintosh. I honestly don’t know how some of these students can tolerate using their computers!

Here’s an average situation: A student hands me her Windows XP laptop. I turn it on and it happily powers up. Before plugging it into our network, I scan for viruses and remove any I find. If I’m lucky, the laptop actually has a NIC and I can patch it in without having to attach the student’s USB or PCMCIA dongle. And then if I’m really lucky, they haven’t changed the default network settings and the computer gets an IP number from our DHCP server. If I’m unlucky, I get to poke around in the properties of the network configuration to set it up properly. If I plug in the network cable before I scan for spyware, the computer more often than not begins to act very very sluggish. The ever-present spyware has begun its duty and is phoning home. Weatherbug (ugh, what crap software) was on 80% of the PCs I looked at, because it’s installed as part of the AIM installer, I believe. The smart students had pop-up blocking software installed, but most did not. Even just launching IE (to get to WindowsUpdate) causes the computer to begin to freak out. Pop-up windows everywhere, like the computer is having a seizure. Closing the browser window causes more pop-ups. Homepages were consistently set to bizarre and shady websites, no doubt being done by spyware. Baffled (and sometimes embarrassed) students say, “I’ve tried changing my homepage, but it keeps coming back to that.” Often repeated phrases: “Can you please make my computer better? It’s so slow now! I don’t understand, it was working fine just a few weeks ago; I didn’t install anything!”

I honestly and truly don’t know how they can tolerate it. Spyware and viruses have become so commonplace and such a scourge, that it’s causing huge losses in productivity. Our dorms were without Internet for days because of viruses. The vast majority of the students could barely surf the Internet because of the spyware pop-up software installed. Despite years of pleading from technologists to fix the gaping security holes in Windows and IE, Microsoft continues to use the same crappy and vulnerable code. When Apple had an operating system long in the tooth, they threw it out and wrote a new one based on solid, reliable, and dependable code. Microsoft has said they are attempting to so the same with Longhorn, but it’s really late in coming, still 18 months away, some analysts say. The spyware companies and virus writers have made Windows a very difficult operating system for the average person to use. My work over this weekend was like trying to bail a sinking boat with a teaspoon. It’ll help, but I have little faith that our network will remain virus-free.

I am now absolutely certain that I don’t have the patience to be a Windows technician. This exposure has sullied my already low opinion of Microsoft’s operating system and browser. Their monopoly in the market has allowed them to propagate incredibly insecure software around the world with little or no competition. Microsoft claims to be making inroads in enhancing security, but evidence of this seemed pretty nonexistent this weekend. The cold hard truth is that there are no viruses for Mac OS X yet, and likely aren’t going to be many soon. Apple’s been quite excellent in quickly providing patches to discovered security holes that a virus-writer might exploit. They have a browser that does not have the insecurity of Internet Explorer. And spyware is virtually unheard of on the Mac platform. For years, my advice to friends and relatives has been to “get a Mac.” But it was mostly because it was what I knew and liked. Now my advice is the same, but for some additional and obvious reasons. No viruses. No spyware. No popups. Take back control of your computer and browsing experience. Get a Mac.

MARCH 13, 2009:

It still doesn’t have to be this way. Vista has solved almost nothing. Hard to believe that 4.5 years have passed and the only thing that’s really changed is that Apple has become a stronger presence in the desktop computer market and a powerhouse in the smartphone market. Now Microsoft seems to be pinning their hopes on Windows 7, which really appears to be just yet another glossy surface update to a shitty code base. At some point, IT managers are just going to finally abandon Windows and go with solutions that make sense.

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Apple’s Mighty Mouse is a decent enough mouse, but it’s scroll-wheel nib thing gets gunked up all the time. My users are constantly complaining about the scroll wheel not working…it’ll scroll up but not down and vice versa. The fix is very simple, really:

Hold the Mighty Mouse upside down in your hand and take a piece of copy paper and rub it vigorously against the scroll nib a few times. You’ll probably have to press fairly hard. The gunk that’s blocking the scrolling should dislodge and the paper will collect some of the skin oil and grime that’s on the wheel.

Personally, I don’t really like the Mighty Mouse and prefer the $15 simple Logitech 3-button mouse.

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I don’t fanatically hate all web advertising, as some people seem to. What I hate are the obnoxious flashing, rotating, vibrating, sound-playing ads that seem to be taking over the web. They’ve even become a vector for infection on Windows PCs as people are “tricked” into downloading what they think is a free Anti-Virus 08 or 09 software. Not a week goes by when I don’t receive a call from one of my users asking if they really need to download the anti-virus software like they’re being told to by the scam ad. These are the kinds of things I’d love to be able to block for my users.

GlimmerBlocker will let me do this via its use of filters. The community has been posting different filters you can download and use. I’ll likely be writing one specially geared to the educational environment in which I work, and GlimmerBlocker will be making its way into the next round of maintenance installs for my faculty’s MacBooks.

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