lifebsideben

I got a new MacBook, and bought VMWare Fusion, so I could… well, I’m not exactly sure what I planned to do with it, but since I have no other machine in my house that runs Windows, I guess I thought I’d use it for that occasional windows app (PowerISO for example) or to test prince.org through the eyes of IE7. Well, I installed XP into it and that was just dandy, it really knows exactly how to handle hosting Windows, great vmware tools integration, the whole shebang, flawless.

More interestingly, I thought I’d install an Ubuntu instance, and maybe retire the big honking RAID5 Ubuntu server machine, and save the corresponding energy usage, etc. I mostly use it for mysql slave backups of prince.org, and some minor code development (it used to also host my music and photo libraries on the raid disks, but I’ve since moved that to an external drive on the MacBook with TimeMachine on a different device, providing the redundancy.)

Sounds well and good, and vmware also “understands” Ubuntu, but uh, not nearly as smoothly as Windows… the whole vmware tools setup is, while not painful, certainly not “one-click”. But, it works. Well, I thought it did–my networking was hosed. I futzed with it a bit thinking it was their special vmxnet drivers/devices, and then realized my host OSes networking was not working, either. Since I connect via 802.11n, and it’s sometimes flaky (hard to know if it’s Leopard or the wonky apple gigabit router), I turned airport off and then back on and it came back in the host… but Ubuntu was still not happy. If I reboot Ubuntu, it takes out the host networking again… hmmm. Try swithing to bridged mode instead of shared… same thing. Hmmmmmm…. a head-scratcher.

Finally, I hit upon the root cause… I bet the router isn’t happy with my “lock this IP to this specific MAC address”, when there are 2 OSes both sending packets, on that MAC! Yep, that was it. I removed the settings in the Airport itself that caused it to always hand out a specific IP via DHCP to a specific MAC, and assigned IPs manually to the MacBook and Ubuntu, and all was well. Yay. I’m still not sure what magic was going on to make networking in Windows work, but no worries.

I actually wonder if I were to use the “DHCP client ID” instead of the MAC address, if it’d work that way… I just don’t know where to set that in Ubuntu… something to try another day!

Tags: apple, debugging, mac, software, ubuntu, vmware

I spent probably 6 hours today trying to get Bacula working fully. I’d never tried it, but have been thinking about trying to implement a “real” backup system for some time. By “real”, I mean, something that can back up the most important bits of my two Macs, my remote webserver, and even bits of the RAID5 array that are “super critical”, to a separate harddrive, handle incrementals, and not involve lots of hackery on the clients. Bacula does seem to fit the bill, and I picked up a 400G eSATA drive to add to the server last week for about $100 to be the backup media (tapes? we don’t need no stinkin’ tapes!)
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Tags: bacula, hardware, linux, mac, NAS, software

So the new Mini is announced. Let’s forgo the cheaper model as pointless, and focus on the higher-end one. Here’s the relevant differences IMO:

• Dual-core Intel CPU (yay!)
  Yeah baby, bring it!! This is the oomph the Mac needs. My 1.42GHz mini is definitely underpowered. Definitely the highlight.
• Cheesy onboard graphics chip (boo!) with shared RAM (mega-boo!)
  Sorry, but the Intel GMA950 seems pretty lame for 3D performance. I suppose gaming isn’t the Mini’s (nor Apple’s, for that matter,) forte, but still. Can this thing pump out 1080p HD via the DVI port? Yeah, but don’t expect to do any cool frontrow effects on it smoothly. And what’s with the shared RAM?
• DL DVD-R drive (sure, fine)
  Yeah, whatever. If it helps bring down the cost of blanks, I’m all for it. My mini is already upgraded to this, so obviously I think it’s got some value.
• Port changes
  The subtracted the modem (yay!) and 1 FW port (boo!), add more USB ports (uh, mild yay).
  Who is going to use a mini via dialup? Nobody, exactly. They’ve wisely ditched the useless modem and added USB ports. I’m guessing the FW port is only staying there at all because of legacy iSights and harddrives… but sounds like USB2.0 is definitely the wave of the future. Honestly, I think this is a Good Thing, even though FW seems to be a technically superior (certainly, more sophisticated) design, and faster in practice.
• Up to 2G RAM (big yay!)
  And even better yet, the mini gains another DIMM slot, so you can populate it with 2×1G DIMMs. Nice. Why no go with a 4G max then, I wonder?
• SATA drive (yay) but still 5400rpm (boo)
  Right interface, wrong rotational speed. Sounds like this is going to cripple the video streaming capabilities out of the box. Again. Can’t they just punch a few holes in the lid to let the few degrees extra heat from the faster-spinning drive, out the top?

There’s some other changes as well, like audio in as well as out, which are nice but nothing amazing–they’d be big disappointments if they were missing, however. iLife 06, great, I just bought that anyhow. [Update: I just discovered it does NOT come with the Mini standard, but is a full-price option!] Bluetooth 2.0 is a nice upgrade, although unlikely to matter for most folks.

Looks like I won’t be upgrading, as much as I really really want the dual core Intel and 2G RAM. I’m hoping there’s a version that’s 1″ taller, with dual 7200rpm SATA drives and a better video chip in the future. Hopefully, this will be timed well with a new OS and iLife upgrade so I can save $200 or so on those, as well But I am interested to hear how this is working with large LCD panels for HTDV/HTPC playback use… I suppose I could still be swayed, but it’s over a $1000 investment–considering the base model is $799, and gotta upgrade to 2G RAM as well.

Tags: apple, hardware, mac