I few weeks after that I applied for a job working for a technology consulting company that d0es work for independent k-12 schools in the Philadelphia Metro-area.  I received a call-back the very next day and set up and interview within the next week.  Three weeks later and I had a new job waiting for me on February 27th as a Senior Support Engineer for this company (I will leave my company name private for the time being).

My new job is similar to my work at Poly but also very different.  I’m working with multiple clients, visiting different schools throughout the week and basically solving their tech issues both big and small.  It’s a lot slower-paced than I’m used to, and the levels of work can range from basic software updates and printer repair all the way up to large scale wireless and network deployment and server room build-outs.

I have clients of my own (only about 2 right now) and in 6-months time I will be managing several more locations and possibly managing more of the company as a whole (scheduling, getting new clients, purchasing for schools, etc.).  Its a very small company, just 4 full-time guys and one part-time, but there’s usually always something to do or someplace to be.

I don’t want this post to be ALL about the new job, so I’ll deviate a bit from that and mention that I did buy a car.  It’s the newest car I’ve ever owned, and I love it.  I did have to buy it because of work, but I wanted my own vehicle for some time.  Anyway, it’s a 2005 Mazda 3i Sport, it’s metallic Grey with an interesting blue pinstripe.

My new ride!

I love driving, and this car is fun to drive.  It’s one of the smaller cars I’ve owned but I don’t need to carry 5 people around anymore..all of my friends drive now!  Hopefully I’ll be able to put some customizations in it; maybe an in-dash navi/screen, but for now, it’s prefect for me.

Anyway, I will try to update more with my new job fun.  I’ll probably have to be vague about some details of work (you know… k-12 schools and all) but hopefully I can sneak some writing time in more often and maybe some different types of updates (maybe car mods/work!).

Hardware

The Mac Mini servers are very fast, quiet, and easy to store of course.  The Promise Pegasus is a great piece of hardware also.  Six SATA drives in a box smaller than a mini tower with a single cable for data.  Setting up the hardware was so simple it’s only one sentence: Take out of box, configure, plug in Promise, done.

Software

Now on to the bad part; Lion Server.  I like Lion as s desktop, I haven’t had any issues with it thus far, but I really dislike Lion Server.  Initial server setup was also very simple; it asks a few questions, configures some services for you, and you’re done.  After it drops you into the desktop, you’re on your own.  So manage the server in the past you had a few tools; Server Admin, the main config GUI for all services; Workgroup Manager, to configure users and computers on the network; and Server Monitor, a simple monitoring tool that gives you the server status at a glance.  Lion includes those tools with the addition of one more: Server.  Server is basically what separates Lion desktop from Lion Server, one single app to “control” the services.  This sounds great, but wasn’t that what Server Admin was for?  Yes..it was.  But now Apple decided that they wanted to make things more difficult and separate configurations into two programs, one of which (Server) is stupidly over simplified.

Server vs Server Admin

Server is basically a simplified version of Server Admin.  When I say simplified I mean VERY simplified.

Looks good, but wait until you go in more...

Now, compare that to the old Server Admin overview shown below.

Looks similar....but...

Now these two look like they give relatively the same information, right?  It tells you everything you need to know about the sevrer at a glance.  If you notice that on Server you have a lot more items on the sidebar though, and Server Admin has very little.  This is because Server Admin allows you to select what you want shown, so out of the many options (there are 11 total) I only need to show those 3; however, out of those 11, only 2 are available in Server also (Mail and Podcast Producer).  Why is this a problem?  Server Admin allows you to really edit lots of different settings with your services, it also allows you to edit more advanced services (DHCP, NAT, DNS).  Server allows you to edit the most used services (file sharing and web) but they are VERY limited in what you can edit.

For example, editing file sharing on anything other than 10.7 looked like this in Server Admin before:

10.5 File Sharing

This window gave you everything you needed to set up proper file sharing with users, home directories, NFS, FTP, SMB, AFP, and a bunch of other things.  It gives you great control over your network file system and user access.  This is what you get with Server:

10.7 File Sharing Configuration

That’s it.  Those are your settings you can edit. Notice the lack of FTP and NFS…as well as lack of a REAL permissions editor.  This is totally unacceptable in a server environment.  NFS is still there (it gets enabled when you use NetBoot) but where is FTP?  it’s not in Server or Server Admin.  Well, Apple decided FTP isn’t needed really, and basically removed it.  Let me rephrase, they didn’t REMOVE it completely, it’s hidden.  Apple’s basic FTP server is still there, but there are not settings in GUI for it at all, it’s all command based now, and to enable it you have to type this command in terminal.

sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

Now, on a server, that’s pretty ridiculous, especially since FTP config was easy and clean in pervious versions of OS X Server.  To get around using the basic FTP, which has limited functionality, I decided to install a third-party server.  I will make another post on how I accomplished this and about the frustrations I had with it.  Long story short, went with PureFTP.

My frustrations with LDAP also came back.  I’m not sure if it’s an issue with our old LDAP database or setup, but I simply couldn’t restore the server LDAP backup for the life of me.  I tried several different methods but nothing worked.  I ended up exporting user data (without the passwords) to the new server using Workgroup manager.  This worked fine, but I lost every password. I was upset with this, but I knew it was the best method to try to get the LDAP working normally again (I constantly have trouble with the old LDAP server due to corruption…so this hopefully would fix that).  The user editing in Server is horrible.  It’s way too simplified, and doesn’t allow much configuration..thankfully, you can use Workgroup manager still.

After setting up a new image and setting shares for home directories and resetting passwords, I tested our lab with home directories and logins and SUCCESS!  It all worked!  So now the network accounts are faster, and the LDAP seems to be working fine now.

Moral: Lion Server sucks compared to older versions.

I’ll be updating again on how I got PureFTP installed on the server and configure it for LDAP.  I’ll also go over how I got SFTP working with users jailed to their home directories….but breaking AFP, then fixing it again.

Currently, the lab I run has 10 Mac Pro desktop’s all running into a 6 year old G5 Xserve and Apple RAID.  The RAID uses 14 IDE drives that are basically maxed out.  We have about 4TB of storage on 14 drives..this is very sad.  Our G5 servers are not upgradable anymore, and we have limitations on the types of things we can serve on them.  They have lasted us this long, but it’s time to finally phase them out.

In the next 2-3 weeks I’ll be replacing our two G5 servers and our RAID with two Mac Mini servers and the Promise Thunderbolt RAID.  The servers will give us huge boost in performance and the RAID will bump us to 12TB of storage.  This will not be an easy task as our current systems all run 10.5 and the new servers run 10.7.  I will also have to migrate all of the user accounts and data to the new system without losing anything. Instead of removing our old servers I will use them only as basic servers; MySQL, Apache, Xgrid controllers, etc.  I’m also going to use them as tertiary backups for our user accounts and servers (backing up the new machines and user accounts to the RAID once per week).

Over the next few posts I will attempt to document the migration.  I’ll start with initial setup then go to migrating data/accounts then end with the final phase out process.  I hope that the next few entries may help people who get into a similar situation as well as keep a record for myself on any problems I might face.

I image my lab once a year. This ensures that I have the latest updates for every machine for all programs, but it also cleans out the old stuff from the previous year that builds up over time.  Apple makes imaging very simple by installing a NetBoot feature on all of their machines and including a NetBoot server installed with MacOS X Server.  In the past I used Bombich NetRestore, a free AppleScript based program that helped make NetBoot image sets and helped with deploying them.  Mike Bombich stopped making NetRestore and suggested everyone to try DeployStudio for imaging..so I did.  I must say that DeployStudio is an amazing program especially for a free program.  It’s also very simple to get running and fairly robust. In this post I’m going to go over image creation, setup, and deployment with DeployStudio (DS) and also go over some issues I encountered and how I fixed them.

Creating the NetBoot Set

The first step to any Mac NetBoot is the NetBoot set.  What the set is is a basic image file that includes all the tools your computer will need to read the image, copy the image, and even run checks on your computer even if you’re not imaging.  It’s a very basic MacOS install that resides on the server.  DS creates these images for both PPC and Intel machines in the same set, so any Mac can boot from the same set.  After installing DS on your server you can open the DS control panel and begin setting up your system AND create your  NetBoot set.  I will not be going over server setup in this post, I may save that for a later time.

The DeployStudio Control Panel

When you open the control panel you should launch the assistant (you can also find it in /Applications/Utilities).  When the assistant opens you select “Create a DeployStudio NetBoot set and continue.  If you’re running the assistant on a computer other than a server you will see this:

DeployStudio DHCP Setup

If you plan on using a server to do the deploying, you can skip this, if not, you’ll have to setup a DHCP server.  This depends on your setup, for my case I can skip this.  The next step allows you to name your set; set the name and unique identifier to whatever you wish, (unless you have multiple NetBoot sets). When you click continue you will tell the set where the computer should log in and look for the images and workflows.

My settings...

more settings...

The settings above are MY settings, yours will be different.  The login and password for mine are supplied by the LDAP server.  The final step is the actual save location and creation of the image.  Pretty self explanatory. It takes about 5-10 minutes.

Completed NetBoot .nbi file

After image creating is successful you’ll have a nice .nbi file in your save location.  This file is basically an image file that contains the bootable images for PPC and Intel as well as the basic MacOS system with some basic utilities like Disk Utility, Terminal and Startup Disk.  It’s roughly 2.5 GB and it should be placed on your server in the NetBootSP0 folder (It’s located in [Volume]/Library/NetBoot/).  Inside the NetBootSP0 folder will be other folders which DS created during install, these contain various other things for DS and also house your images.  I will go over image creation next.  This is where we will be able to test to see if your NetBoot Server and set are both working.

Creating Images with DeployStudio

Creating the images is an extremely simple task once you know what settings you need.  I will explain the setup with my current settings but attempt to go over most of the other ones.

To start the process, boot your mac and hold the ‘N’ key down during power on, this will perform a network boot (REMEMBER: Your computers must all be on the same subnet, this is the only way to do this without messing with a lot of things!)  If your computer boots to the DS screen you will see the DS Runtime Window.

This window shows all of your available jobs in DS.  There are a few default jobs that come with DS, we’ll make our own later for deploying.  For now we’re gong to select “Create a master from a volume.”  Click the Play button at the top and you will come to the heart of the Image creation.

My Image Settings from a PowerPC computer

This window is probably the hardest window we’ve seen so far.  First thing is to choose which drive you will make an image of from the dropdown menu.  I’ll start with my MacOS partition.  After selecting the correct partition I name the image something like 2011_09_02_Intel_lab and leave other settings alone.  The keywords are not very important unless you have a lot of images. I usually select Compressed for the type because it saves space and it gives a much faster restoration.    Access group is what you would have set in your initial DS setup that I did not cover.

Format is what kind of image you are making.  Since I’m doing a MacOS install the Format will be HFS+.  I normally select “Auto Detect” but if you want to have HFS+ Journaled, Case-sensitive or both you may want to change it because it will always auto-detect HFS+ without journalising.

Once my settings are correct I click the Play button at the top and the image making process begins.  This will take a lot of time depending on the size of the image being created,  a 100+GB image will take roughly 2 hours (sometimes more, sometimes less, depends on the machine and network) and it will then compress the image (my images get compressed to about 75GB from 128GB…compression rocks!).

Masters in the NetBootSP0 Folder

After image creation you will see the .dmg file in your NetBootSP0/Masters/HFS folder.  (Note: I just found out that new versions of DeployStudio won’t show your images in DS Admin unless you have .hfs in filename before the .dmg, it will automatically add them during image creation, but if you have old images, just add the .hfs right before the .dmg extension).

You can use this same process to create NTFS, FAT, and EXT4 images.  Follow the same steps but make sure you leave the Format as “Auto-Detect.”  After creating a NTFS image it might take some time to show up in DS admin, this is because some server-side tasks may need to be done, it will show up when that is complete.  NTFS imaging requires a little more setup in DS admin beforehand…again, I will not be covering that in this post.

Making Workflows to Deploy Images

DeployStudio comes with an administration program where you can manage images, workflows, packages, scripts, and see progress of NetBooted computers.  You can also set up all of your computers in it before hand (names, network settings, licenses, etc) and set up automation for all of your systems so if you want a computer to automatically format and re-image when you NetBoot it, you can do that (please don’t think that’s a great idea…just saying).  To start setting up workflows you’ll need to open DS Admin, it’s located in /Applications/Utilities.  Enter your server credentials and you’re presented with the DS server information.

The window that opens first is the current (or previous) activities.  In this window you can watch and control the computers that are currently working in DS.  ou can also see what jobs they were doing, and how far along they are.  This screen is very helpful when you have DS running on many machines.

I am going to explain how to setup a dual-boot Mac workflow.  The default jobs are very helpful at getting you started, I’m going to start from scratch.  To create and edit workflows we’re going to select “Workflows” from the left sidebar and begin setting up our job.  Click the “+” button at the bottom and you will be presented with a new blank job.  Then click on the little “+” button next to “Drop tasks here.”

Creating a new workflow

The first thing to do is to drop the “Partition a disk” task from the left side to the drop space.  Then you should select  “Mac OS X + Windows” from the Apply layout template dropdown menu.  Resize the partitions to suit your needs, make sure your images will be able to fit on the partitions you make for your drive.  I normally do 75% Mac OS/25% Windows, I also normally Automate this process, your mileage my vary.

The next step is to drag the “Restore a disk image” job from the left and drop it after the partitioning job.  Your MacOS image should ALWAYS be first of else it will not work.  Select “Enter value…” from the Target volume section, then select the “MacOSX” option from the menu.  Set your Image to HFS and select the appropriate image from the menu (the one you created earlier).  Now, for the options you can read from the image below how to set those.  If you’re imaging Mac OS 10.7 Lion you should check “Restore system recovery partitions” but I don’t need this.

My HFS Settings

You may also notice Multicast settings, you can set this up if you’re brave, I don’t need it so it’s ignored.  Your HFS partition is complete, now on to Windows.

Drag the “Restore a disk image” job from the left and drop it after the first restoring task.  Select “Enter value…” from the Target volume section, then select the “WINDOWS” option from the menu.  Set your Image to NTFS and select an appropriate image from the menu again.  Settings for Windows is relatively the same as HFS with some exceptions;  you should check “Expand restored NTFS partition” and uncheck “Set as default startup volume” unless you want to have Windows as your default.  You’ll also notice that all of these tasks are automated, this is so you can boot the computer, select the job, and walk away without intervention.

DS NTFS Settings

Now, you can add more jobs to the workflow such as AD binding, or software updates, but this setup is the basic setup for a dual-boot deploy.  Now just rename the job by clicking the name in the top with the other jobs and rename it, you can also add a short description of the job.  Your workflow is now complete! Now it’s on to the easiest task…deployment!

Deployment

I say this is the easiest part because it really is.  If you have everything set up properly, you should have no issues.

To deploy the image to the computers, boot the machines again pressing the ‘N’ key, when the machine boots to DS you can select the newly created Workflow and press the play button.  If you automated everything, that’s it..it will partition your drive and load the images to those partitions.  After the job is complete your computers will either tell you it was successful (or failed…more on that below) or they will reboot.  If the task was successful, GREAT!  Reboot the machines, they will run the final scripts in MacOS then reboot again…MacOS is done.  You only have one more thing to do and that’s configure Windows.  I won’t go into this because it’s going to be different for everyone, but you will have to activate windows and any other programs that require it because Windows will not keep the activation after imaging.

Issues?

Now, not everyone will be so luck to have a successful run…if you run into any issues visit the DS forums, they are very helpful and pretty speedy.  I had one issue that just drove me nuts.  When I ran my deployment script the MacOS partition would go fine but once Windows hit it would fail…everytime.  DeployStudio keeps logs for every computer on the server, so I took a look and noticed the following errors:

[Thu Sep  1 14:41:15] dyld: unknown required load command 0×80000022
[Thu Sep  1 14:41:16] -> invalid starting block value () defined in MBR for partition /dev/disk0s3.
[Thu Sep  1 14:41:16]    Check your partition map. You need to define at least one DOS/FAT partition in order to get the MBR automatically in sync with GPT.
[Thu Sep  1 14:41:20] -> Restore action completed.
[Thu Sep  1 14:41:20] Restoration failure (elapsed time: 0.24 minutes)

I posted in the DS forums (topic link) and in a matter of hours the admin of the forums posted a solution:

Sounds like the custom fdisk command fails on 10.7 DSS netboot sets. You may try to remove the one located in your netboot folder at /Applications/Utilities/DeployStudio\ Admin.app/Contents/Frameworks/DSCore.framework/Resources/Tools/fdisk.

So I tried this and BOOM, successful.  It’s great when a developer helps with products so quickly…and I’ve only usually seen this with free or open source projects.  So if you’re having issues, the forums are key.

I hope this post helps people out with Mac imaging and deployment.  If you have any other questions or issues feel free to ask in the comments.  If this post helped you or think it will help others please feel free to repost and share away!

Let me get this out of the way first, I like this phone a lot.  It’s a great device, it’s fast, it’s sexy, it’s big..but it’s not perfect…far from it, and most of the reason is due to the crap software that is on it…let me explain.

The UI and Software

My OG ran stock vanilla Android (what devs call AOSP: Android Open Source Project). This basically means it’s the bare Android OS with no added UI tweaks and no added bloatware crap (with exception to some Verizon apps).  This is the best way to run Android for the most part because it’s not using the CPU or RAM to run some fancy/ugly user interface over top of it, it’s not going to have built-in apps syncing crap in the background, it’s just plain ol’ vanilla ice cream (and I like vanilla ice cream).  And it works!  It doesn’t waste CPU (meaning it’s faster) and it doesn’t background sync unnecessary apps constantly (meaning battery savings) unless you install them.  But of course, HTC and other companies want to change it to suit their own phones and needs.

This is a Screenshot from a Nexus 1 running AOSP 2.2

Now, the Thunderbolt (as with many HTC phones) doesn’t do AOSP Android, they use Sense UI, it’s their own user interface which they designed to put on mobile devices for a “sleek” and “unified” look.

This is Sense UI

While some people like the look (which I don’t think is terrible mind you) and the feel, I don’t like it, I hate it.  There are several reasons I hate it actually the first and most important being that it’s clunky and slow to respond VERY often; it feels like my OG before I rooted it…this shouldn’t happen on a 1Ghz phone with 700+MB or RAM.  So what I did to “fix” this was install ADW.Launcher and use that as my home app.  It’s faster, and it looks and feels more like a stock phone now.  Second, they package a whole mess of crap in with it; they have a “friendsteam” which gathers your Twitter and Facebook and whatnot into a widget on your screen and displays it and updates it for you; a weather widget (which is actually nice, but i should have a choice to remove it);  and their own Facebook and Twitter syncing built in.  This is stuff I’d like to install on my own and not have running in the background constantly asking me to log in and sync; if I want Twitter and FB, let me install them myself.  They also use their own MMS app which is very slow compared to the AOSP app.

You might be thinking, “man, this is cool that it’s all built-in, why are you hating on this?”  Because I like to be able to choose what to have installed on my device.  Because of these built in apps (which mind you, aren’t really apps, they’re more like utilities) I have two Facebook apps, and two Twitter apps and it’s kinda dumb to waste space on stuff like that.  I also find it annoying that they START UP WITH THE DEVICE…even when I DON’T USE THEM.  What a waste of CPU and battery.  Once CM7 is released for the phone (not Alpha-builds) that will be my savior.  Verizon is also guilty of bundling tons of bloatware with this device.  When I received the phone it was PACKED with tons and tons of useless crap..and you can’t remove this stuff!  I’ve written about carriers loading bloatware onto phones before, this shit needs to stop with Android.

The Battery

Smartphones are notorious for having crummy batteries.  My OG was actually pretty great before the last few months of using it.  I used to get over a day with it and I was happy.  When deciding on a new phone every review I read had the same complaint with regard to the Thunderbolt: The battery is terrible.  Now, I’m never far from a power source, and I have around 4 or 5 micro-USB chargers from my older devices and ones that I found around the lab, so this wasn’t too much of an issue for me.  My first day on the phone I got through the entire day of heavy use and texting without it dying, it got to about 5% by midnight (from 8am or so).  The second day, same thing.  On the third day that’s when it ended.  Without using it too much I made it to about 2pm before it started dying on me, I charged it and it was low again by 9pm.  Now I see what the complaints were about.  I tried using task killers to kill unwanted tasks, I synced data less, I lowered brightness, nothing helped.  I read around online and found the best way to get more mileage was to turn off 4G.  I figured, I don’t need 4G all the time, so it’s fine, if I get more battery time out of it this is what needs to be done.  After turning off 4G, I get through the day again.  A few weeks ago an update was released that helped the 4G radio consume less power, so since then I’ve actually been able to leave 4G on and get through most of my day with it…so good on them for fixing that.

The Hardware Itself

This is where the phone really does come out.  This phone has some weight to it (it’s heavier than my OG which was a brick) and it’s got that big bright screen.  The screen makes it so easy to read things on and to watch videos, the rubberized back makes it easy to hold, the weight makes it feel like you’re not going to crush it in your hands.  It is a nice, solid phone.  It’s also fast when you need it to be.  Playing games, running apps, downloading, it just runs fast (especially with ADW.Launcher).  Of course Verizon’s network helps too, I get 4G everywhere in NYC, and the 4G speeds are really good (EVEN INDOORS! Take that WiMax!).  I have plenty of space on the 32GB MicroSD card they give you and on the internal storage (8GB but only about 2.5 are available).  The only complaints I have about the hardware and design: no dedicated camera button, I really miss this, but it’s fairly minor; the bluetooth volume is super low, I’ve read that it only does it with some headsets but my Jabra is so low I cannot use it; and the GPS takes forever to lock on, sometimes 5-10 minutes.  Now, some of this is probably software-based so a fix may be in line (apparently there might be an update in the next month or so to address some of these issues as well as the random reboots caused by the last update) but until that fix is out these problems will remain.

Overall

So to sum this up in a few lines (TL;DR); I really like this phone a lot, it is a great phone by design.  The 1Ghz Snapdragon processor and the large amount of RAM really make this phone fly with apps and games and with Verizon’s 4G it really is a speedy phone in all faces.  However, the phone has many kinks due to some bad software that comes bundled with it and a broken update from HTC.  Most of it’s issues are solely based on the software so hopefully we will see fixes for them in the future.

Some first impressions: This thing is super fast, it’s got a nice feeling to it (not as solid as my DROID but still pretty well built), and the screen is really really nice.  The battery life isn’t as bad as everyone says it it…I got a full day out of it with fairly heavy use…we’ll see if that continues though.  I hate SenseUI…so I replaced it with ADW Launcher right away and I’m waiting for CyanogenMod to come out for it (it’s currently being worked on).  So expect some sort of review in the coming days/weeks…

I installed CM7 when it was at RC1 for the DROID (still buggy, but still good for everyday use) and I originally flashed my phone by doing a factory reset of the device (removes everything) and then installing the ROM. This gave me an endless boot screen.  What I had to do to fix this was not only do a factory reset, but wipe the cache partition AND the Dalvik cache partition.  This was easy with the ClockworkMod and it was also nearly 100% risk free since I had a complete Nandroid backup.  After wiping the two it booted successfully!

I noticed that in Android 2.3 Google will restore all of your previously purchased and downloaded apps if you want it to automatically on a new device (only the app itself, not the data..like game save data).  This is great, but I already decided to use MyBackup Root for this, mainly because I wanted to have my stuff there with all of the data.  So i just told the phone not to download everything and I’ll just restore everything from my backup.  What this left me with was broken installed apps with no way to update them because the Market links were all hosed.  This sucked, now what was I supposed to do?  I decided to flash again and allow Google to push the apps to my phone.  This process took some time but everything was downloaded for the most part; unfortunately, I didn’t have my app data, so all of my game data and all of my settings were gone…I check MyBackup and sure enough I was able to restore data only!  I did that and bingo, everything worked again with all of my old data!  A few apps needed to be reinstalled or needed their data wiped (Google maps and Facebook I think) but for the most part everything worked just as it was supposed to.

Choose which to restore? Yay!

So now that I had my apps on my phone, I was nearing happiness with my hacked DROID.  I say nearing because I was still having many issues with other things.  I won’t go into every little one but I will talk about the two that almost made me decide to go back to stock.

LED Notifications

The one thing I love about Android phones is the LED notifications.  A simple little LED in the corner of my phone blinks different colors for certain things (texts, emails, etc) so I don’t need to turn the screen on, or unlock my phone to see what I missed or see what that beep was from…I can just look at the color of the LED.  Funny thing happened after installing, it stopped working.  I would look down and nothing would be blinking but when I unlocked my phone I’d notice an e-mail that I missed!  What was going on here?  I looked in the settings and found that CM has basically rewritten the notification system and you can customize colors and blink rate from it if you so desired, but instead it broke the damn thing.  This wouldn’t fly with me, I was about to go back to stock because one of my favorite features was broken…then I found the forums.  I searched the issue on the forums and found a lot of people with the same issue, on different phones even!  Reading through many of the posts they all usually came around to the same solution, un-check everything in the LED settings then check them again then hit “Reset all LED notifications” and reboot. And it worked!  I had my LED back and working and now it was even better because I can change the settings for every program and even change the colors and blink rate for them, pretty neat.

Change color and rate for LED notifications

Missing Messages

Now that my LED notifications worked I was happy that I could look down and see if I missed any emails or (more importantly) text messages…but strangely I felt that I was receiving less messages.  I went an entire day without a text message, which is very odd for me actually.  I looked at my phone, no blinking LED, I unlocked the phone, no notification in the menu, I opened the messaging app and boom, new texts, some as old as a day!  What the hell was going on with this?  I’m missing text messages now?  This used to happen with my EnV Touch, never my DROID!  I tried resetting my notifications for the app, and it would work for a while after I opened the app.  I figured, okay, it’s fixed, but then it would stop later on in the day.  I was getting very frustrated with this now and was again thinking about going back to stock.  I hit the forums again and found one post about the issue with one simple solution:

The solution! Check that box!

Once I checked that, never missed another message.  It locks the message app in the memory so it’s always running.  Sure it uses up memory, but my messages are more important to me than the amount of apps I can run at one time.

Side note: But why does the DROID do this with CM7?  The DROID has 256MB RAM, this was a lot when the phone came out and with 2.1 it was fine.  Once 2.2 was released memory was becoming a problem for the phone.  The phone had trouble even keeping the Home app in memory; if you ran a program that was memory hungry and went back to the home screen you’d have to wait for it to redraw because Android’s memory management would kill it.  So in CM7 you can see the two check boxes for home and messaging, this stoped the redrawing(relaunching) and the missing messages…but it took some memory away of course which means you can only do so much multitasking before apps start getting killed.  Android 2.3.3 uses more memory, and the DROID just doesn’t have that much…so CM7 also allows asset purging to free up RAM as well as compucache (memory compression).  These use a little CPU but allow you to multitask fairly well;  it’s nowhere near as good as other newer phones, but it works.

There were some other small odds and ends that I had fixed by tweaking settings and installing updates but I thought that these two were really the most damming for me.  I managed to fix them with help from other nerds at the CyanogenMod Forums who were running into similar issues and there are some I managed to fix by trial and error.  Now, he ROM still has it’s occasional reboots and hiccups (not very often) and they usually happen with two programs; Google Maps and the Camera app, but these crashes happen less and less with each update.

CM7 is now out of RC and was released as Gold…but not for the DROID yet.  It still is very much a work in progress, but the progress is going very quickly, and I really like the direction it’s heading.  They’ve managed to give DROID users Android 2.3 even after Motorola decided it “wouldn’t work” on the phone.  Well, it is working (for the most part) and I’m fairly happy with it.  It has really allowed me to use my phone a bit longer than I was expecting.  I’m probably going to wait until August to upgrade my phone instead of going for the Thunderbolt, but time may change that.  What I do know is that my phone still works well and I will get more time out of it because of the ROMS.

So when Froyo (Android 2.2) came out the DROID got it down the line and that’s when the DROID started to show it’s age; extremely slow…a big drop in performance.  So I decided to root it to get a little more millage out of it before my upgrade.  Mind you, I was waiting for the Thunderbolt to come out to replace it…but decided against upgrading for the time…another story I suppose.  I decided to use SuperOneClick to root my phone, and damn it was simple.  Literally one click and it was done…but what can I do with this root?  Well, first thing was overclocking to see if I can get some more speed.  I overclocked it to 800MHz and really didn’t notice much of a difference besides the fact that I could now have a wireless hot-spot…oh and I could take screen shots now (why doesn’t Android have this functionality built in? Seriously!).

Hey look, I need to ROOT to take a screen shot!

So I decided to take it a step further.  My buddy was telling me about CyanogenMod and how he loved it on his MyTouch and basically brought life back into it.  So I said “Why the hell not?”  Not only does it add a lot of functionality, it will give me Android 2.3.3 (Gingerbread)…something the original DROIDs won’t ever see normally.  I backed-up my apps and text messages phone using MyBackup Root then flashed my recovery ROM to ClockworkMod which allows me to install firmware from the SD card and allows me to backup my entire phone to an image just in case anything goes wrong.  After the backup with MyBackup Root I rebooted into recovery mode and backed-up the entire phone using the Nandroid backup (in the recovery) then started to flash CyanogenMod 7 on my phone..this meant I had to do a complete wipe of the phone which is always scary but with the backup I should be cool!

Wiped the phone, flashed the ROM, and booted the phone. It worked! I had the Release Candidate (at the time it was RC1) of CyanogenMod 7 on my phone!

I had some issues with CM7 at first and some issues with getting my apps back (which I’ll talk about in Part 2) but after some initial bumps I was up running as smooth as I could be on a release candidate.  I had some reboots and some programs would crash but reinstalling them from scratch helped for the most part.

After a few updates it became more and more stable.  I am now running RC4 with a new ultra-low voltage kernel (which allows me to overclock to 1GHz and uses less battery power than the stock kernel). which gives me good battery life, pretty good performance, and all around a pretty good experience.

Android 2.3.3 and 1.1GHz!

So if you’re looking to get some more time from your old DROID this seems like a great way to do it.  It’s not up there with the new phones, but it does give your device a nice little jolt until you decide to retire it.

In Part 2 I’ll talk about installing all of the apps from backup and troubleshooting the many issues I had with memory issues and how they were resolved.

This post by Mel Martin on TUAW, The Unofficial Apple Weblog, really confused the hell out of me.  I saw the title “Why I’m Staying with AT&T” and was expecting to see things like “I haven’t had the issues everyone talks about,” or “I like their customer service!” No, what I found was a long list of complaints with some reasons why he’s sticking with AT&T through all of his problems.  Let me break this down a bit more.

I admit, AT&T has been sloppy and at times downright incompetent. Who can forget the massive foul up when the first iPhone came out and literally millions of customers couldn’t get AT&T servers to sign them up? It happened again with the 3G iPhone and the iPhone 4.
There’s the really nasty rate of dropped calls, lousy or inconsistent reception, and how AT&T always seemed to put endless roadblocks before developers who wanted to use the iPhone in the way it was designed. Months of delays on the SlingPlayer app, no Wi-FI tethering, and more delays delivering a 3G tethering plan that was overpriced and forced you to give up your unlimited data plan. Oh yes, AT&T dropped unlimited data so it could start enabling some of those features that might force you to go over AT&T’s newly imposed limits. Nice. The list goes on and on.

Let’s see.  That is a list of eleven complains or problems faced on AT&T with the iPhone, not to mention that he put “the list goes on and on” at the very end, meaning there are more complaints!  Any normal, competent person would have tossed their provider out on their ass a long time ago with this list, I know I would have, but that’s because I actually like being able to make and receive calls and texts and data anywhere I like.  This is a VERY bad list of complaints for any cell service and sticking with someone this bad is just insane.

Now, with this list of eleven you figured there would be a much longer list of good reasons he’s straying with AT&T, right? Let’s take a look now, one by one, and try to keep count!

Big Fee to drop my AT&T plan. Way too much. $325 for those who purchased after June 1, 2010, and $10 off of that for every month of completed contract.

This is a good reason! Why would you want to pay a fee to drop your cell company only to have to pay another $200 to buy a new phone which you already own!  Let’s hope a trend of smart follows.

Coverage. We all know that AT&T coverage is generally worse than Verizon, but AT&T ponied up and let me have a MicroCell device for free. It solves the ‘no coverage at home’ problem, and after some initial growing pains it works well

There goes the smart…out the window.  This is where I start getting very confused.  You’re claiming you want to stay with AT&T because of their coverage but you say in the very next sentence that they generally have worse coverage than Verizon?  And because you had such bad service they gave you a personal 3g device to make calls in your home?  So you’re sticking with AT&T because they have bad coverage but solved your home service issue?  Why bother have a cell phone then? Isn’t the point of a MOBILE PHONE to be able to use it…mobile-ly?

Competition is good. I expect AT&T to step up and compete, not because they want to, but because they have to. Maybe there will be a reinstatement of unlimited data plans. Maybe FaceTime will finally work on 3G.

Another stupid point.  While I agree that because Verizon now has an iPhone that AT&T will have to step it up, AT&T has always had this problem and still haven’t resolved it for the most part.  Why would they all of a sudden just start to “compete” now?  Haven’t they been competing in the past, or were they just  riding the dollar waves of the Apple fanboys turning a blind eye to their crappy service just to have an iPhone?  Not to mention that you’re basing this on speculation that “maybe” something will happen.  I don’t know about you but when I’m paying for something now I want it to work now, not “maybe” in the future.

Simultaneous voice and data are huge. I often fire off an email or web link when I’m on the phone. Going to Verizon means I kiss all that goodbye.

Okay, a valid reason to stay on AT&T.  CDMA cannot do voice and data simultaneously and if that’s a big issue for you then you should have no questions to ask, just don’t switch. That’s two instances of sanity.

Speed. At least here in Arizona, I get really fast data on the iPhone. Yes, the Verizon voice network is more reliable, but in local side by side tests on the data side, my AT&T phone really is faster than a Verizon smartphone.

Speed is another thing that I have trouble viewing as a major issue to switch cell carries.  For one, the difference in speed isn’t really that much, unless you’re using 4G on a device.  Now, I would say that this is another good reason if you really need that speed, except for the fact that you point out AT&T’s flaw right in the next statement.  You say AT&T is faster than Verizon (true) but Verizon is more reliable.  Tell me, what’s more important to you: getting something done quickly while praying that you keep a steady connection, or getting something done a little slower, but knowing it’ll get done because you have a strong, reliable connection?  If you say anything other than the latter, you’re a moron.

New iPhones. There will likely be a new iPhone this summer. I expect it will be a lot easier to talk AT&T into an upgrade than Verizon.

Guess what, you’re probably right! It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out Apple’s release schedule. But I also think that if someone wanted to upgrade early they will pony up the dough.  If they switched to Verizon and paid the fees they won’t have an issue upgrading their device.  Not to mention that so many people will probably wait for a new device before switching to Verizon anyway.

And that’s the end of his list. Five reasons he’s staying, five. And only two of them are valid.

Explain that to me please: 11 complaints vs. 5 reasons (of which only 2 of them are valid in any way).  How can someone who apparently knows something about technology see this as a good decision?  If I had half the list of complaints this guy has, I’d drop Verizon like a bad habit.  I have maybe two complaints about Verizon and neither of them has anything to do with service or call quality (mainly cost and devices).  His entire post seems to me like he’s sucking the AT&T pee pee all the way home while getting his free cell service too.

I should also point out that I have called TUAW out on a very misleading title in one of their other posts and they responded by sending me tweets to rumored stories about the iPhone 4G on Verizon.  It seems they do not understand the concept of a rumor.  Over there they seem to be a bunch of AT&T and Apple fanboys…and dealing with fanboys is a hard thing to do.

Sound off in the comments if you have anything to say!

Update note: I found this post on a blog I frequent (The Adventures of Systems Boy!) and I was so happy to read it.  Three sentences and it’s already the best post on the Verizon iPhone. Thank you, Systems Boy!