The Year of the Geek

More like 25 Years, but this is easier.

Archive for the ‘Hardware’ category

First Impressions on Lion Server

February 15th, 2012

I haven’t forgotten about the posts on upgrading my servers, I’ve just not had the time to. I also got extremely delayed with getting the hardware itself. Let me just give some first impressions on Lion server and the new hardware.

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.

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Posted in Hardware, Rant, Reviews, Software, Uncategorized

Next, on YOTG.

November 15th, 2011

It has finally happened. My lab has finally gotten the funds to upgrade our aging G5 servers with nice, new, shiny Mac Mini’s and a Promise Pegasus RAID.

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.

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Posted in Hardware, Work

Tags: apple Hardware new purchase raid xserve

That didn’t last as long as I was expecting…

April 18th, 2011

I decided to upgrade to the Thunderbolt after all. Main reason: I got $50 off from a web coupon. I’m going to write a little bit about it after I’ve used it a bit more.

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…

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Posted in Hardware, Phones

Tags: android cell phone cyanogenmod new purchase Technology wireless

Getting more from my Original DROID (Part 2: Restoring and Troubleshooting)

April 13th, 2011

In part 1 I described (in little detail) how I rooted my phone and installed CyanogenMod 7 on it to get some more mileage out of it until I upgrade to a newer device this year. But of course every upgrade and every hack isn’t without it’s issues and every hack isn’t perfect at all. Cyanogen never claims to be 100% trouble-free, and every users’ experience will vary depending on device and applications installed; after all, it is technically a hack made by third-party developers…and no developer is perfect. The methods for flashing are also different for each user.

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.

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Posted in Hardware, Phones, Software

Tags: android cell phone cyanogenmod DROID phone software

Getting more from my Original DROID (Part 1:Rooting and CM7)

April 11th, 2011

I love my DROID, I have since I got it over a year ago. But in a year, a lot can happen with technology of course. My phone was originally equipped with Android 2.1 (the first phone to have it actually) and had an ARM 600MHz processor (underclocked to 550 for battery life), and 256MB RAM. It was fast, really fast…and it took a while for phones to be that fast…but it didn’t last long. Soon after the DROID came out every new phone that came out just got faster and faster very quickly..I mean, that’s what technology does, right? But the DROID looked slow very quickly.

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.