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.

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!

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.

From Cyanide & Happiness

First, it made me laugh because of how truthful it is, and I know from experience.

A few years ago, before I was the technical director of my lab, they were installing Maya 3D with a network license system.  The entire process of purchasing the licenses and installing the server and putting the license files on the machines was a nightmare that ended with someone passing around a pirated copy of Maya to use in the class.  We owned the software and licenses, but the Alias (now Autodesk) licensing software was so convoluted  that it was easier to pirate the software.  Just recently I learned that the version of the FlexLM license server that we use doesn’t work with Mac OS 10.5, so I had to cut the package up and copy it to the computer myself.

Just the other day I was trying to watch an episode of Entourage on Fancast, legally (If you have HBO on your home cable with Comcast, you get HBO on demand on Fancast as well).  After waiting 5 minutes for the website to install stuff on my machine I tried to play the show and it didn’t work.  I began trying different browsers and refreshing and it still didn’t work.  I began to download it via a torrent while I was trying to get fancast to work properly and next thing I knew, the torrent was done and I was able to watch it.  Turns out it just didn’t work for some reason, no error, no nothing.

Both software problems, both problems with companies not testing their stuff properly for the consumers.

Now, I’m not specifically talking about DRM, more about big companies screwing consumers unintentionally, but all because they spend so much time and money on copy protection.  Of course I’m not saying that stealing software is okay, and I’m not saying that companies should not protect their products, but I do believe that if your normal consumer is getting screwed over because of shitty DRM or licensing then you’re doing something wrong.

Can anything really be done to fix this that will allow consumers to stop getting screwed while protecting the company?

I personally enjoy the iLok to a certain extent.  The iLok is a hardware based licensing solution that just plugs into a USB port on the computer.  The software reads the license and it just runs.  It’s not perfect in the least though.  It’s managed online, and if you lose the iLok (or it gets stolen) you’re pretty much out that license, unless you pay for the protection.  You can store multiple licenses on one iLok, and you can move the iLok to another machine and use the software on a different machine if you need to.  A mobile license that (for the most part) it works!  The iLok must also be purchased, which adds more licensing costs, and it also takes up a USB port. So it’s not perfect..nothing is though.

This is something to think about, and I do fairly often since I deal with licensing a great deal for work.  So think about it!

Today Motorola responded to all of the eFuse nonsense with something that makes the situation a bit better.

Motorola’s primary focus is the security of our end users and protection of their data, while also meeting carrier, partner and legal requirements. The Droid X and a majority of Android consumer devices on the market today have a secured bootloader. In reference specifically to eFuse, the technology is not loaded with the purpose of preventing a consumer device from functioning, but rather ensuring for the user that the device only runs on updated and tested versions of software. If a device attempts to boot with unapproved software, it will go into recovery mode, and can re-boot once approved software is re-installed. Checking for a valid software configuration is a common practice within the industry to protect the user against potential malicious software threats. Motorola has been a long time advocate of open platforms and provides a number of resources to developers to foster the ecosystem including tools and access to devices via MOTODEV at http://developer.motorola.com.

This is very good compared to bricking the phone.  At least the phone can be recovered by the user instead of having to ship it to Motorola for a repair(not sure of the complete details and how warranty would work).  I’m also happy to see that Moto responded so quickly to the public.  However, this still does not sit well with me as Android was developed with developers and tinkering in mind.  If I want to mess around with my device, why can’t I?

(Thanks to Tom for pointing this out for me)

Well…

Yesterday’s post has already shown us that Motorola should really rework some of their business practices, but it also puts them in a precarious position in the OHA by going against what the OHA is exactly trying to stop, carrier and corporate lockdown of mobile devices. Some even think that because of the eFuse Moto should be asked to leave the OHA, and I’m not entirely sure that they’re wrong in asking this. If they are supposed to abide by the OHA terms, they should. No deviations.

Now for another punch in the OHA/Android face, T-Mobile and Verizon are now installing “junkware” in their new Android phones that cannot be removed in most circumstances. The LA Times blog is reporting that, “the Droid X comes loaded with several nonstandard applications for Google’s Android, most of which cannot be removed” and that T-Mobile’s new Samsung Vibrant is also loaded with some extra apps that cannot be removed. What kind of apps are installed? Here’s a few snips:

Among the [Droid X's] so-called junkware is a Blockbuster video app and a demo for an Electronic Arts game called Need for Speed: Shift….The EA racing game, which provides limited functionality and a large button on the introduction screen urging players to buy the full version, can be removed…

Skype, which is included with other Android handsets Verizon sells, is a permanent fixture, as is a utility called City ID. The latter program provides location information about phone numbers on the incoming call screen. But it works for only 15 days before asking users to pay $1.99 per month…

The T-Mobile Vibrant phone from Samsung, meanwhile, has four of these extra apps staring you in the face.

One is the movie “Avatar,” permanently loaded onto the device…Another is a live video channel called MobiTV — good for only 30 days. The third is a link to install an EA game called The Sims 3: Collector’s Edition. The last is an outdated version of Amazon’s Kindle app.

There’s also Slacker Radio, which cannot be used before providing an e-mail address, and a button leading to Gogo Inflight Internet’s website, which includes a one-month trial for Web surfing (only on plans that provide the service).

Try as you might, none of these apps can be uninstalled.

That is an awful lot of software to load onto a phone that runs an operating system that is supposed to be “free” and “open” for it’s users. The fact that most of them cannot be uninstalled is the most enraging part. I’m also sure that these apps take up a good deal of storage space.

Samsung, Motorola, Verizon, and T-Mobile are completely going against the principles of the OHA which they are all (with the exception of Verizon) a part of. But I’d probably blame the carries more because in the end, they are the one’s with final say on what is loaded on their devices.

So, should all of them be asked to leave the OHA? I’d say that if they continue this trend then yes. The OHA should give them an ultimatum to stop and they should take it or leave. If the OHA fails to even deliver on that then what is the point of the OHA? If you’re not going to stand by one of your most basic principles then you have failed.

While I don’t think this is worse than the eFuse in the Droid X, it certainly is something that needs to be resolved just as rapidly. Putting a few small applications on a phone specific to your company is not really a problem, not allowing your customers to remove them is.

Before I even get into the list I come across this

This is the first of a series of letters to Apple on your behalf, telling the gang in Cupertino what would make their wonder-phone even more wondrous

And it even goes into a real letter to Apple.

Dear Apple,

While it’s clear the iPhone is the best smartphone on the market right now, you have a lot of competition creeping up. We want to help you blow them out of the water with the iPhone OS 4.0. Here are our suggestions:

Now, if you know Apple AT ALL you know that they really don’t listen to the user. TUAW certainly knows this since they write about Apple all the time.  Apple’s idea of market research is “Steve said this was good, so it’s good.”  This isn’t always the case of course; they brought back firewire to all of their laptops after omitting it on most for a time, but Apple really isn’t going to listen to you all that much.  They will look at the market and see what other phones have that they missed, and probably include some of those.  For instance, people use removable-media on their devices a lot, some people prefer it over internal media of course.  Will Apple ever put a microSD card in their iPhone or iPod? Probably not.  Why?  Probably because it’s something else that could break that they don’t want to have to worry about, but it’s probably because they don’t want people to add more space to their devices without buying a whole new device.

Now to the list (please read the article if you’re going to ask questions or complain or whatever, I will only be posting the main idea of each item, not the description of the idea)

1. The lock screen needs to change

This one is nothing too crazy.  The lock screen could change of course to show more information; a list of to-do’s, emails, whatever.  So this one I really don’t have an issue with.  Other phones do this a bit; on Android you get your notifications with an icon in the top menu bar as well as a different colored blinking LED on the front of the phone.

2. A new home screen. The iPhone is the smartest phone on the market. Make it smarter. Introduce a location-aware home screen.

This is another one that I really don’t have an issue with.  I actually like this idea and wonder why more phones/devices don’t have it.

3. That new home screen? Let us access it by vertically swiping.

This one confused me a little bit. I can see the desire to have all of your feeds and shit within a simple swipe, but why?  Do something like Android and use a drop down menu at the top.  You select the top menu and slide it out, this way you don’t accidentally swipe vertically while you’re reading something and open your home screen. The mock-up looks nice:

Credit: Teehan+Lax

But it reminds me of the drop down in Android, just more refined.

4. Overhaul app navigation.

This is another one I really like.  Tape the home button when on your app menu and it shows all of your homescreens in a nice “exposé” style manner.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7soM07Y3qNI]

This should be standard too.  If hold my home button on my DROID it brings up my running programs and I can switch between them (more on multitasking later).

5. 85% of us want multitasking and 3rd party background apps

This is where I get a little annoyed with iPhone users.  Now, multitasking is something that the Palm Pre does with WebOS, as well as Android phones, but the iPhone falls short here.  It SHOULD have it, but iPhone users used to ask me “Who needs that?” or “Who cares about that?”  Well, apparently 85% of the people polled care about it enough to respond to TUAW.  This is a good demand…until I see the next line: “but not at the cost of battery life.” What? Really? You want to run multiple applications at once and not use battery life? What kind of engineering do you think Apple does?  Come on now, be realistic!

6. Almost 80% of us want Flash, even if it’s a bad idea.

Again, a pretty good request.  I want it on my DROID too.  Apparently it’ll be out for Android before the iPhone though.  Also, running Flash on anything MacOS related is a death sentence.  They realize this in the post, but I’m just throwing it in there also.

7. We love that you introduced landscape mode across virtually all apps in iPhone OS 3.0, but 70% of us want the ability to selectively turn it off.

Okay, this really isn’t built into the phone?  Android has it built in already…why didn’t Apple?  I don’t know. But it’s actually a legit request also.

8. When we leave an app, we want it to remember where we were.

This one is part of the whole multitasking thing. When multitasking comes, this better be in it, or you’re doing it wrong! (Yes, Android for the most part has this, and I believe WebOS does as well.)

9. 65% of us want the ability to remove Apple-branded apps.

This next one is a fair request, but it just won’t happen. Apple doesn’t care…really.  They don’t want you to remove their apps on the iPhone because, well, it’s their apps.  There are ways apparently to hid the app from your screen, but not to remove them. These apps are so small what should it matter? This is what you’re getting with a brand; the device and the apps to come with it.  Same on most devices.

10. 60% of us want a universal “documents” folder.

Okay, fair again, but a question is why doesn’t it do this anyway? “We realize this breaks the sandboxing model that prevents one app from blowing away data belonging to another one, but we have every confidence you can make it work.” Yeah, and when an app comes out that removes all of your pictures and documents who are you going to blame for allowing this? Thought so.

11. Better Support for Codecs and Add-ons.

This one is basically asking to allow WMV and AVI stuff to run. I suppose this is another valid request. Next!

12. The iPhone is a hard drive with a screen, so….[Give us Disk mode in the OS. 50% of us want to use our iPhone as an external USB/Wi-Fi hard drive.]

One of my favorites. I wonder why Apple doesn’t allow this.  Maybe it’s because they don’t want people to be able to remove their apps so easily, or copy some over, or maybe it’s because they want their users to use iTunes.  You know, one of their most popular pieces of software.  It’s all about controlling the environment the phone runs with.  You can use other programs to add songs, and documents and pictures, but adding apps is all iTunes.  There is really no third party app vendor, is there? You’re stuck with iTunes, like it or not.

So that’s really my $.02 on this blog entry.  It’s probably biased, but it’s me being honest.  I like the iPhone.  I think it’s a great device, but it does have some stupid flaws that can easily be fixed (as well as being a shitty phone).  Unfortunately these requests might fall on deaf ears,  Steve Jobs is not going to listen much, he’s going to make you listen.

Fixing or adding any of these features to the iPhone will still not help if you’re sitting on a shitty network. I’ll keep m DROID and use an iPod Touch (or my 6th Gen iPod Classic).  I’ll at least be able to do everything I can on an iPhone while actually being able to make phone calls.
There will most likely be a part 2 from this article, so I may just have to wager in on that one as well.

Over the summer I made a lot of changes to the network, mainly I changed it over to use WPA2 Enterprise with our RADIUS server. The logins are taken from our Open Directory LDAP (the ones people use to log into our machines, website, wiki, etc.) and thats how people connect. Works great in MacOS, I select the network, put my user and pass in and voila! Windows was another story.

My MBP has Windows 7 Ultimate; I was able to connect to the network after changing some WIndows defaults. It does ask for a login, which is better than what XP did, but it still had some issues. I had to disable the “Check server certificate against blah blah”, because it’s a self-signed cert it wouldn’t work. I also need to disable “Use windows login password to login to this network.” I understand most people using “enterprise” networks all use AD or whatever to login to their computer, but why make that default? Not to mention, to change both of these options it’s 5 levels down or so buried deep in the wireless preferences. It’s impossible to change if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Windows 7 connects fine now. No issues, it’s actually very stable. Issues arise when Vista users connect. Now, when I add the network for a Vista user it comes up as WPA2 Enterprise (good), AES (great), it even prompts for a user and password (excellent). No connection. I change those settings above again, because it’s by default, still nothing. I go into even more advances prefs by changing the authentication method to MSCHAPv2 or TTLS, PEAP, whatever works. Nothing works. I check all of the Vista prefs with my working Windows 7 prefs, they are identical. What is the issue then?

After a good Google search, and more and more searches, and stops to Apple discussions, and everything else I can think if, I see similar results. Apparently Windows Vista HOME does not work with WPA2 Enterprise. It just doesn’t work. It’s “broken” as some would put it, or “disabled.” Whatever the reason, my question is “Why??” Why do you put WPA2 Enterprise network prefs and even allow me to add said network to my computer when I can’t fucking connect to it? Explain that one, please! If you don’t want Home users to connect to enterprise networks, take the fucking thing out, don’t just make it act like it works and then not let it. How do I know it’s a client issue and not a server issue? Logs.

My server logs all RADIUS connections and attempts to authenticate. My server issues the challenge to the machine, but the machine apparently ignores it, or throws it away, or wipes its ass with it. It does NOTHING.

Now, I was having this issue with some other computers as well, Windows XP users. Their main issue was that they didn’t have updated drivers or settings were screwed up, but they eventually worked most of the time. I’ve also tried with some Vista Pro computers, and yes it works most of the time. The times it doesn’t usually work, I tell the people to get the software from their card manufacturer and use it, and then it seems to magically work.

What is wrong with WIndows wireless? You got me, but I finally told those people who couldn’t connect to either upgrade or deal with it and connect to a poly network. Hell, Poly’s putting N-Wireless in, I might just use it from now on also!

The lab is primarily used for video editing and 2D/3D graphic design. These are three very expensive fields when it comes to software. For video editing we use Final Cut Studio 2. We have a lab license which allows us to run 5 copies at any single time; this license costs us a one-time upgrade fee of around $2000. Of course we had to have Final Cut Studio before that so you need to factor that cost into it also. I’m not sure how much it was originally, but I’m guessing between 2 and 5k. Now, we don’t pay a yearly fee or anything, it’s installed, and it works. No fuss. Is there anything else out there we could use, something free? Maybe cheaper?

In short, no.

There really is nothing like Final Cut Pro out on the market. (And don’t tell me Adobe Premiere Pro because I’ll just have to punch you in the face) Avid is around, it’s been around, it will probably always be around; but it’s not FCP. Avid is a whiny little pain in the ass that doesn’t work if it doesn’t get it’s way, not to mention it’s about $2000/license. No thanks. So FCP is something we’re stuck with it looks like, no big loss. (I know there are open source editors out there, but they’re just not as good and intuitive as FCP is at all, so don’t bring that up.) With respect to Adobe, we do have 1 license of After Effects. It hardly gets used, but it’s really a good program from what I’m told.

Next is 2D graphic design. This one is a bit simpler. We use Adobe Creative Suite 3 (no, we didn’t upgrade to CS4) which comes with Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Acrobat Pro. We’ll ignore Flash for now because we really can’t use anything else that I know of. Photoshop is the standard graphics/photo editing software, the weapon of choice for graphic designers if you will. Without this piece of software your digital media lab (or in this case, my lab) is a laughing stock of the DM world. However, there are freebies out there, although they might not be as good they sure as hell will do the job well. GiMP and GiMPShop are around and have been for a long time. This Linux counterpart to Photoshop gives users who cannot afford the price tag from Adobe the ability to make beautiful graphics like the pros. It’s tools are almost 100% similar, and it’s interface can also be with the help of GiMPShop. I would show screen shots comparing the two, but I can’t seem to get GiMPShop to run on my laptop. (BTW, the two run with X11, not natively.)

InDesign and Illustrator are programs I am not so sure about replacing, I’ve never tried alternatives to them. I know there are a few out there though. Inkscape is one that looks like a promising Illustrator replacement, it’s free too! For InDesign we have Quark of course; although Quark is rapidly getting replaced my InDesign, and one called Scribus, another open source replacement. I’ve never used any of these so I cannot speak for them, but if you’re looking, try them out!

Dreamweaver is for web-development. It’s more of a helper for most new developers. It’s gotten a lot better over the years, but it’s still nothing that cannot be replaced by good ol’ hand coding with TextMate or whatever editor you prefer. These are all wonderful, some are free, some are not. However, for true web editing I have to give props to Coda by Panic. I’ve mentioned before that I love this program. I do. I really think this is probably one of the best code/web/css editing programs on the market, ever. It’s beautiful, and it’s functional. It’s also $99. Does this bother me? No. Each penny of that $99 is worth it. If you’re just doing web stuff, don’t go near Dreamweaver, get Coda, as a matter of fact, get multiple copies of Coda to give to friends. That’s how much I love it.

Look at this beautiful CSS editor! I can also edit the code of the CSS and ANY OTHER CODE WITH CODE HINTING!

Now we come to 3D graphics. Our choice program in the lab is Autodesk Maya 2008 Unlimited. Maya is the “industry standard” for 3D graphics, right with 3D Studio Max; both of which are now owned by Autodesk…weird huh? Maya comes with so much stuff that it’s very hard to find a comparable program. Some difficulties come up with licensing (you need to be running a license server if you have a set number of licenses, and you need to make sre you get Unlimited or Complete. The difference is just what kind of fluids or fur you get, whatever. I like Maya to a certain extent. it’s powerful and fairly easy, but it’s licensing is annoying, and it costs a good amount for upkeep. We need to constantly upgrade if we want the bugs to go away (because lord knows you don’t want to keep fixing your software after the first service pack which we paid a few thousand dollars for in the first place) and if we want service for the license we bought, that’s also more money.

Maya's starting interface.

To replace Maya many people opt for Blender; Maya’s open-source cousin from the Dutch. Blender is completely free, and it does a lot of the things Maya does. It really is an excellent replacement for Maya; however, it’s got a steeper learning curve than Maya. While Maya may still be considered difficult to grasp anyway, Bender is like a nightmare to some 3D artists I’ve known. So if you can learn Blender (which by the way has all documentation online free as all good programs should) you will probably be very happy with the results.

A random screenshot from Blender 2.4 from Wikipedia.

Besides these main programs I have taken liberties to find free versions of other programs for my lab machines as replacements to troublesome or other non-free programs. Adobe Acrobat 9 has a nasty issue with network users on Mac OS, it crashes…all the time. I’ve taken Acrobat off and replaced it with a PDF plugin for Safari and Firefox. If someone wants to use Acrobat Pro, which is VERY rare here, then they can ask me to install it for them, for now Preview works just as well. AppFresh is a free program that checks all of your programs for updates and allows you to install them at once. very handy for updating the lab machines. And I can’t forget my favorite free buddies Carbon Copy Cloner and DeployStudio, without these FREE tools I would have be dead trying to deploy the lab and backup systems.

So, if you’re on a tight budget and you’re looking for cheaper alternatives, try out some of these. They might end up being better for you in the long run. If you have any other programs to suggest, drop a comment, I’d love to try some new programs out. Just remember, sometimes you don’t get what you pay for.