Andreas Wacker

Apple tells us since years whenever it feels approiate that OS X is based on unix. They are not lying of course. But there are some nasty details. One that drives me crazy right now:

Since it’s beginnings unix always supported tape drives. All of them, sometimes there were updates needed etc etc.
But data management via data tapes was always a thing that just worked. On every unix flavor I know. Actually it worked pretty much the same and usually is very reliable once you are a couple of months away of the bleeding edge and if you don’t have to battle broken hardware.

OS X is different: The parts that make tape archiving work have been removed. OS X is the only unix system where this happened. The hardware is there and it works. The software was there and it works. Just that Apple decided “No Tapes for you”. Which is super lame.

On one side Apple wants to be in the pro market. With XSan they like to become a storage vendor, and on the
other side they cripple the operating system by not creating /dev/mt/tpsXdY or /dev/nstX devices.

This is nothing less than Microsoftesc. It really is lame to break working things, just because you have decided that a couple of tape archiving software vendors is more important than the pro market. No, I can not use “retrospect” to manage a Peta Byte for the the movie that I am working on right now. The linux boxes doing the job would have not moved into this Apple heavy environment if Apple would not have broken OS X. To me OS X is only 95% unix and 5 % got soaked in Koolaid and fell apart. Tape device support is some of that. What a shame.

turns out os x has no ‘fuser’ command. oh well. But

umount -f /your/device/path


does the trick in many cases where the pansy finder rejects to eject (aka unmount) a volume

no! It hasn’t.

But now there is the first
trojan it seems.

You need to download and click on it. It’s finder icon appears to be forged to look like a jpeg file.

Now would be the time to see if the “Broken Windows” theorem holds true.

If you try to mount a samba 3.0.14 volume from an OS X 10.4 client then the mount will never finish / connect and you will get an entry in the syslog of your server like:


smbd[30115]: [2006/02/14 18:15:46, 0] rpc_parse/parse_prs.c:prs_mem_get(537)
smbd[30115]: prs_mem_get: reading data of size 2 would overrun buffer.
smbd[30115]: [2006/02/14 18:15:46, 0] rpc_server/srv_pipe.c:api_pipe_bind_req(919)
mailhost smbd[30115]: api_pipe_bind_req: unable to unmarshall RPC_HDR_RB struct.


The fix is easy: just upgrade samba to 3.0.20 and things work again. Fedora Core 4 comes with
this ‘bad’ samba, and only OS X 10.4 barfs on it according to the net. 10.3 is supposed to be fine.

but nice

from a cubicle near you

Chiat/Day: 0 - People: 1

iTunes does a good job in keeping my hard drive full with nice audio and video.
It’s easy and wide spread.

It still had glitches though:


Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Podcasts

contains those files. No matter if video or audio.

When you delete a podcast then files are not deleted at times.
I just found some old things that should have gone.
The current playback within iTunes is very lame. There seems to be no
easy way or preference to let quicktime handle these files.

But it’s better than nothing. It’s somewhat tragic that there was not
nothing before Apples move into this market. Many Applications worked
much better with RSS and media enclosures. But they failed to gain enough
momentum.

Just added ten more Terrabytes to the Xsan. When republishing the volume via afp on a OS X 10.4 server box I had to:


sharing -a /path/to/volume
serveradmin stop afp
serveradmin start afp


Things that are not obvious in this:

The path in the sharing command can not end in a slash. But the shell WILL add it if you let it finish it.
The stop / start is needed. sharing -l will show the new volume but clients can not mount it.

Another neat trick that I learned today is that you have to slice an Xraid into 2 LUNs in order to overcome an internal 2 Terrabyte limit of the Storenext *cough* Apple Xsan software. That alone gave us an unexpected 2.7TB boost.