What's Going On

I've attempted this post twice now, and it never seems to come out right. It's one of those future-of-the-blog type posts that everyone hates so much, but it's kind of a biggie. So here goes attempt number three.

MIA

Regular readers may have noticed the blight of posts lately (with the exception of the pre-programmed Anniversary post). Also, uncharacteristically, comments have gone unanswered. And the missing scripts and site banner have surely been a tip-off that something is amiss. Indeed.

The short version is that I am in the process of moving to a new home, and in the process of transitioning to a new job (which job was offered me on the anniversary of this site, ironically — Universe, you're a riot). As you can imagine, changing up these two things alone changes so many things that fall beneath them in the hierarchy of life. A blog is certainly no exception.

Earthlink Blows

To be a bit more specific — or as specific as I can at this point — the missing banner and downloads are due to my change of home address and subsequent ISP service transfer. Seems when I transferred my cable service to my new home, Earthlink started a whole new account in my name and unceremoniously rendered the entirety of my old account — including every file I'd stored on their FTP server over the past eight years — null and void. Yep. They deleted all my shit without so much as a phone call and charged me for the pleasure. Rat bastards! If I weren't already signed up and so damn frantic already, I'd drop them like a hot potato. Rest assured, I will do so when next I have a chance (as I did with Sprint — how you like me now, Sprint? Bitches!). Earthlink has just lost my 8+ years of business. Maybe not today; maybe not tomorrow; but soon, and for the rest of my life.

The Future

All of this in conjunction with my upcoming change of employ leaves the future of this blog very much in question. For one, without Earthlink, how will I handle the file archive? How will I handle every dead link on my now-three-year-old site? Would I continue to use Blogger for the site? Or should I start running my own site to mitigate such future transitions? Doing so would allow me to update all the broken links en masse fairly easily, but would be extra hassle, responsibility and downtime. Going forward, will I have issues with the new employer? Or maybe I won't. Will I finally be able to reveal my secret identity? What will I blog about? The fame! The fortune! It's downright dizzying!

Or should I just take this as an omen and throw in the towel?

Honestly, I'd like to not do that. And my friends and colleagues tell me that I "have to" keep blogging. So understand that I will be looking hard for ways to continue writing about systems in a public forum such as this. Understand that The Adventures of Systems Boy! is not planning on going away. (And if it ever does I'll post an explanation. This will never be one of those sites where the author just stops writing. I frickin' hate that. Just kill it, man! Jesus!) But please also understand that this transition will require a great deal of thought, planning and effort on my part, particularly if I switch hosts. It will take time. I may not write much for a while. Comments that don't require a response (and maybe even those that do) may go unanswered for some time. And there are likely to be some significant changes to the content of the site. (Suffice to say, the Macintosh platform plays a significantly smaller role at my new job. Linux, anyone? Anyone?)

In the meantime, if anyone has any suggestions regarding a transition such as the one I'm describing, I'm all ears. Otherwise, please feel free to catch up on the past three years worth of posts. I will write more as soon as I'm able, and will update the site periodically as details about its future solidify. Please stay tuned. (God, I finally get what feed readers are good for!)

Okay, I think that covers everything.

Hope to see you all soon!

UPDATE:

The banner is back! Finally! That was bugging the hell out of me.

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today The Adventures of Systems Boy turns 3! I totally spaced last year's anniversary — so I was totally shocked to realize that it's been 3 years, not 2 that I've been doing this. But this year I'm catching it in time thanks in part to Blogger's new scheduling feature (currently in beta as of this writing, which writing is actually occurring a full two months in advance of the actual birthday and scheduled for publishing on said birthday). Blogger continues to add features I want, so I'm still here. And scheduling is one I've wanted for a while. Those Google folk, why they're downright prescient sometimes.

In any case, this year, for whatever reason, I've seen a general increase in comments, and most of those comments have been really great. It's quite gratifying to realize that there are more than a smattering of people who are actually interested in reading about and discussing this weird, wild Mac lab management niche, and who come here to do it. That makes me feel like a success in some small way.

Anyhoo, I don't want to toot my horn all day. Just wanted to say thanks to anyone who's reading, and especially to those who've contributed. It's appreciated!

And Happy Birthday to me!

Adobe Update Hell

I've been hopeful in the past about Adobe installers, and there have been improvements. But Adobe's update process still leaves a bitter taste in my mouth every time I try to use it, which is with less and less frequency, largely because of said bitter taste.

Adobe Updater: Update Thyself? Not Confidence-Inspiring
(click image for larger view)

Even more frustrating is the fact that Adobe's updaters continue to annoy even after being expressly told not to. To wit, this dialog popped up out of nowhere recently, despite its preferences being set otherwise.

Adobe Updater Preferences: Completely Disregarded
(click image for larger view)

I contend that Adobe's automated update process is just plain broken. It's actually much easier to use their support site than their updater. That's what I do when I need to run Adobe updates. And I keep the updater turned off.

Or at least I try to.

A Brief Foray Into Windows

I just had a rare occasion to use a Windows XP machine here in the lab. Oy, was it painful! All I wanted to do was take three simple screen shots — just three — for an instructional article I was writing for our community. It took a half an hour.

I started, of course, by logging in to a Windows box. That went fairly smoothly. Type my name and password, and, sure enough, I get in. So I open a new window by going to the Start menu and clicking "My Computer," although it's not my computer. It's anything but. Still, "My Computer" gets the new window open. I take my first screen shot by hitting the "Print Screen" key. Yes, Windows has a dedicated screen capture key called "Print Screen." Hit it and it sends the entire screen to the clipboard. Not to a file, mind you. To the clipboard. Next you'll need to open up some kind of image editor. I chose the venerable Photoshop CS3. Opened the app, created a new document, and hit control-v to paste my screen grab in. Good (if a bit of a pain in the ass) so far. Next I made some settings in my open window, and made another screen grab. And once more for good measure.

In Photoshop I decided that it would be best to save my files to my centrally-located network home account, so I hit the save button and navigated there, named the file, and... The Save dialog crashed. After waiting about five minutes I decided that the only thing to do was to force quit Photoshop, which I did, losing all my screen grabs and necessitating beginning the entire process anew.

Windows XP: Definitely Not My Computer (click image for larger view)

The next time around I saved each of my screen captures locally as I went, and that seemed to go okay. Next I just wanted to copy these documents to my network account so I could access them from my office Mac, but the copy failed, producing a meaningless error message. Looking through my files, however, it was clear what the problem was. Apparently, during the crash Photoshop had spewed about three thousand temp files all over my home account, and these needed to be deleted before Windows would copy anything over.

So, I began the process of deleting these three thousand or so files by selecting about six hundred of them and hitting the delete key. I kind of like that Windows' delete key actually deletes stuff. That's a nice touch. What I didn't like was that deleting 600 zero byte files was going to take four minutes. But what was I to do? I went ahead with the file deletion. Four minutes of sitting and watching that miserable, 8-bit trash deletion progress bar — you know, the one where the trash files fly through the air and dissipate in a big pink sparkle — is enough to turn just about anyone's brain to mush. Which is probably why, after it was all over I went ahead and switched to list view (though there seems to be no way to make this setting stick across windows) and selected the remaining 2400-or-so files, right-clicked and hit delete.

Eleven minutes?! Argh!

With some time to kill I decided to log in to an adjacent Mac. Once logged in the Windows brain-fog cleared and it dawned on me: I could just delete the files from the Mac! And it won't take eleven frickin' minutes!

And by golly, that's just what I did.

Eleven seconds later I was able to copy up my files from Windows to my network account and get on with my life.

When I think of how easy all that would have been on a Mac I'm appalled. Absolutely appalled. Windows is ugly, flimsy and crash-prone by comparison. And the user experience is dead-awful. It's no wonder I avoid it like the plague.

God help the Windows Admins! You have my pity.

Time Machine After Logout

I've been using Time Machine for a while now. And I've noticed some interesting things about its behavior. Of particular note, I've noticed that Time Machine does not back up your data when you are logged out. I found this strange until I figured out why this is the case.

I first noticed Time Machine not backing up logged-out users after setting up the staff computers here at work. Oddly, my work computer did back up when I was logged out, which I realized when I noticed a backup failure due lack of drive space. According to the Console logs this backup attempt had occurred in the middle of the night. Clearly Time Machine was able to backup when users were logged out, but it would only do so on my machine. So what was the difference?

By default, Mac OS X wisely un-mounts external volumes when a user logs out. This makes sense for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it's what users expect, and it's the least likely to break something if a user logs out and pulls their firewire plug without ejecting their disk. It's a very sane default that errs on the side of data protection. But it's not always what you want. For instance, say you have network shares, like external RAID drives, that are connected via firewire (which, in fact, we do). Or say your network backups that run in the middle of night get stored on a firewire volume (which ours do). If you want these drives constantly available you need to be able to keep them mounted even when no user is logged in. Fortunately, Apple provides a method for doing this, though it's by no means obvious.

The trick to keeping external drives mounted after a logout lies in a little .plist file. The name of this file is autodiskmount.plist, and it does not exist by default; you have to make it. In the file should be the following text:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">

<plist version="1.0">

<dict>

<key>AutomountDisksWithoutUserLogin</key>

<true/>

</dict>

</plist>

Put this file in:

/Library/Preferences/SystemConfiguration/

And reboot. (Yes, reboot.)

Now all external drives (firewire, USB, eSATA, etc.) will stay mounted after a logout. If they're shared, they'll always be available. And they'll always be available to Time Machine.

So the difference between the staff machines and mine? My computer is set to never unmount drives at logout. Apparently, Time Machine is perfectly capable of running even when no one is logged in. But it obviously needs the Time Machine drive available to do so. Keeping firewire drives mounted post-logout will allow Time Machine to work all night long. Sweet!

And since I'm so crazy with the Installer Packages these days, I'm including one here that will install the necessary preference file to make all this happen. You know, just to make your lives a little easier.

Download KeepExternalDisksMounted

You're welcome!

UPDATE 1: A reader asked in the comments how I came to have the preference file installed on my system. I'd put it there long ago because I needed firewire drives mounted for rsync backups of staff machines. But I certainly didn't figure out how to create that file myself. Credit for that goes to this Mac OS X Hints hint. It's got all the details if you're interested.

UPDATE 2: One other thing I forgot to mention: Why is this useful? I mean, if you're logged out you're not really capable of creating any new data, so there's nothing really new to backup anyway, right? This is mostly true, indeed. But imagine your boss uses Time Machine for his hourly backups. Now imagine he creates a whole buttload of data — I don't know, emails to the CEO, photos of his kids, whatever — and he creates this data right before he leaves for the day. Then, safe in the knowledge that Time Machine's got his back, he logs out and goes home for the weekend. That weekend there's a power surge or something, and his machine is fried. "No problem," he thinks, "I have my backup." But his most recent data is gone. His photos, his draft to the CEO, gone. And guess who's to blame? Yup. The Systems Admin. Your ass is grass, and Time Machine is the lawn mower. (Uh, this is why I don't write in the mornings.)

Personally, I think it would be smart if Time Machine asked you at logout if you'd like to make a backup, or at least warned you that backups would not be performed after logout. This seems like a bit of an oversight on Apple's part.

The other time this can be useful is when you're creating your first backup. This is typically a lot of data. Here in the office we told folks to let it run overnight. But they couldn't log out. So we dropped them to the Login Window with Fast User Switching. Still, it would have been that much more intuitive if we'd just told them to log out like they always do, and that their backups would be ready in the morning.

So yeah, not earth-shattering, but still potentially useful. And interesting on an academic level to know that Time Machine will run sans login.

I have to go install that preference file on my staff machines now. Bye!