RSS Feed

‘Mac’ Category

  1. Oh. Fuck.

    February 15, 2012 by deadlock

    20120215-201037.jpg

    Category Mac | Tags: ,, | No Comments

  2. For Posterity: Ubuntu External Disk Tips

    November 8, 2011 by deadlock

    OK, another one for posterity. I’ve a desktop PC that I’ve converted into a Ubuntu-based server by putting it in my utility room with no monitor connected to it (that’s what makes it a server, see?). I’ve attached a 750GB external USB HDD to it and run SMB/CIFS and netatalk (for my OS X machines). That’s what makes it a file server, right?

    I occasionally run into problems when Ubuntu reboots though – the partitions on the external drive can’t be mounted for whatever reason (usually because they weren’t dismounted properly before the reboot). Ubuntu’s boot process stops and it displays a prompt directing the user to press ‘S’ to skip mounting or ‘M’ to manually fix whatever the problem was. Although you can ping the server, you can’t SSH to it. Once you’ve figured out that that’s why it won’t boot, all you need to do is connect a keyboard, press ‘S’ a couple of times (once for each partition on the external HDD) and Ubuntu will complete its boot cycle. That gets a bit tedious though, so to fix this once and for all, edit your fstab (/etc/fstab) and add ‘nobootwait’ to the options for each drive.

    /dev/disk/by-label/STUFF /mnt/STUFF hfsplus auto,users,rw,uid=dermot,nobootwait 0 0
    /dev/disk/by-label/MOARSTUFF /mnt/MOARSTUFF hfsplus auto,users,rw,uid=dermot,nobootwait 0 0

    Category Mac, Ubuntu/Linux | Tags: | No Comments

  3. Migrating OS X to a New Disk (Via a Network-Stored Backup)

    August 2, 2011 by deadlock

    I’m posting this here for posterity since I’m sure that I’m not the only person who’s ever wanted to do this and I had to piece it together from a few sources. And yes, I know, this is made much easier if you use Time Machine. Shut Up!

    I decided to upgrade the HDD in my MacBook and didn’t want to start afresh with a clean OS. I don’t have a spare external drive lying around, so I don’t use Time Machine (I know, I know, I should, but my preferred back-up strategy works for me). What I did instead was use SuperDuper! to clone my current HDD to a SparseBundle on a network share. I then shutdown, swapped out the old disk for the new one and booted up the original install DVD for my MacBook.

    My assumption was that I could go into Disk Utility, partition my new HDD and then restore the SparseBundle to it. Of course, things didn’t quite go according to script.

    Partitioning went fine of course, that’s straightforward enough. My first issue was actually mounting the AFP share that hosts my backup. I’m not sure if it’s a peculiarity of my file server – which runs Ubuntu with netatalk to share via AFP – but even though the server itself showed up in the network sidebar of the ‘Select Image to Restore From…’ file dialog, none of its shares did. The shares on my Macmini did, however. Thankfully this was an easy one to solve: quit Disk Utility, start Terminal and mount the share from there:

    mount_afp afp://dermot:hahayeah@porkboy.local/Backup /tmp

    (Yes, I mounted it to /tmp – there are almost certainly better places to do this but it worked out OK so I’m not bovvered).

    Exit Terminal, back into Disk Utility to try restoring again. No dice. I could see the share in the dialog now, but the SparseBundle was greyed out. Bah! After some Googling I found my answer. Exit Disk Utility, back into Terminal and…

    hdiutil attach /tmp/backup_20110728.sparsebundle

    Back into Disk Utility to try restoring again. This time I just had to drag the mounted backup from the side-panel on the left into the ‘Source’ field, drag my HDD into the ‘Destination’ field and click ‘Restore’. Job done (after a couple of hours!).

    Category Mac | Tags: | No Comments