Tag Archives: lion

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It doesn’t quite work :) , a little bit, but not really.

Often if the specifications of computers match with other Macs you can install an older OS X on it then what came pre-installed on the Mac. Like in this situation I discovered that the Macbook Pro Early 2011 (MacBookPro8,1) has a lot of specifications in common with the Mac Mini Mid 2011 (MacMini5,1)

Same CPU, GPU and ram type. Both have Thunderbolt, bluetooth, wifi, Sata 2 clocked at higher speeds etc.

The Macbook comes with Snow Leopard 10.6.6 and the Mac mini with Lion 10.7. In the old days that would mean that the Mac mini could also run 10.6.6 or newer (10.6.8). Because all drivers are available. Thus if Lion or Mountain Lion doesn’t work for you, you could downgrade to Snow Leopard.

I’ve tried this many times before with G5 macs, earlier Intel models and all kinds of hardware really.

But in this case it seems Apple used a different I/O chip in the Mac mini. Also the I/O for the thunderbolt seems different. Because of these tiny hardware differences it doesn’t work. Very sneaky.

I successfully installed Snow Leopard on the Mac Mini but quickly discovered that the Sata Bus had a throughput of maybe 10/20 kilobytes while using the system. Instead of the advertised 3 Gigabit. This basically means the Sata Bus functions in a sort of fallback mode called PIO. And this is something of the 80′s and with that is super slow. Copying data and writing to the disk will literally take hours.

Another thing that seems to happen is that when you use the Thunderbolt port on the Mac Mini and Snow Leopard loads, the screen goes black. This suggests the firmware or the thunderbolt chip has a slight difference with the Macbook version of it. The Thunderbolt port does, however, keep showing as connected in System information. But it has no output.

However, and this is the weird part. Sata and Thunderbolt worked fine throughout the installation of the setup. This suggests this can be resolved with a driver or modification in Snow Leopard somewhere but I couldn’t find anything constructive for this. I guess no-one has tried this before. Since such things are notoriously hard to find for OS X I didn’t go into that much further and simply upgraded to Mountain Lion.

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Nope! I’ve had it. For real this time.

Mac OS 10.4 Server worked fine. Mac OS 10.5 Server was a disaster. Mac OS 10.6 Server was only crashing and breaking every 6-9 months. Mac OS 10.7 Server was a complete screwup. Mac OS 10.8 Server is better but any serious networking is a no go!

 The fail!

DNS Server on Mountain Lion does *not* work. I’m not gonna wait for 10.8.1. It’s been rubbish since Lion came out last year. But it just got worse. It’s slow, unresponsive and sends things to the wrong IP’s. Generally DNS is now more of a hinderance than useful tool. Combining that with the glaring omission of DHCP in the core services, Apple finally managed to push me away from a product because it sucks so bad.

In 10.7 a very very big gripe was Access Control Lists conflicting on all kinds of things. Mountain Lion makes this a tad bit worse. The conflicting ACL’s are still there and now require me to give “everyone” read-only access even though the users are already in the ACL. This is a major security flaw if you ask me. Also FTP can only share one path not unlike in Snow Leopard (10.6) Where i could allow access to /Storage *and* /Library/WebServer/Sites/. It’s one or the other now. Terrible!

Not to mention the terrible idea of lock files and restricted access on every /Library and /System folder. Dammit Apple, I can take care of my own computer!

The road to victory

I’m going to phase out Mac OS Server for several things and be done with it. Ubuntu Server 12.04 seems really reliable and appealing and with it’s large community should be fairly easy to set up too. Plus I already have a Ubuntu jacket and some experience with Ubuntu Desktop.

In order to bring some order into the resulted chaos of upgrading my servers to 10.8 I’ve ordered a bunch of parts and am gonna build a PC server.

It’s small, cheap and has great reviews and good performance for small networks like mine. Many use them as Home Theater PC’s so certainly Network Services will perform even better on it!

I’ve ordered:

1x Antek ISK-300 mITX case
1x Asus AT5NM10T-I, Atom D525, 2xDDR3, mITX

I have suitable ram lying around and a bunch of harddisks that are new. And with that for just under 250 euros (including the already owned harddisk and ram) I have a “Mac Mini Grade” tiny PC.

This machine will be taking care of DHCP, DNS and when it’s all settled in and working I plan on moving some other things to it as well, VPN and perhaps even my File sharing.

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Oh yes, I’m tricked into it! And it looks pretty! Plus, it seems to work! I was just looking up some information on how to upgrade and saw the screenshots and kinda fell in love instantly. Silly me! To be sucked in like that, I should know better.

So I bought it, found out I had to install Mountain Lion Client first. Then download the server package. Which neatly upgraded all existing services and… installed a bunch of new ones! Yay! I felt so good. But then I noticed something. DHCP server is removed…

Yea, what genius thought that a server doesn’t need a DHCP server I don’t know. But it’s a loss. And an annoying one, too. However, I have overcome this difficulty by reconfiguring one of the Airport Extremes to be a DHCP server. Since Mountain Lion now seems to support proper DNS I’m gonna try that combination.

Look at that sexyness!

The panels and settings load much much faster too, so someone had their head screwed on right and actually did something useful. This particular server runs… Minecraft daemons. Thus not much services are active. But once i upgrade my other server that one will use a bunch more, so I can properly use a lot more features and do some real file sharing and get a good idea of what’s what and how and if it works. But so far it seems a solid upgrade from Lion.

But. No DHCP server. An essential part if you ask me. Which is kinda weird, because VPN is present and VPN needs a DHCP server, locally, to hand out IP’s to connected VPN clients. So there must be something active… Why can’t I reach or see it.

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That’s right. For some reason Mac OS DNS Server screwed up the named.conf and cleared it out. I just added a new Alias… Can’t be that hard, right?

Anyway, removing the named.conf and re-creating all DNS entries worked and it seems back online now. Also i had to re-set all other settings for the DNS which were kindly screwed up too. Go Apple Go! Awesome products!

[update]

While it seemingly was fixed with a new records table. It wasn’t none of the clients could ping one another on the domain name. The server itself lost track of the domain too. Which made Open Directory crash. And DHCP. And some other things.

Repairing efforts have been fruitless, as usual. Googling the issues turned up nothing but other frustrated users. So fuck it. Back to Snow Leopard server. A clean install… Now where did I put that serial code :( .

[update 2]

I’ve now reinstalled the server with Snow Leopard. Damn that is fast compared to Lion. I can’t even go grab a drink before loading the settings in server admin finish loading. It’s amazing. Things actually respond within a few seconds! It should be the other way around really. Installing a newer system and get the feeling its infinitely better, faster and more awesome. Now I’m really sad that I cannot downgrade the other server to Snow Leopard as well. :(

It makes me wonder how superbly faster my iMac and laptop will be if i could install Snow Leopard on it…

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So i have Lion for a bout a week now, on both my Laptop and iMac.
I am mightily unimpressed and more annoyed with it than anything. Where are the cool and awesome new feats? I have yet to find anything new i actually like in Lion.

Some more quirks i found and find hard to understand why ANYONE would even think of making it a default…

- Opening a video in Quicktime 10, then closing it after a few seconds, then quit quicktime and opening another movie. Opens the first AND the new one. SO you have 2 videos running. Why?
If you finish the first movie it stays away… Is this some encouragement to finish earlier vids first? Wtf?
This only happens in QT10, not in QT7.

- Sidescrolling in Finder… Yea, turn if off please. Oh wait! i cannot! (Or i cannot find the setting) :( So i cannot use a sliding gesture anymore to go back and forth between folders like you do with browsers to go back and forward between sites.

- Fullscreen apps don’t stay fullscreen and forget which space they belong to.

- Opening Excel opens all previous files too. Confusing me to no end since i open only one! Stop fucking restoring the previous state! I quit that file. When i want it i open it myself tyvm!

- Messy gestures in the trackpad. Luckily i could disable them all!

- Window positions not saved? Yahoo Messenger keeps being too low when i start the app. iChat ALWAYS end up somewhere in the middle of the screen no matter where i place it.

- iChat and Yahoo. Yay! i thought. But that fun was short-lived since Live! (MSN) Contacts in iChat’s Yahoo are not visible. Wtf!?

And i’m sure there is more that i forgot or didn’t even see yet :(

I wonder when we can Upgrade to Snow Leopard again!