Tag Archives: upgrade

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And i’m the first one! In this street anyway. So I should have unhindered greatness starting today.

That’s right, I’ve bought a new Airport Extreme today, to replace my 1st generation (6 year old) Airport Extreme. When trying to configure the thing I was pleasantly surprised by the dual band Wifi option that does not require NAT to be enabled. So I quickly reconfigured the Wifi to use 5GHz as a default and keep a “2nd” network on 2.4GHz for the older stuff.

That means both my airports now talk to each other (Wifi extension) via 5GHz with, presumably, speeds up to 540mbps. A good bump up from the previous 2.4GHz 300mbps. Our iPhones and the nexus tablet do not use the 5GHz band. But my iPad 2 does. And so does the Mac mini in the living room. So now we can stream movies and stuff even faster without taking up the bandwidth. Double yay!

As you can see in the pictures below, which I made with an app “Wifi Explorer” (available in the app store) The 2.4GHz band is a bit cluttered. Those poor people on channel 1 can’t have much fun with their Wifi. But look at the 5GHz band… It’s all mine!

2.4ghz 5ghz

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Today I received my first SSD drives. Meant to finally repair my silly Mac Mini.

One of it’s drives broke a while back and I didn’t get around to fix it yet. Last weekend I found a decent deal at my favorite Computer parts store and acquired 2 Corsair Force GT 60GB.

According to various reviews and sites they’re very good and even durable so I’ll see what happens.

The box tells me the data throughput is specced at 555MB/s for reading and 495MB/s for writing. Which I’m guessing is quite fast. Such numbers never really mattered for conventional disks. 5400Rpm was slow, 7200 was fast. And for high end there was 10000Rpm. The end. So I have no idea what speeds I’m coming from.

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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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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! Last night i’ve finally upgraded my Mac OS 10.6.8 server to 10.7.4.
With some recent changes in our use in services and such and new discoveries i’ve made. And about a billion bug fixes and improvements from Apple i felt confident enough to upgrade the thing.

BEHOLD! DNS and DHCP now actually work!
It worked so well it was beyond comprehension. Until…

The quest begins:
To start with, i absolutely hate the OS upgrade via the App Store. For server it makes no sense at all. And it took me about an hour to get it working not including the 3 times i had to re-download the 4.2GB Lion image before it picked up the automated download of server.
Yea. You can’t just say “Install Lion Server” you have to download Lion first. Which then triggers the server part. Except the trigger didn’t work a 100 times before i “re-bought” Lion and Lion server. Luckily it was smart enough to know i had already bought it. But that triggered the Server download, finally.

After that, the server went on installing, rebooting, installing some more, rebooting (i think). I do everything on remote desktop and with the installation process that’s not available, so i just let it run blindly. Hearing the boot sound occasionally. This took a good hour and a half.
Then nothing. No churning disks or reboots for a while. But also no remote desktop coming back. Hmmm… Assuming a confirm or “I’m finished, have fun” dialog was waiting for me i hit enter. And after a few minutes of churning disks i was presented with the Lion boot screen.

Hoping things did go well, but fully expecting my Open Directory, DNS and DHCP to be broken. MySQL missing and all file shares corrupt. I barged straight in. Set the “natural” scrolling to how it should be and noticed my Minecraft server wasn’t going nuts over it’s share. It had logged in… And indeed Open Directory was working! A miracle!

When i moved the web folders into their new location i noticed something else… MySQL worked too… And that’s not even part of the core modules anymore. Last time i tried, the installer kindly removed everything non-default. Including MySQL. Now it was actually in the way with my plan. But no fear. So Terminal hackery later, MySQL was good and dead and in the trash! Ready for MySQL 5.5 to be installed with it’s handy Prefpane.

So far so good. File shares worked, users were kept, i actually had to break my database to replace it. And well, overall it just went fine. New printer drivers and a load of settings later i had this brilliant idea.

Let’s learn a trick or two:
And it was truly brilliant…

Let’s make a Open Directory Replica on the Minecraft server!!! Let’s learn something new!!!

So i re-setup Open Directory from Stand-alone to Open Directory Master. Which allows for sharing user accounts between compatible servers.
It migrated my stuff to the new database. Twitched, retched and died.
Kerberos active, Password Server and LDAP dead. Ohnoes! This allows everyone unlimited access to most things network since the passwords cannot be verified. So anything goes at that point. Bummer!

So i kill LDAP:
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist

And Repair LDAP:
sudo /usr/bin/db_recover -c -h /var/db/openldap/openldap-data
Note the -c for severe corruption recovery!!

And then start LDAP:
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/org.openldap.slapd.plist

Green telltale, yay! victory…
2 seconds later, grey telltale. False victory! :(
The log claims the database cannot be opened and closed LDAP until a valid database is found. It would try to start the server from time to time though. Epic Fail!

Some Googling later; “It’s your best bet to demote the server to Stand-alone, hope it keeps the data and if not, restore your backup!”
Ah yes, the non-existant backup. But, my data is here and worked. So demoting it should not destroy the database just revert the latest changes.
And 3 minutes later I’m presented a pristine empty, neat new database.
The log tells me the data was corrupt and i should restore my database from my archive. *sigh*

Mmhm… That’s for 10.6.8. Too old. Moving on!

Upgrade the empty database to Open Directory Master. Add a user via “server.app” only to find that everything is greyed out… Huh?!?
Broken again? Or… I open Workgroup Manager, That works. So yet again if you use Open directory and ANYTHING that’s not within Apple’s beaten path you have to rely on the older tools because the new stuff fails. Great. So much for simplicity!

So i add my users, set the access rights, passwords, paths. File Sharing does find the users. And all seems well.

Meanwhile… On the minecraft server:
I convert it to Open Directory Replica. Assign the Master server to it. And it works. Aparently. But the timezone is ignored. So the logs are 2 hours off… Silly.
It seems to work though. Yay! Single accounts all over the network! And it only crashed once and didn’t require multiple re-installs. Huzzah!

Afterthoughts:
- Upgrade is now possible but a clean install still is better i think. As in – Wipe disk, install Leopard client, upgrade to Lion client. Install Lion Server.
- Apples upgrade process is flawed from the start (the failing trigger if you already own the software and thus don’t have the buy event first)
- Apples server management tools are not very user friendly. In fact, the whole way things work for me now is clumsy. Lion Server aims to be managed by Server.app. A glorified Server Preferences (Snow Leopard). But, some things are done in good old Server Admin. User management doesn’t work in Server.app when you use Open Directory which is done in the even older (it still lists Classic OS!!) Workgroup manager. So 3 apps instead of 2. And all 3 are horribly slow.
- MySQL (5.5.24) needs some tweaking with the socket and my.cnf or it won’t work.
- Access control Lists (ACLs) tend to conflict with each other if you use both file sharing and the web server due to their oversimplified approach. This forces you to compromise security in some ways.
- Using server.app for remote management is not very friendly and keeps trying to install server components on your client machine.
- Open Directory is still as fragile as ever yet is one of the most important services the server has to offer.