Rob's Brain Upload

As lion machines are starting to appear in our offices and our server is still running 10.5.8, it's come to my attention that it will no longer serve updates to clients running Lion. In trying to sort this, i've also discovered that it's not serving up snow leopard specific updates either, but at least those clients will connect and not just throw up a generic "cannot connect" update

Turns out this is because Lion is looking for a different filename on the update server than previously. You can force it in workgroup manager to look for the old filename, but seeing as the server isn't actually even downloading any lion updates, there's nothing to update.

Thanks to the discussions here... I've sorted it (i think... still downloading many gigs worth of updates).

(Make sure you backup everything first!!)

First you need to get Leopard server to find and download Lion updates.

*Stop the update server

* Download http://swscan.apple.com/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist and move it to /usr/share/swupd/html/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist

* Open it in your preferred editor and change it to

<key>PrimaryCatalog</key>

<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog</string>

<key>CatalogsList</key>

<array>

<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/index.sucatalog</string>

<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog</string>

<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-leopard-snowleopard.merged-1.sucatalog</string>

<string>http://swscan.apple.com/content/catalogs/others/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog</string>

</array>

* Edit /etc/swupd/swupd.plist and change the meta index to the following

<key>metaIndexURL</key>

<string>http://(mysus.mydomain.com):8088/content/meta/mirror-config-1.plist</string>

<key>portToUse</key>

* Restart the update server and it should start syncing all the new updates.... may take some time / days etc..

Now you need to symlink the new catalog files in the 'others' directory into the main catalog directory.

ln -s /usr/share/swupd/html/content/catalogs/others/index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog.apple index-lion-snowleopard-leopard.merged-1.sucatalog

etc... for all new ones.

That should be all you need to do. Will correct this if mine fails to work once it's finished downloading. Currently it's connecting but saying that no updates are available which is to be expected.

Another computer oddity today.

Had a call from a guy at work today wondering why every time he copied a set of data from one excel workbook to another the dates gained 4 years and a day.

Well it appears that all dates in windows are referenced by the number of days from 1st Jan 1900 (which makes sense). This is the default option for workbooks in Excel for windows. However, on macs, they're referenced from 2nd Jan 1904 (which makes less sense).

In this case the master file this guy was trying to copy from was based on a PC original file and hence was in the 1900 format and every new workbook he created on his mac defaulted to the 1904.

You can change the system a workbook uses by going Excel - Preferences - Calculation, then under workbook options select or deselect '1904 date system'. This only affects the current workbook.

The problem we had was that changing this to 1904 in the master workbook changed all the dates (that were right to start with) by 1 day and 4 years. To correct this you just need to subtract 1462 from each date. You can do this by writing this in an empty cell, then copying it, select all the dates to change, then edit - paste special, then paste = values and operation = subtract (if your dates are now too recent) or add (if they are too late)

You can find more detail here.

Have spent ages trying to work out why my Windows Vista installation (don't ask :O( ) running under VMWare Fusion point blank refused to connect to the windows update server even through the internet connection worked fine in such things as Internet Explorer.

Turns out that for some reason it doesn't use the proxy settings set within internet explorer settings, as everything else in windows seems to, it uses the settings in the WinHTTP configuration.

Found the info from Microsoft here.

In my case the commands I used were

C;\Windows\system32>netsh

netsh>winhttp

netsh winhttp>set proxy myproxy:80

I didn't set any exceptions as windows update doesn't need any, and i've not found anything else that uses that connection and it all seems to be working fine for me now.

Another one of Microsoft's annoyances.

When running users on network homes, users are having issues saving from Microsoft office applications getting such errors as "Word cannot save file because it is already open elsewhere" when there is no other copy open.

The cause of this appears to be the weird way that Microsoft saves files. Rather than saving directly to the directory you specify, it first saves it to the .TemporaryItems folder in the root of the share that the users home directory is located.That means that if the home directory is on /volumes/userRAID/users/fredbloggs and the share is /volumes/userRAID/users then the temporary directory is /volumes/userRAID/

Therefore all users need to have write access to this directory, even though it is a few tiers up the folder tree than the user has access to.

Took me ages to find out that one :o/

Couldn't find this anywhere on t'interweb so after some fiddling, here's how to move an iTunes library from one user to another on the same computer on OSX (leopard in this case and iTunes 10.1)

Now this only works if you're using an external drive like me, or some directory outside the home directory of the user.

First, logged in as the new user, open iTunes and go to iTunes - Preferences - Advanced. Now change the 'iTunes Media Folder Location' to the directory of your old iTunes library (the directory in which you have 'music' and other directories. Save the changes and quit iTunes.

Now time to delve into terminal. For this you need to have access to root or any other user that can access both yours and the old user's home directory.

Now all you have to do is copy the ~/Music/iTunes directory of the old user to the same location of the new user. In my case:

cp -R /users/admin/Music/iTunes /users/musicserver/Music/

Check the permissions on the copied directory, should be owned and read/write by the new user, then quit terminal and reload iTunes. Now your old library should appear :o)

If not... see me after..

Now i don't know if this is specific to my setup, i have a non server mac mini running leopard server as a home server / music server attached to my home cinema system, but i've never managed to get the included remote to work with it and to control front row (but that's a whole other topic by itself!). However today i was randomly flicking around on my macbook pro trying to work out why it's randomly beeping at me for no real apparent reason and found the following in the security settings under system preferences....

Ahah!... Checked the same place on the server and, sure enough, it was there and checked. Now as i said, i don't know if i've accidentally checked this myself or if it's automatically set on the server version of the OS as a security default or something. Either way it's working now :o)

Now just to find why my laptop's beeping at me everytime i start a new sentence....

I had to do a complete re-install of my work's server the other day, had plenty of backups (as you always should), reformatted, installed OS X, got everything back running again, thought all was good with the world.

Then came to setting up the scheduled backups that run at various times to backup the mail databases, user directories etc etc.... For this we use Roxio's Retrospect backup 8. Popped the CD in the drive, installed away, ran the administration program to be prompted by a "insert product key" dialogue box.... :o/

Now the CD was just lying on the desk by the server, you think i could find the box with the manual and key and what not....

After no luck searching around google and the like i started looking inside the uninstalled scripts to find out what files were put where to see if i could extract the key from the cloned backup of the OS disk i had. Turns out most of the files reside within /Library/Application Support/Retrospect. Good.

First method of attack was just to copy the old directory over the new one in the hope that it would pick up the old configuration files including the key. No such luck. Due to the Retoengine daemon running in the background, most of these files are in use and therefor can't be copied over. Stopping the process doesn't help as it re-spawns before you have a chance to copy the files. Now i didn't try copying it as root from terminal but that may have worked.

Second method was to uninstall Retrospect completely, copy the directory over, then reinstall the application. I didn't have much hope for this method as i just assumed that the installer would just overwrite the directory i'd copied over. However, upon running the uninstaller, i noticed that a lot of the configuration files were still in the Application Support directory... ahah!. So copied the backup version of the directory over the top of that one, reinstalled the application and Bingo... one working retrospect :o)

Onto the next issue.... getting the update server the work.... dum de dum....

HTH

Rob

Hello everyone.

Just a brief introduction to this place. I've mainly created it just as a space to put things that i've found out, either by trial and error, or by hours of searching the web, just so i can find them again when i need to. However, hopefully it'll help some other people out who are also searching the depths of the web to find similar things.

Who knows what'll end up on here but it'll probably mainly be computer or sound related being the two things I end up doing the most.

That is all for now

Rob