2011 - Too many bits, too little Bytes

Upgrading the hard drive on old Macbook Pro (and upgrading to Lion)

Tiago Ferreira November 27, 2011 November 27, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

My old 13″ Macbook Pro’s 250GB is at it’s limit. It’s full and slow, and it is running Snow Leopard. So it was time to change it all. The old disk was a 250GB Hitachi HTS542525K9SA00 with a 5400RPM rotational speed, the new, a Seagate Momentus 750GB 7200RPM beast. The Plan? 1. Get the new hard drive onto a usb case 2. Install Snow Leopard on it 3. Install Lion on the usb drive Ad 4. Check if all the applications are ok 5. copy all the data from the old drive to the new one (*) 6. Install the new …

Problems of replicating Virtual Machine

Tiago Ferreira October 25, 2011 October 25, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

One of the biggest advantages of VMs, is the capability of cloning and replicating them. This allows the creation of a number of similar systems, without having to replicate the configuration and installation time. Unfortunately , there are a small number of downsides: The MAC addresses are also cloned. Remember to generate new MAC addresses on each new cloned VM. Also, Ubunto caches this value, which will generate a typical error message on dmesg: “udev: renamed network interface eth0 to eth1” . To avoid this problem, delete the the file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules and restart the system.

How to manage a small Virtual Machine infrastructure

Tiago Ferreira October 23, 2011 October 23, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

Over the last months, I felt the need to start a small virtual machine infrastructure to manage every small need on a laboratory at work. The set up infrastructure is the following: 1x Apple Macbook Pro 4.1 – for development of the appliances 2x HP DL360 with 8GB RAM running Ubuntu 10.4 – to run the VMs Note that is this NOT a production environment. This only covers a LAB needs and requirements, so stuff like redundancy and fail safe will not be included. Ad Over the next few weeks, I’ll add some important notes. Workflow The workflow …

Recover data from a non booting Macbook Air (OSX 10.6 and 10.7, and probably 10.8)

Tiago Ferreira August 2, 2011 August 2, 2011 sysadmin3 Comments

The Macbook Air is the best tool for someone whose main function is to attend to meetings. Although the new (2011) models all feature SSDs, the older models only offered those as an option. As such, even the best build machines are not free from hard drive failures, which remain as the component with highest failing component. Regardless, in case you get stuck with a non booting Macbook Air, here’s how to recover the data: 1. First, why does this even works? Simple. OSX uses a kind of file system called “Journaled“, which is far different from FAT or NTFS, …

Check opened files by a process on OSX

Tiago Ferreira July 26, 2011 July 26, 2011 sysadminLeave a comment

Recently i’ve been fighting some performance issues with Spotlight on OSX 10.6. As sad as it may seem, the problem is not on Spotlight it selft, but on it’s reliance on third parties to search inside files. On my case, the issue is related to Office 2010 Exel files: Jul 26 10:52:51 macbook-2 mdworker32[18995]: (Normal) Import: Spotlight giving up on importing file /Users/xxx/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/xxx/xxx.mbox/Attachments/156147/2/_excel_filename_.xlsx after 240 seconds, 235.697 seconds of which was spent in the Spotlight importer plugin. Which makes Spotlight take DAYS for index all my files and emails. Regardless, the way to ckeck what Sportlight is actually doing is …