My copy of Leopard Server arrived.

Very briefly, because it’s getting late, because I’ve been enjoying a rather nice Rioja and because the one thing I really really wanted to get working – iCal Server – hasn’t been working, here are some thoughts.

AAAAAAaaaaaarrrrrrgggggghhhhhh!

Apple have obsoleted NetInfo, which breaks my cfengine configuration and invalidates most of what you’ve read on these pages. And it broke my groups with the knock-on effect of breaking sudo.

The calendar server refuses to run because it can’t find an entry under /Computers in DirectoryService for my server’s FQDN. How one goes about creating this entry I don’t know. Well that’s not strictly true. I’ve figured out that one would go about creating an entry in LDAP with apple-serviceinfo set to the FQDN. But presumably this should have happened automatically but hasn’t because my server is apparently in advanced mode instead of workgroup or master mode. More investigation is needed to find out what to do about this.

Yes, it’s pretty. I spent several seconds admiring the reflections in the dock. That is, while I was logged in as the local admin user. Because the installer decided to remove my LDAP binding so I couldn’t log in as me. Then when I added it back I still couldn’t log in as me. I deleted and re-added my directory and then it worked. I’m not sure why.

I haven’t tried Time Machine yet.

NFS still worked. In fact it may be the one thing which survived the upgrade unscathed. Indeed I took advantage of the fact that I was exporting the filesystem to my local subnet to modify my sudoers file.

Apple’s X11 implementation still sucks. I was hoping they’d have done something about it. Of course I had no reason to suppose they would but that didn’t stop me hoping. But no, applications still stop responding for no reason whatsoever and the X server needs to be killed. Ho hum.

My Bluetooth keyboard stopped working. Or, more correctly, the Bluetooth radio on the iMac was stopped. Which meant I had to find and connect a USB keyboard in order to log in and turn the radio back on. VNC didn’t work because Apple installed its own VNC server which trashed the one I’d been using. Fun.

And that’s about it. Most of my time has been spent messing with the calendar server so I haven’t looked at much. More comments over the next few days…

So the Cambridge branch of Cancom, a large Apple reseller, doesn’t have OS X Server 10.5 in stock. They have plenty of desktops but not the server.

I knew I should have ordered it.

We use Munin at work to monitor the health of various machines on the network. It works well, is reliable and is easy to configure. I decided I’d try it out at home.

I installed the server, which was easy, and put the client on another machine, which was also easy. So far so easy. I then went away and left it.

By yesterday afternoon it was happily producing pretty graphs. I was pleased and decided to add more machines to the configuration. This I did. Then when I got home from work and looked at my graphs I saw … nothing. The graphs had gone. Munin had decided to stop drawing them. It was still gathering data from the machines; I could see the RRD files changing over time. But it refused to update the graphs.

My investigation into this problem was cut short by a minor LDAP emergency. Every so often (that is to say quite often) when I would start a shell, either over SSH or in a terminal, on a particular machine, the shell would come up with a bogus PATH and would not act on any commands typed. A little digging revealed that each failed shell exactly coincided with a line appearing in the slapd log complaining about error 4: size limit exceeded.

I tried various things to solve the problem. I tweaked and reindexed slapd‘s indices. This was a good thing to do although it didn’t help. I tried pointing nss_ldap to another LDAP master. This didn’t work either. I tried downgrading OpenLDAP; I was already running the latest release on that machine but I hadn’t seen the error 4 messages on my other masters running older versions. This also didn’t help.

Then I remembered that I had recently upgraded the C library and recompiled a bunch of stuff. I tried compiling nss_ldap again. That didn’t help. Finally I reverted nss_ldap to the version compiled against my old C library. I’d upgraded it previously because I came across a problem where a statically-linked application would segfault when querying LDAP for netgroups (but not users or groups or other stuff). Of course this upgrade hadn’t solved that problem. The older nss_ldap was the key. My weird shell issue went away immediately.

At first I was all pleased with myself for solving a problem. It was one of those tricky ones where you have to do some digging and try a few off the wall ideas in order to succeed. Solving those problems is always satisfying.

Then I remembered that I had created the problem myself. I’d spent my whole evening battling with an issue of my own creating and made no further progress on my pretty graphs. Which, lest we forget, were at one time working.

Grrr.

OS X 10.5 (codename Leopard) is being released on Friday and it’s going to be the first OS I ever paid actual money for.

I feel like an Apple fanboi because I’m really quite excited about it. Mainly because of the Calendar server.

And that is just so damn worrying.

I’ve been a happy Slackware user for many years but recently I’ve been thinking about making the switch to Red Hat (probably in the form of Fedora) for my home machines.

Slackware is my favourite Linux distribution and Red Hat has its annoyances but the reasons to use it are becoming quite compelling. My last three jobs have involved using Red Hat in one form or another and at Siemens I was even referred to as a "Red Hat expert" (shudder) so having the same kit at home as at work is tempting.

If I made the switch I would effectively be coming full circle. Back in my student days I had a Slackware desktop and I switched to Red Hat 6 because I felt like spending all my time compiling packages was unnecessary effort.

Note to young ‘uns: that’s Red Hat 6, not Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6. Now vacate the grassy area at the exterior of my residence.

Mac VNC clients suffer a little in comparison to their Windows or UNIX counterparts. Chicken of the VNC has a decent feature set but is slow. RealVNC viewer is noticeably faster but can get confused when you try to scroll the window, and it doesn’t reconnect the session when the machine wakes up from sleep.

Quite by chance I stumbled across JollysFastVNC. "Ooh," I thought to myself, "a VNC client that claims to be fast." Good news indeed. So I fired it up.

Holy jeepers! The dude wasn’t kidding. This thing is fast!

See the introduction to this post.

It’s been an eventful day which started and ended with frustration but finishes with a greater understanding of network home directories, a working AFP server and cleartext passwords finally banished.

I sent my fileserver down for reboot to install the latest Linux kernel. At this point my iMac, on which I had a desktop session, became very very upset. My home directory is NFS mounted and when the server went away the client became totally unusable. Even when the server came back up it wouldn’t re-establish the mounts.

UNIX machines traditionally tend to choke when NFS servers go away but the Mac automounter absolutely refused to come back to life and I had no option but the reboot the machine. I wondered if AFP home directories would be more reliable.

It turns out they are but there’s a fatal flaw. An ssh connection to the machine won’t mount the AFP home which means they’re only useful for a desktop session. At least I did get them working though.

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A managed user has certain preferences defined by the administrator (that’s you) which may or may not be editable after being set. The preferences are stored as attributes in LDAP namedapple-user-mcxflags and apple-user-mcxsettings whose values are Base64-encoded XML data.

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I really wanted an iMac. The new ones are a nice spec (1920×1200 resolution on a 24" display for the top end ones) but they aren’t cheap. The lower spec machines look nice but the 1680×1050 resolution on a 20" screen equates to an inferior dot pitch compared to my MacBook Pro.

Having decided that what I really wanted was a big screen, I hit eBay.

A guy had a few of the last batch of the old iMacs for sale, with the white casing before they switched to the brushed metal look. £900 cash on collection from Birmingham. Bargain.

Rebecca and I jumped in the car and hit the motorway. Two hours later we were there. The bloke wasn’t a weirdo and his house was right next to a carpark. Free parking for the win. He had the iMac all set up for me to inspect and it didn’t take long to confirm that it was kosher.

Then the fun started.

First Rebecca asked if she could use the guy’s bathroom. So far so usual after a two hour drive barely 20cm off the ground. Only she couldn’t get out of it. Turns out the handle on the door is pretty stiff and the door wouldn’t open. The result was that she had to call my mobile for assistance.

Then the iMac was too big to fit in the boot. "Why don’t you put it on the back seat?" quoth the guy. "Back seat? What’s that?" I replied. "Oh yeah. Two-seater."

The upshot of this was that Rebecca had to sit with the machine between her legs the whole way home. Hey, I moved house in that car. A single computer wasn’t going to be a problem.

See the introduction to this post.

Macs can be NFS servers with a little poking. Here’s how to export /Applications to 192.168.1.0/24 without root squashing.

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