Newton’s Lore

I’m not sure that Time Machine’s going to prove much use to me if it spends longer than a weekend “Preparing backup”. Maybe if I left the machine backing up all week and only used it on weekends? Contemplating nuking the backup and starting from scratch as that way at least it’ll not have to do any comparison with the existing backup.

Meanwhile Spotlight is claiming that it’s 3% done indexing the backup volume and has 49 hours remaining. Sigh. I just added the backup volume to the list of things not to index (Why doesn’t that happen automatically?), and I got an error dialog. But re-opening the Spotlight preference pane shows the volume was added anyway. Now it’s still indexing it, but claims it’s 1% done and only got 3 hours remaining.

I’m thinking it’s time to fire up Superduper.

Check out these USB/eSATA/FireWire/FireWire 800 hard drive “Stage racks” also a similar gadget on Amazon.
Just as long as you don’t knock it over. Fortunately they include weights in the base. Unfortunately this increases the shipping cost!

So, the first Time Capsule backup over Gigabit Ethernet took about 8 hours to backup an 80 Gb drive. So, the 160Gb drive should take 16 hours? So far it’s  been over 24 hours and we’re stuck at 132.07 of 145.81Gb (There are 2,007,881 files to back up!),  and not  moving. The weird thing is that MenuMeters shows around 600KB/s of outgoing traffic, presumably to the Time Capsule as everything else  has  been quit. At that transfer rate I’m estimating 8 hours left (time for  bed!), but it’s hard to tell as the progress bar doesn’t seem to be moving. Edit- Something like 32-36 hours all up I think.

Picked up a 500Gb Time Capsule. Got home and was somewhat in a hurry. Power cable was a bit hard to get pushed in properly, although there was no visible evidence of why this would have been the case in either the plug or the socket.
Ignored the “Install this first” CDs, as usual, and fired up Airport Admin utility under Leopard on the wired LAN and it found the existing Airport Express. Did a “Save As…” to save the config of the existing Airport Express (including passwords). Then unplugged the Airport Express and plugged in the Time Capsule, attached to the network cable that used to be plugged into the airport express. Interestingly the assistant offered me the chance to use the Time Capsule to replace an existing wireless access point, but it wanted me to find it (and I’d just unplugged it :). So I plugged it back in to power and the LAN, but the Assistant couldn’t seem to find it. I gave up at this point, hit the Manual button and just imported the settings from the Airport Express (seemed like a safe bet) into the Time Capsule’s settings. This seemed to work. Changed security to WPA Personal and restarted the Time Capsule.
So, now turn on Time Machine on the Leopard box and get it started. That was at 18:30, and it’s now done 47.3 of 69.44Gb (1,396,130 items from my 80Gb drive) after some 5.75hrs (over Gigabit).
Meanwhile, every other machine had to have its Airport connection changed to WPA Personal, and even though I’m pretty sure I typed the password in several times, it took a while to register and stick (at least I hope it’s stuck now!).
Are network speeds faster? Hard to tell. I haven’t maxed out the speed as currently we need backward compatibility with 802.11g until the next round of upgrades. It offers 802.11n on 2.4 or 5GHz, and 802.11a compatibility as well as 802.11n/b/g.
Other noteworthy things are that the Airport Admin utility displays a set of warnings about the current Time Capsule configuration (ie no DNS, multiple DHCP, etc.).
The Time Capsule also offers to sync with a timeserver, and also flash its light if there’s a software update available. This is much less useful as it’s going to be stuck in a separate room where I’m unlikely to see its flashing light.
There’s also support to “Advertise configuration globally” via Bonjour, or so it seems to make it available globally over the internet. I don’t enable this.
I’d heard rumours of it running hot. Sure, it’s warm, but not really any warmer than my ADSL router, and it’s been doing a lot more work for the past 5 hours. Plus it’s got an internal power supply, so it’ll be warmer from that alone.
The other thing is now there’s an extra shared volume appearing in the Finder. Logging into it reveals a shared disk onto which I can put stuff. Cool. Checking in the Airport Admin shows it’s a guest read-writable volume, which is probably not good by default. Now locked down
So far, it seems to be behaving pretty much as expected. I could do setup in a hurry without too much pain. It claims to be backing up at a reasonable speed.
Now I just need to test recovery

EMC Insignia (nee Dantz) have released a beta test version of RetrospectX (codenamed “Unicorn”) client and server for the Mac. Users need their existing Retrospect licence key to use the beta. The Mac client and server are universal binaries.

Steve Jobs has announced Time Capsule, an Airport Extreme with built in  500Gb (US$299) or 1Tb (US$499) hard drive

EMC Insignia announced their return to MacWorld:

EMC will highlight and demonstrate the latest version of its backup and recovery software – EMC® Retrospect® for Macintosh, version 6.1 – for consumers and small and medium businesses. In addition, EMC continues to demonstrate its commitment in enhancing Mac data protection as it will announce a call for betas for the next version of EMC Retrospect for Macintosh at Macworld.

For more information about EMC Retrospect 6.1 for Macintosh, please visit http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/smb/retroformac 

After EMC bought Dantz and management put Retrospect for the Mac into what essentially amounted to maintenance mode since before 2004 it had better have done a good job with adding features to the next version. It’s only because the old version is so good and the competition so complex or unreliable that Retrospect still survives.

So, despite wanting to get my copy of Leopard on the day of release (sad Mac fanboy that I am), I waited some days to install it. Some of these were because my offsite backup was offsite, and I didn’t realise its power supply and cable were also offsite

Anyway, I began the upgrade process by upgrading a PowerPC PowerBook G4 which already had a developer pre-release copy of Leopard installed. Reassuringly this installation failed, leaving the machine in an unusable state.

Buoyed with enthusiasm by this experience (well, ok it’s somewhat traditional for the release build to fail to install over a developer build), I proceeded.

Having by this time got the first bug reports on Macintouch and news of the Keychain/login update I cautiously turned on auto-login on my machine so that I didn’t need the password to get in (theoretically). I also downloaded the update. I backed up my Intel machine and ran the Leopard installer. I bravely selected the ‘Upgrade’ option rather than ‘Archive and Install’, but I was feeling lucky and wielding a backup.

The machine rebooted (alas I did it overnight so I missed the install movie) and I was in Leopard.

So, fire up Safari and… no network. Bummer.

Install the login/keychain update and reboot. Well, at least the network has come back!

So, what to do? Check out the new Finder features. Launch some Apps. Upgrade some Apps that report upgrades are available. Try AppleWorks, which quits on launch (with the recent items panel open). Eventually this is resolved some days later when I read on Macintouch that the AppleWorks Users Group suggest:

1. Quit AppleWorks and switch to the Finder.
Delete the Recent Items folder at Macintosh HD > Users > yourname > Documents > AppleWorks User Data > Starting Points.
2. Re-launch AppleWorks. AppleWorks will create a new (and empty) Recent Items folder and should then run reliably under Leopard.

Other things I noticed:

• Arrow keys no longer work in vi in iTerm Build 0.9.5.0611. I’m sure that will affect a lot of users!
• httpd is now actually Apache2. This means that the config file has moved from /etc/httpd.conf to /etc/apache2/httpd.conf which is where you’ll have to enable php5
• mysql.sock appears to need to be in /var/mysql/mysql.sock by default. I did
  

  sudo mkdir /var/mysql
  sudo ln -s /tmp/mysql.sock /var/mysql/

  after which mysql once more behaved.

• My cups-pdf printer has vanished into the void. I haven’t tried reinstalling and there doesn’t seem to be mention on the site about Leopard support, so ignoring that one for the moment
• “fink selfupdate” seems to have happily updated fink for most things
• Fired up Mail.App and it proceeded to attempt to update my mailboxes. It then complained at one stage that it couldn’t, so it switched to importing my mail. I’m not sure what difference this made, but it seemed to work eventually.
• I had the cursor vanish once, but it got better and came back
• The grammar checker detects double words such as “the the”, but doesn’t let you hit the ‘Change’ button to just fix it, which would seem logical.
• Speed comparison wise, Leopard seems a little more responsive. Must be leveraging the GPU that does it.
• Spaces is hard to get the hang of.
• The dock does not seem to be worth the attention lavished on complaining about it
• The firewall was down. Turning it back on was a good idea
• Although the Sharing Preference pane showed “mycomputername.local”, clicking the edit button actually revealed that the name was in fact “Macintosh.local”, which conflicted with 3 other machines on our network as I found when I opened the laptop at work
• Address Book not being able to send/receive SMS messages via BlueTooth sucks. Hopefully that functionality will be re-enabled shortly.
• iChat’s new effects are cool. I can’t wait for the hologram effect “Help me Obiwan Kenobi, you’re my only hope!”
• Coverflow is cool for paging through those piles of PDF documents generated by the ScanSnap S500M and ReadIRIS
• Searching by filename is easier in Spotlight, yay!
• The build number is 9A581. Java is version
  

  java version “1.5.0_13″
  Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_13-b05-237)
  Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_13-119, mixed mode, sharing)

• After a cursory look, NeoOffice seems to work. Eclipse seems to work ok.
• Other mission critical apps that will need an update are Missing Sync and Filemaker

Dantz Retrospect have released a new knowledgebase article which details how to change your selectors to ensure that documents with their bundle bit set are backed up. These include (but are not limited to) documents created by

iWork ‘08 (all apps)

• Keynote
• Numbers
• Pages

iLife ‘08

• iPhoto
• iTunes
• Garage Band

We have also seen this change apply to some .pdf files included with Apple branded software packages

• My, the box sure is shiny
• I should have done the full backup before I got it
• I should have cleared 9Gb of free space before I got it