http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/09/google-92-93-94-95-96-97-98-99-100.html

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To properly tell this story we’ll have to go back in time.

In January of 2008 when this model of Mac Pro was available (version 3.1) it was definitely the cat’s meow. I bought a true boss of a system too. I picked up an 8-core 2.8ghz Mac Pro with 4gb of RAM. Later, I bought some third party RAM from Crucial to stuff it to the brim with 32gb.

I also visited Newegg.com to pick up three more hard drives. That was an easy decision. I picked up 3 more 750gb hard drives, all of them Seagate. When I was a PC guy Seagates or Maxtors were the only drives to buy.

I also picked up a Drobo. If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know what happened with the Drobo. To replace the Drobo I eventually purchased a Promise DS4600 and 4 Seagate ST31000340AS 1 terabyte drives.

The Promise unit had issues. It was finicky and liked to drop drives out of the array for no discernible reason. Oddly enough, the drive that failed out of the array most often was whatever drive was in bay 4. It didn’t have to be the same drive. You could literally swap the drives in and out of bay 4 and eventually it would fail. It was really bizarre. I opened numerous cases with Promise.

Promise finally came back with the information that this particular model of Seagate drives were not certified to work with the DS4600. Okie, I can handle that. No problem. I reviewed the compatibility list provided by Promise and selected a set of Hitachi 2TB drives.

I then moved on to fight the DS4600 again to make it work over eSATA. Only this weekend did that finally get resolved. But that’s another story for another day. If you want to hear it, let me know and I’ll be happy to tell it.

Anyway, back to the Seagate drives. After all of that drama and switching around, I now had a set of Seagate ST31000340AS 1tb drives… four of them to be exact. During this time I was also experiencing regular S.M.A.R.T. failures in the 750gb drives in the chassis of the Mac Pro. Those drives were being sent off and replaced on a fairly regular basis.

As these drives were replaced and rolled around, I decided that maybe I should move the 1tb drives into the Mac Pro and get 250gb of extra space. That’s kind of a no-brainer decision, right? I ended up with the original 750gb drive that shipped from Apple and three ST31000340AS drives in the other bays. I had the bright idea of creating a RAID-0 and installing Lion on it. I just knew it was going to scream.

…except that Lion wouldn’t install.

The install would always start off just fine. It would write files and then reboot. Then, somewhere in the next storage of the install it would just die. An error message popped up claiming that there was a problem and Lion couldn’t be installed.

how can this be? thought I. There’s no way Apple would release an operating system that has an incompatibility of this nature with a 2008 Mac Pro. this is insane.

I lost many countless hours of sleep to install attempts. I would try to install. I would watch it fail. I would research a little more. I’ve spent weeks trying to get through this. Nothing… and I mean NOTHING would get through with the install…

…until one time, it did.

Immediately, my trust level of the whole installation was suspect of course. Why would it fail to install so many times and then just out of the blue… it would work? It didn’t make sense. I had tried reseating hardware. I had tried pulling out the BlackMagic Intensity Card. I had tried pulling out the eSATA cards. I tried putting the stock RAM back in place. I tried everything. Nothing worked… until this time it did. Weird. It didn’t make sense.

I ran with Lion on the RAID-0 for a few days and happily thought I would go about the installation of Carbon Copy Cloner so I could set up clone tasks for the operating system disk.

cue music. It started to happen. Everything segfaulted. I could literally open the Console application and watch the crash reports roll in like a riot was going on in the Grid and reporters were on the air. No program was safe. Every one of them blew up. Sync your iPhone? Bam. iTunes died. Sync your iPod? SLAM. VTPCDecoder (or something) explodes. yeah, this OS is suspect.

I decided to whack the RAID-0 and try the install again on a single ST31000340AS drive. Guess what? The install failed… again and again.

I booked a Genius Bar appointment. Obviously, my logic board was bad.

I’m not sure what made me think to try it, but I did. One of the 1tb drives had died at some point and I received a replacement that was a completely different model. Also I ran across information on the net that a lot of people were having problems with ST31000340AS drives and certain versions of firmware. Those versions were SD1A and SD15. I looked over the drives I had. All of them had one of those two firmware revisions.

interesting.

I took one of the drives Seagate sent back that was a different model number. For the record, the drive was model ST31000528AS. I slapped it in the chassis and formatted it with HFS+. I fired up the Lion installer and hit go. I asked it to give me a full, fresh install of Lion on this disk. It worked the first time.

Not only did it work, it has been rock solid. Nothing is crashing like it was before on the other drives. Lion has become a joy to use the past two days. I stored away the Snow Leopard volume and kept it for emergencies.

I cancelled the Genius Bar appointment.

By now I think you can figure out what my conclusion. There’s something wrong with ST31000340AS Seagate drives. Don’t try to use them with Lion. Something about the kernel in Lion disagrees strongly with that model of drive. If you read around on the net you will find many, many horror stories with those drives.

Beware.

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It looks like Exchange 2007 SP3 RU4 has a lot of goodies in it. At least 5 of the items in this list are impacting the environment at my day job.

While it’s good to see progress, I’m always wary of these updates because of the regression bugs they often introduce. Test and patch carefully, gang.

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Read it. Now.

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2563324

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Image via CrunchBase

Since today appears to be National Pile on RIM Day, I thought I would add a little fuel to the fire.

I see a lot of people talking about the Playbook, the devices and the terrible mobile device experience that RIM has brought to table in contrast to the sleek, new offerings from the competition. I do not disagree with anything that has been said in that area. It’s sad to see a once-mighty company implode the way they are, but given the leadership of the two CEOs in power there, it’s really not a surprise. I also noted that RIM thinks of their ecosystem in a backwards fashion from Apple: the corporate device usage drives the home device choices.

That’s wrong, but whatever.

One thing that I do not see many people talking about is how RIM’s core business is dying. I’ve often considered my enterprise to be a microcosm of what is likely happening around the world. Blackberry Enterprise Server is dying in just about every corporation I’m familiar with. In our own enterprise, the BES device usage is dropping month by month while the iOS and Android devices are skyrocketing. I can’t give you statistics due to privacy stuff, but I assure you that is the case.

I can also vouch that in our research into BES 5.0 has produced interesting results. It appears that the quality assurance on BES 5.0 when paired up with Exchange 2010 has been poor. I know of at least one major social networking organization that was so frustrated by the experience that they dumped Blackberry Enterprise Servers entirely, took away all of the Blackberry devices and handed out iPhones.

If RIM is relying on their core business to stay relevant, they are in more trouble than people think.

Related articles

• Could the News Get Worse for RIM? (blogs.wsj.com)
• RIM Financial Outlook Dismal, 500,000 Playbooks Shipped (mashable.com)
• RIM says second-quarter forecast lower than expected (macworld.com)
• RIM: The big reset (business.financialpost.com)
• Backslapping As Waterloo Burns: Tough Times Ahead For RIM’s Co-CEOs (paidcontent.org)

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If you’re not familiar with Dropbox by now, you should be. Dropbox is what MobileMe‘s iDisk aspires to be one day. For now, it isn’t.

For the uninitiated, Dropbox is a fantastic cross-platform bit of code that synchronizes files across all of your computers. It also provides a look into the folders via a web browser if you should need it. They also offer an iPad app that allows you to browse and download files to local applications such as Pages.

Alas, Pages on the iPad, however, doesn’t speak Dropbox. It will allow you to edit the documents and export them to:

• An email
• iWork.com
• iDisk
• A webdav server

Dropbox is missing from that list. You could save your files back to your iDisk, but then you’d need to go to a regular machine and copy that file from the iDisk to your Dropbox folder. That’s pretty obtuse.

While we wait for Apple to purchase Dropbox and implement it as an iDisk replacement, we can use the magic of Apple Mail and Applescript to create a nifty workaround. Today I spent some time on a script that will do the following:

• Take the contents of an email message with a particular subject line
• Extract the attachment
• Save the attachment in a Dropbox folder depending on the keyword you use in the subject line of the message

Since Dropbox runs all the time on your Mac, it will notice the file change event and automatically sync the file to all of your computers linked to that Dropbox account.

Making an Applescript that will save an attachment to your file system is quite easy. Linking a mail rule to that Applescript is also quite easy. Therefore, the implementation of this is easy. What makes this script a little different is that you can specify keywords in the subject line and it will decide where to put the file inside your Dropbox folder based on the keyword. Editing those keywords are completely up to you.

To implement, download the “Save Attachment to Dropbox.scpt” file below. You should open /Utilities/Applescript Editor.app and modify the script’s keywords for the subject lines you plan to use. Save the .scpt file to your favorite location for AppleScripts. (For Mail scripts, I use “~/Library/Scripts/Mail”).

Next, create a rule in your Apple Mail using criteria to judge when to fire off the rule. In my case, I told it to look for messages that meet all of these criteria:

1. Messages coming from a particular email address
2. Containing a subject line keyword that starts with“-savedb”

The script will execute and look at the subject line of your email message. The subject line should start with “-savedb…” and have some kind of keyword in there. You edited the script to define those, right? Well, you don’t use the rule to define those keywords. Note that I said in the keyword to use “starts with” the string “-savedb”. The script will determine what to do with it based on what you code there.

I also recommend adding an action to move the processed messages over to a folder. In my case, I created a folder called “Processed to Dropbox” and told the rule to move the message there.

An important note: the script will overwrite any files that have the same name as the file. I felt that this was a safe thing to do since Dropbox automatically backs up 30 copies of the file on the site and you can retrieve any version you like. Deleted versions of the files are tossed in the Trash. They are not deleted completely until you empty the Trash. If you still do not like this behavior, feel free to modify the script to remove that action.

Now all you have to do is send yourself an email from the proper address with the proper keyword from your favorite app on the iPad and voila, it’s instantly synced to all of your computers and backed up.

Another way to use this is via “DropDAV” at http://dropdav.com. I was close to using that solution until I read more about it. I decided I wasn’t entirely comfortable with giving another third party my Dropbox username and password, so I developed this method instead.

If you want to encourage the developers of Dropbox to add WebDAV support, be sure to give them a +1 vote here.

I hope you enjoy this script and it helps band-aid the interruption in workflow until Apple purchases Dropbox. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask in the comments below.

Click here to download “Save Attachment to Dropbox.scpt”.

Related articles

• Dropbox – Features – Simplify your life (lirax.wordpress.com)

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You will likely hear about Yammer after your corporation or business signs a deal with them. Your users will start to flock toward the service and sign up. Lo and behold you will discover that they will be offered a piece of software to install. During the software install they will have the option to invite other users in your organization.

It appears this feature enjoys crawling through your local address book or global address list to invite folks. If you’re in a large organization with thousands of employees, congratulations! You now have a spam attack.

Yammer needs to fix this. Other social startups need to learn from this. Because of this, I’m actively staying away from Yammer, even though my large business is asking us to use it. Screw that. I have work to do.

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Apple needs to expand this conference and offer paid developer accounts a first right of refusal.

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For some bizarre reason they did not afford the same convenience to Mac users. Initially when Steam was released for the Mac they even forced you to keep the SteamApps folder in your Documents folder. This made it really painful to use a portable home directory. Valve relented after a huge user outcry and relocated the folder to ~/Library/Application Support/Steam, which is probably where it belonged anyway.

Now what if you want to move it out of there to an external drive? I have roughly 40gb of games wrapped up in that directory and frankly, there’s no reason for it to exist in my home directory. I studied around on the forums and Steam support site and discovered they did not have any ability to shift this content around natively. That won’t defeat me, however.

I moved the SteamApps folder to a location on an external drive and first tried to make an alias of the new location to ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps. This didn’t work. When I launched Steam, it told me that it had to exist on a case-insensitive volume. That’s rather odd. My external drive is formatted with HFS+ case-insensitive. No matter. I deleted the alias and tried a UNIX-style link:

ln -sf /Volumes/DS4600/Storage/SteamApps ~/Library/Application Support/Steam/SteamApps

I then started Steam back up and I heard the DS4600 RAID-5 volume (which is where the SteamApps now reside) spin. I looked in the library and voila, all of my games were present.

That wasn’t so hard. Wonder why Valve won’t let you do this? I’ll keep it running this way for a while and see if it blows up.

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If you don’t follow what I mean, here’s where I was: often times, large corporations or benefactors will offer a code fix bounty or developmental funding for an open source project they have come to rely upon.  What if an open source developer were to deliberately code a bug into an open source project or withhold a fix so they might extract some financial support with this method?

I brought it up in #morphix to Gandalfar, one of my trusted open source advisors.  We debated it shortly and he brought up several good points.  While this may happen, the scheme is likely to fall apart quickly.  The community is the resolver of situations like this.  If the community finds a bug and offers a fix for the problem, then the developer will find themselves in a political combat situation.  They would likely try to stifle the fix with some ridiculous excuses and/or start to censor discussion of the subject over mailing lists or on forums.  Speculation could be raised about the issue and ultimately, people could start to fork the project elsewhere, unless the license of the project disallows that.  In the long run, the community would resolve the situation by simply offering a new solution.

So while it could theoretically be achieved for short-term gain, in the long run the community makes the approach unsustainable.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, I think we all know that closed source entities often engage in this practice.  I could point out several examples that I have absolute knowledge of this happening, but I don’t think I have to.  I’m not completely absolving open source from this either – look at what “official distributions” do in some situations… Red Hat Enterprise Linux or Novell (SUSE) for example.  But in those situations, if you didn’t want to pay to upgrade the operating system and still resolve your situation, we all know that with the right application of effort and skill you could overcome it.

All in all, this whole thought process ends up with a positive note about open source.  If it’s broken, you can fix it yourself or work with others to make it happen.  The community – that incredibly large, global groupthink – keeps it all honest.

Or, you can put all your money and eggs into a closed source basket and find out you’re getting screwed when it’s too late.

It’s all about choice, right?

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• Novell’s Work Popular… in Microsoft Blogs (boycottnovell.com)
• Mentoring and Open Source (web2learning.net)
• What Makes Apache Tick? (grep.codeconsult.ch)

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