The barrier to entry with Snow Leopard server was lowered when Apple reduced the price of the product to $499 USD and offered an unlimited client version only.  It was even more palatable when the Mac Mini server version was introduced at $999.  Previously, you could build your own Mac Mini server for about $1300 USD, but this new model allows small developers and workshops to get into the product at a very low price point.

With that in mind, I’m anticipating that there’s a number of people that are checking out Snow Leopard server for the first time.  You might be enthralled with all of its features and niceties.  One of those niceties includes Time Machine.  However, when you look at what Time Machine really backs up, you’ll discover that it doesn’t back up any elements of your server data.

That’s right.  Snow Leopard server is not backing up your mail data, Open Directory data or anything else of that nature.  It’s backing up enough to restore the server to an operational state, but you’ll find yourself rebuilding the Open Directory and mail data from scratch.  The Apple documentation states that they offer a number of other command-line utilities for backing up server data.  These utilities are a number of powerful little guys like “ditto” and “rsync.”  For the uninitiated, this means you’re now plunging into the world of search to discover a backup script that will save your hindquarters.

When I was researching this, I came across SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner most often.  While these serve the purpose of making a bootable clone of your server drive, the developers recommend that you do not use their products against Snow Leopard server while the services are running.  So, guess what?  Now you’re back to looking into a script to stop all of your services, back up the data, then start them back up again.

One side note here: it’s dreadfully easy to stop services with a terminal command or bash script, but I’m not going to go over that here.  If interested in this information, let me know and I’ll post it in another article.

After more searching, I came upon a little resource at http://maclemon.at – a site where a fellow has created the backup script “mlbackup.”  The site is mainly in German, so it’s not entirely clear what to do with the program.  However, it seemed to fit the bill for what I wanted so I decided to check it out.

mlbackup is provided as an installation package.  After downloading it, double-click on the pkg to install it.  Installation is pretty straightforward but implementation is a different story.

After installing mlbackup, it’s important to know what was placed on your system:

/usr/local/maclemon/* – the binaries for mlbackup and man pages
/etc/maclemon/backup/* – sample configuration file and globalexclusions

Start by copying the sample configuration file to a new file for modification.  In my case, I created a backup configuration file that is named after the volume that contains the data for my server.  My server’s name is “Ramona” and the server data is stored on a volume named “RA Server Data.”  Therefore, I did:

sudo cp demo.mlbackupconf.sample ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf

This creates a copy of demo.mlbackupconf.sample and names it “ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf.”  Next, you’ll want to edit that new file and make the necessary changes for your server.

I use “vim” to edit, so I type next:

sudo vim ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf

Using “vim” is an article in and of itself, so I’m certainly not going to cover its usage here.  If you’re an innocent  newcomer to vim, it can quickly turn you into an innocent bystander of a violent gunfight.  Be careful.

Once you’re in vim, hit “i” for insert mode and make the necessary changes to the file.  Notably, you’ll want to change some of the items listed below.  I’m pasting in the contents of my file and the changes that I made.

# What is the name of this backup set?

MLbackupName="Ramona_Server_Data"

...

# What file or directory to Backup. (No trailing Slash for directories)

# Default: $HOME

MLsourcePath="/Volumes/RA Server Data"

...

# Where shall the Backups be stored (local path on the destination machine)

# Default: /Volumes/Backup

MLdestPath="/Volumes/Ramona Backup/mlbackups"

...

# Where to send the eMail notification about the backup to?

# Default: $USER

MLadminEmail="<my email address>"

Hit “esc” to get out of insert mode.  Then hit “:” and type “wq” and enter.  This will save the file.

In case you haven’t deduced it from examining the file, I have two external drives hooked up to this Mac Mini server.  One is a firewire800 drive called “RA Server Data.”  The other is a larger drive on USB called “Ramona Backup.”  My intention is for mlbackup to execute against RA Server Data and back it all up to Ramona Backup.  I intend for it to keep 5 sets of backups.  mlbackup is pretty nice in that it will automatically clean up the prior backup sets so it only keeps the amount of sets you want.  If you’re running this every day, you’ll have 5 days of backups.

One other note here.  There’s a bug in the mlbackup script that if the “MLbackupname” parameter contains a space in the name, mlbackup won’t clean up the old backup sets automatically.  Found this one out the hard way.  If you intend to have a backup set name that contained spaces, replace the spaces with an underscore character to prevent this issue from biting you.

The first half of your mlbackup configuration is complete.  You’ve told mlbackup what to do, but now you need to tell it when to do it.  The old way of setting up scheduled tasks in OS X was to use a cron job, just like a regular UNIX or Linux implementation.  However, Apple has replaced cron with launchd.  Now you need to configure launchd.

Launchd is a complex beast.  I’ll summarize what I learned about it.  Launchd will fire up any tasks on your behalf at any time you define, much like cron used to do.  It uses an XML file to define the job and depending on the parameters in the XML file and where you put it, launchd will do different things.

Since it’s so complex, I’m only going to talk about what I did for this launchd task.  Your ideas and mileage may vary.  I’m interested in hearing what others do with this, so be sure to let me know what you put together.

In my case, I created a new file in /Library/LaunchDaemons.  I put it there because I want mlbackup to be executed as root (spare me the speeches, I’m trying to back up server data here) and I want it to have access to the system.

Here’s the contents of the file I created there in /Library/LaunchDaemons.  The name of the file is at.maclemon.mlbackup.radata.daily.plist:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<dict>
  <key>Label</key>
        <string>at.maclemon.mlbackup.radata.daily</string>
  <key>ServiceDescription</key>
        <string>Back up the disk RA Server Data every day.</string>
  <key>LowPriorityIO</key>
  	<true/>
  <key>ProgramArguments</key>
  <array>
	<string>/usr/local/bin/mlbackup</string>
	<string>/private/etc/maclemon/backup/ramona_serverdata.mlbackupconf</string>
  </array>
  <key>Debug</key>
  	<true/>
  <key>StartCalendarInterval</key>
  <array>
  	<dict>
    		<key>Hour</key>
    		<integer>4</integer>
    		<key>Minute</key>
    		<integer>0</integer>
  	</dict>
  </array>
  <key>AbandonProcessGroup</key>
	<true/>
</dict>
</plist>

Again I’m not going to go into a whole lot of detail here about what I did, but I will point out a few items of interest.

Note the “ProgramArguments” directive.  There, you see that I’m calling mlbackup and giving it the full path of the config file I created earlier.  This is vitally important, otherwise mlbackup won’t do a thing.

The “StartCalendarInterval” element tells launchd when to start the task.

The “AbandonProcessGroup” item is required if you intend mlbackup to send you email at the completion of the job.  Without this element, mlbackup won’t send an email and may not clean up the backup sets in a way that you intend.

Finally, tell launchd that you created the file and you want the system to load it up and pay attention:

sudo launchctl load -w at.maclemon.mlbackup.radata.daily.plist

Launchctl is the terminal command to force launchd to load up the file.  For some odd reason, without the -w, it won’t load.  Why you have to do this is unclear in the Apple documentation for Snow Leopard.  In the past, -w controlled whether the job was enabled or disabled.  In Snow Leopard it seems, without using -w, launchctl just looks at you funny.

That should do it.  You should receive an email from the root user at the end of the backup task if all goes well.  If you didn’t receive an email, be sure to check your backup volume and verify that something was written there by mlbackup.

One other note that I forgot to include.  mlbackup is mainly just a bash script, but it does contain a newer version of rsync.  mlbackup uses this version of rsync over the one that Apple supplied with OS X because it has some vital optimizations for the backup to take place.

That should do it.  Hope this helps get your server backups running well.

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A coworker sent this along.  I’ve had this issue on a few contacts and didn’t really have time to delve into it.

Name removed to protect the innocent and good intentions.  Be very careful with this and make sure you have a backup of all data that you plan to manipulate.

—

item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-AssistantPhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessFax>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessHomePage>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-BusinessPhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-EmailAddress1>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-Home>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-HomePhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<EX-MobilePhone>!$_
item1.X-ABLabel:_$!<Other>!$_

cat munged.vcf | sed -e 's/EX-//' | sed -e 's/_$!<//' | sed -e 's/>!$_//' > fixed.vcf

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Check that.

Restart Safari if it’s open.

Now you’ll find that your plugins magically work.  I guess this whole 64-bit thing has caught developers with their pants down.  Not sure how that happened since they’ve only been talking 64-bit on the Mac and Windows side for years.

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At WWDC 2009, I stood up in a session on Snow Leopard server and lightly rattled Apple‘s cage about its poor scaling guidance for the product. They were spending a great deal of time talking about the benefits of Wiki Server 2, but there was little to take away from the session on what to tell any prospective customers regarding cost.

I think in the Apple world, there’s this unspoken rule of “whatever’s good enough” to suffice for an environment. That’s fine, but what I’d really like to be able to do is recommend a solution that will do the job.

In the past, Microsoft was very good about providing specific scaling guidance. Around the Dark Ages (which I define as the day SQL Server 2005 came out and every product hence), Microsoft pulled back on several things. Most notably, they stopped providing specific scaling guidance on products and very clear documentation.

The documentation that was offered with each product varied and was mostly vague and notional. Once my Microsoft TAM asked me as part of some kind of survey if I thought that blog content provided by Microsoft developers and whatnot could be considered as official documentation. It seems like some folks within the organization believe this to be so, but Goddess forbid you end up in the India support organization… where only the script in front of them is official documentation.

Back to Apple. They provide documentation and it’s usually quite good. They provide fairly extensive documentation. Sometimes it’s wrong, but it’s still documentation. It’s something to point to and say, “See here, it says this should function this way.” That’s a nice level of comfort. What they do NOT provide is scaling guidance. They will never ever tell you, “It will take x amount of Snow Leopard servers to run Wiki Server 2 for 10,000 users doing y amount of data.” Why not? I suspect it’s because they don’t know.

As Apple becomes more and more relevant in the enterprise, this has to change. If I’m going to propose an Apple-based solution to any of my prospective customers, I have to have something to work from. It cannot be “we’ll just throw some servers in there, watch it, then buy more.” Most customers… at least the government for sure… do not like that approach.

Ironically, I started this post as a complaint against Microsoft for providing not just vague information on this… but a box full of vague smoked up with an opaque fog on the glass.

That sucks, guys. Stop contributing to the failures of the IT industry and fix it.

I’m looking at you too, Apple.

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When NetNewsWire went with Google Reader syncing, the hair stood up on the back of my neck.  I swore off Google Reader quite some time ago.  Indeed, I was using NNW to avoid Google Reader.  Now I’m being forced back?

It was time to look into splitting up with NNW.

I haven’t used RSS support in OS X since Safari 3, so I decided to give it a new try in Safari 4.  Part of my original problem with RSS support in Safari was no conceivable way to sync the read status across Macs.  Well, turns out they put that support into bookmark sync over MobileMe, they just didn’t notify me.  Thanks, Apple.

Anyway, I was researching how to do this on the net and it looked painful.  Everyone’s steps included loading up Firefox, attaching the Sage plugin to it and importing/exporting yadda yadda… blah, it should NOT be that hard.

So I opened NetNewsWire and just casually dragged a feed title into the bookmark bar in Safari.  I was shocked to discover that Safari took the bookmark just fine.  Once I opened it, it processed the bookmark as a feed and started syncing it.

That was easy.

You still have to open the bookmark one time before it starts syncing it automatically, but just do the “open in tabs” thing and you’ll be fine.  Screw all that Firefox/Sage import/export garbage.  It’s just a drag and drop.  Enjoy.

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One of the greatest things about WWDC is the fabulous music they play before each and every session to keep the devs jazzed up.  There was a thread about collecting the songs that were played before each session because Apple wasn’t posting a playlist.  Fortunately, thanks to the iPhone, devs were walking into the sessions with Shazzam running and collecting information on any songs that weren’t recognizable and posting it to the thread.

Well, that thread has now developed into an iMix.  If you were at WWDC 2009 and want to purchase some of the songs you heard before the session, your wishes have been granted.

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If you find that there’s an address book card out there that isn’t syncing with MobileMe, your iPhone, or another Mac… check to see if there is an ampersand in the failing record anywhere.  Apparently once a card hits MobileMe, it doesn’t like the ampersand in the vcard and chokes on it.  If MobileMe chokes on it, all of your devices will be unable to find the new card.

Just another tip from yours truly.

I’m in New Orleans this week, working project stuff for the day job.  Lots of fun here.  More later.

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Do you use Apple Mail in an environment with Outlook?  In particular, do those Outlook users prefer HTML mail?  Do you receive mail from them with a microscopic font size?

Thanks to the tip I found here you can correct this issue.

1. Close down Apple Mail (command-Q)
2. Open the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal)
3. Type the following command: “defaults write com.apple.mail MinimumHTMLFontSize 13″ (note: without quotes)
4. Restart Apple Mail
5. Squint no more.

Hope this helps.  Flying back out to meet up with my sister Vermithrax and raid a few kingdoms today.  Wednesdays are always fun like that.

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Apple finally announced the WWDC 2009 dates and they couldn’t have targeted a better week.

It looks like I will become a representative for my agency on the Calconnect standards organization.  They happen to be having a meeting at Oracle in Redwood Shores, CA the week prior to WWDC.  With the wife’s permission, this means two weeks in the wide and crazy world of San Francisco.

I must admit I’m not a huge fan of the San Francisco scene.  Sometimes I feel like I’m too old to really appreciate all the life and culture that goes on out there.  But maybe have a day or two out there by myself with little to do can turn that around.  We shall see.

It seems like I’m getting more traffic to this site, so I’m wondering – do any of you want to see any WWDC-related coverage here, or do you plan on relying on the big boys for that?  If so, maybe I can find some of the little-known stuff to report on.

Let me know.  Even if you don’t care

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• Apple’s 2009 WWDC Signals Countdown To Next-Gen iPhone (iphonesavior.com)
• WWDC rumors abound after Apple schedules conference (macworld.com)

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You can imagine my dismay and disappointment when I discovered that some kind of problem is preventing my site from publishing to MobileMe successfully. I even filed a bug on it.  Lots of posts in the forums about it too, but I don’t see the major Mac blogs taking up the yoke of pressing the issue with Apple.  That’s also disappointing because it’s likely they won’t do much about it until it gets really ugly and public.

Sigh.  So I deleted porkbuns.org for now, until I can get it published.  Please keep your feedreaders subscribed there.  Eventually it’ll come back up.

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• Apple on iPhoto ’09 changes (macworld.com)
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