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Ok, I might be sold.

Though the outdated hardware has posed a few limitations, I’m not so worried about that.  I did just order a Dual 2.5Ghz G5 off Ebay for $300 because the one thing I *AM* driven nuts by is the pounding that this single 1.6Ghz PPC chip is completely incapable of taking.  I’m hoping that the new one has more than the 4 DIMM slots this one has…more memory couldn’t hurt.

I’ve obtained a copy of Mac:Office 2008, Photoshop, and a few other neat pieces to play with, but so far I’ve not dove completely into it.  (My laptop is still on my desk as well, just in case I should need it)  Entourage 2008 Web Service edition was added because of course, I’m running Exchange2010, and WebDAV has been removed after Exchange2k7.

The other thing I’ve noticed is the backup/restore process worked wonderfully.  I wiped the drives and built a new 1.8TB RaidSet on the new drives, which finally gave me a partition of appropriate size, and booted from the CD, Selecting “Restore from TimeMachine backup”

Impressively enough it took less than 2.5 hours to restore the OS and everything I had done on it to that point.  When it rebooted, there were no strange messages, though on opening the “Mail” app, I found that it had to go and re-import all of the mail that had already been downloaded.

Oh well, not THAT huge a deal.

I’ve done something similar with Windows7 recently, but it required a “RecoveryCD” be made before you could run the restore.

The best part of this new setup, by far.  Is access to BASH. I *HATE* that there doesn’t seem to be a decent CygWin shell anywhere on the market for windows.  I do a *LOT* of shell scripting both for work and because I find it fun, and this makes life very easy.

The government’s “Continuing Resolution” will be expiring a week from today.  As a government contractor, this directly affects me.

They have two choices.  They can pass ANOTHER C.R. or they can actually pass a budget.

I don’t post political statements here too often.  However I don’t know about you, but from where I stand this travesty that the House has floated is a disaster.  1.2 million jobs lost by the estimates I’m hearing, and to top it all of, it doesn’t do SQUAT to balance the budget because the places that need to be cut / reformed, IE Defense, etc. are off the table.  So this will be for nothing.

If the posturing peacocks on capitol hill don’t get their collective crap together and one side (or the other) forces the government to shut down. I may have some time on their hands.

Part of me is hoping that cooler heads prevail.

Part of me is looking forward to a little time off.   I’m told it is actually a CRIMINAL offense for me to work if the government shuts down.

Bring it.

So I’m trying a disk upgrade.  One of the spare 250G drives I threw into the Mac when I got it failed (Lower-bay, which I’m assuming was disk-2 of 2) so I decided I would try my hand at upgrading the disk.

I realized that the 250G drives i put in there won’t be enough to hold my pictures and music alone, let alone the rest of the stuff that I usually keep on my desktop.

So I found a 2TB drive to put in it’s place.

The Swap went swimmingly.  Shut down, pop the old drive out, pop the new drive in, took a little playing around (and a quick google search) to get the new disk added to the raid-set, and a few hours later, Tah-Dah. 

So then it comes to adding the other 2TB drive in and mirroring back.  Simple process right?

I shut down again, pulled the top drive out, put the new 2TB drive in it’s place, etc etc etc.

Nada.

It seems that while the data is contained on both disks, the host is only set to look at the first disk for it’s boot device.  Oversight?

So I used the google, something I’m priding myself on my ability to do these days.  (What do people with only one computer do when they get into trouble?)  And found that I have to boot from the CD and manually mirror the disk back using the disk-utilities on the CDRom.

Makes sense.  Though you’d think it wouldn’t be too hard to, on failing to retrieve boot information from disk0, to look on disk1 before giving up.

Does anyone of my five readers know if there is there a way to force a boot to the “up” drive in the set?

I would gravitate to the storage end of things wouldn’t I…

So here’s the underlying problem.

Note the 1.8TB RaidSet1.  Now Note the 232.8GB RaidSet1.

The problem seems to be that while both devices are owned by the raid set, and the “RAID Slice” itself on each drive is 1.8TB, the partition on the underlying slice is stubbornly stuck at 232.8G.

SO…

This makes the filesystem *WAY* smaller than it could be.

Since I don’t have anything appreciable on it…  I’m going to back it up using Time Machine, and reinstall.  (I’ve heard complaints about time machine, so I’m going to want to see work it before I actually come to depend on it.)

*THAT* will be tomorrow’s post.

My definition of “Day” changes…well…daily.

I’m having to do some shuffling of data off my old PC Workstation and I found something interesting.

MacOS can’t WRITE to an NTFS volume without a third-party driver.  It can read from it just fine.

I ran into a situation where I had to consolidate data from 2x 2TB drives onto one to free space for “The Next Step” (which you’ll read about tomorrow if you care) and so I connected them both to the Mac to hopefully do a quick ‘copy’ from one to the other.

Nope.  Not a chance.

MacOS can’t write to an NTFS volumes.  Now I found a few third-party drivers and tried one that had a 15 day trial version…  Only to find my way into what I can only assume is the Mac version of the “Blue Screen of Death”  (The “You must turn your computer off NOW” screen – how rude.)

What I find interesting about this is this.  Linux can read/write from an NTFS volume just fine.  Since MacOS is BSD Linux, I can only assume that Apple has made the conscious decision not to support NTFS writes.  Probably because it provides people with a simple migration path OFF Apple hardware, which, as any hardware vendor would like to believe, no-one would ever want to do.

Still – my experience is largely positive.  Got my work VPN up and running on it without too much angst and work.  And my son is sufficiently horrified at the sound of the power-on chord (there’s probably a fancy word for it) that I make up reasons to reboot when he’s in the room.

I can see that the entertainment value of this investment will be limitless.

Ok, Day 2.  The Mac is now under my desk where my PC used to be.

So far It’s been a mixed bag.  But part of that is kind of understandable.

I’m running an older G5, with the PPC970 chip in it.  (Only one of them 1.6Ghz, 800Mb FSB)

This means I’m already seeing some sluggishness.  Again, if I had a 1.6Ghz P4 I’d be seeing the same thing, so this is not actually a negative.

Look-and-feel wise I’m liking it.  Mostly because I’ve been running Ubuntu 10.10 with the Cairo-Dock for some time now on my Dell Adamo 13.  My gods it looks identicial.

So far, the cons -

1.  Not nearly enough USB ports, and my Best-Buy purchased Belkin 4+1 USB card causes the eternal hang at the blank blue screen.

2.  The case doesn’t have a place for a Media bay (IE Flash storage, camera cards, etc)  I have to use an external.  See point #1 about USB ports.

3.  Got a dual-port video card in it.  I was happy to see this.  One of the ports is something I’ve never seen before.  Guess I have to pay a visit to best-buy tomorrow.

4.  There are only two internal drive slots, and really nowhere else to mount an internal HD.  Whereas my Dell Precision690 had four, so I could put two fairly high-speed drives in for the boot partition and two slower 2TB drives in for data.  In the Mac, everything goes on the two, so unless I want to run everything over the network, I’m kinda stuck.

And while this isn’t strictly speaking a ‘con’ for the Macintosh, there is no copy of Office2k8 available on Technet…And Office/Mac 2k11 only works on the Intel platform, not PPC.

And the pros:

1.  It’s smooth.  The BSD Linux definitely has everything I’ve come to expect from a Linux distro, Once I found out where they hid the bash prompt, generated an SSH key and threw it into my authorized_keys directory on the CentOS servers I have running catbytes.com right now, I can get into and work on all of my systems.  (I haven’t found the RDP client yet, but I know it’s out there.)

2.  The smaller keyboard and in-line mouse that Apple is famous for leaves a lot more room on the desk for my usual clutter.

3.  It’s *QUIET*.   I can barely tell it’s running, while the P690′s do have some active cooling and so do make some noise, this thing is absolutely silent.

4.  Software compatibility seems OK.  And by that I mean other than Office 2k11, I haven’t found anything that won’t install even with the older hardware / OS.

I’ve never actually owned a mac..

I guess right up until now.

It was a gift.  I didn’t buy one.  Had no memory or hard-drives but hell, those are cheap right?

Had no operating system….  Not as cheap but still easily doable.  (*WAY* cheaper than Windows – Score 1 for Apple)

I’m installing to an older PowerMac G5.  Single CPU, 4G of ram.   Not fancy but I’m also not spending $1,500 on this little experiment.  I also bought an actual Apple keyboard and mouse, simply becuase I figure if I’m going to experience it, I’m going to experience it right.  They’re cute, but Apple must be pretty proud of them, because I’ve never paid $50 for a wired mouse in my life.  (The “Magic Mouse” was $69 and I briefly considered it before realizing that this “free” mac has already cost me about $500 in parts)

Oh – The reason it was a giveaway?  Bad power supply.  Ebay fetched me a *NEW* one for $125 and while it, at first, seemed bigger than the place it was supposed to fit, once it was in it was pretty slick.

I’ve been called inflexibile in the past.  Someone who doesn’t bend from what he thinks he knows.  I’ve argued against Macs as being “Toys” and “Not ready for Business” and saying that I’m “Not ready to contribute to the Steve Jobs Buy-Me-A-New-Organ” fund.

Ok the last part is still true.  I don’t care for Steve Jobs, I think he’s way too much ego for one (allegedly) human being.

I’ve been a Windows person for a long time, MCSE certified (lapsed & I haven’t put it on my resume in years because it’s not the work I want)  though I will *ALWAYS* prefer some kind of Linux/Unix under the covers.  There is just so much more you can do with a Linux desktop without dropping a dime.  (My Dell runs Ubuntu 10.10)

So fate presented me with a gift of a Macintosh, I decided that I would spend 30 days using it as my primary computer, wherever possible, and see how I like it.  I’ll document it here, this being the place to document things like this.  If I still hate it at the end of 30 days, at least I’ll be able to sound like I know what I’m talking about when I blast people for the ‘toys’ they use.

(Next think you know I’ll be saying I support using tape as primary storage…) 

(No, that won’t be happening)

So far so good.  The thing is whisper quiet, which is a HUGE plus for me.  (It’s hard to have conference calls with a jet-engine sitting on your desk.  The Precision 690 I replaced my last desktop with is better, but still not perfect. (and throws a *LOT* of heat.)

It’s taken about an hour and a half to install the OS.  I’m attributing that to the single CPU and older system.  I’m sure the newer ones run faster.  If Apple wants to send me a free one I’ll be sure to comment on how fast it is.

I’m replacing my desktop with this for one main reason.  My goal is to force myself to use it wherever possible.  I have my Dell running Linux and an HP running Win7 should it significantly impede my ability to work.

Gotta run, the install just finsihed.